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Pariah said:
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Uschi said:
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Homosexuality doesn't have to be the norm. I'm just saying that it's natural. If 'GOD" didn't want gays and homosexuality goes against "GOD's" will, howcome animals are homosexual?



That's like saying that, "If God didn't want us to eat other humans, or our own children for that matter, he wouldn't have engineered those instincts into lesser sentient lifeforms."

This all around line of argument makes me wonder exactly how you're defining "natural".



Natural as 'occuring in nature without outside influance.' Yes canibalism fits under this label. People do practice canibalism and there is evidance which led researchers to believe it is possible that humans all, at one time, have practiced canibalism. This does not mean that there is anything inherently wrong with consumption of human meat. It is my preferance to never partake in the practice because of respect for the other humans around me and the fact that it turns my stomach to think of eating people, but that does not mean there is anything wrong or unnatural about eating any animal meat, even human. In some cultures the consumption of the dead is part of their burial rights and seen as a way to keep the dead loved ones alive in spirit. Fun Fact: Human meat is the healthiest thing for a human to eat since it has all the right nutrients.*

*information claimed in this paragraph is what I got from watching the canibalism special on the History Channel

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One could reason that because we created plutonium or enrichened U-235 that-that automatically makes their existence a natural occurence because we, the makers of the substance, came from nature, but that's not about to bypass the fact that we made it and it didn't come straight from the earth as all natural resources do. More to point (and perspective), one could say that a man who has an abnormal brain structure, which makes him a violent killer, is a natural occurence and he should be allowed to do what he's predisposed to do. Could you accurately title such things as "natural"? Wouldn't it be, perhaps "anamolous". Your thesis is built upon an oxymoron; life is built to survive and prosper, not to destory itself and take others with it unnecessarily.



By my definition above, homicidal maniacs are natural occurances, yes. Natural design has nothing to do with moral preferances.

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Penguins mate for life. There didn't have to be no female penguins. Maybe there weren't as many female penguins as male so they just paired up anyhow. It doesn't matter.



Which would suggest that they want sexual release, but that does not, on its own, suggest that homosexuality is natural.



I'm just leaving this in to say that, again, by the definition of natural being 'as occuring in nature without outside influance,' homosexuality is by definition a natural act -as proved by our little penguins. If you think there are still moral qualms, that's fine. I'm just establishing, to this point, that homosexuality is a natural occurance.

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As for one gender on the planet, we all started out as asexual multi-celled organisms reproducing through cloning ourselves and getting an occasional mutation when things didn't go perfect (as does happen). I see no reason to demand heterosexual relations for a species to survive on a planet. Even if we weren't here, some of the other lower-based life forms still would be.



Evolution = Not Proven. Therefore, it is not a proper example to base your arguments on.



http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA202.html
"Nothing in the real world can be proved with absolute certainty. However, high degrees of certainty can be reached. In the case of evolution, we have huge amounts of data from diverse fields. Extensive evidence exists in all of the following different forms (Theobald 2004). Each new piece of evidence tests the rest.

...

The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts. "

Please give me a real argument against asexual reproduction. There are living creatures (in the oceans mostly) that reproduce asexually. Life can and does exist without genders.

Here I would also like to bring up those frogs referanced in Jurrassic Park. There, IIRC, really are certain types of amphibians and fish which can change their genders based on environmental stimuli (including population statistics within the species). Are these animals abominations before "God?" Should we wipe them off the earth in a massive holucaust? Aren't they technically homosexual since they're transgender? Or is that kind of natural sexual relation ok with you?

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In the Middle Ages nine of ten children would die of disease or something before reaching puberty. It was valuable for the church to teach 'be fruitful and multiply' when most of the people croaked. It was basic instinct to pop out whatever you could. In present time and in first world countries we don't have the same problems.



The main argument was never regarding the Church.

And where exactly do you get this from?



I get the statistics from the two college-level courses I have taken regarding Europe in the Middle Ages. People would reproduce and most (if not all) of their children would die. My main argument here is also not regarding the church. It is regarding society's norms. In the Middle Ages for Western Culture, most of Europe was dominated by the Christian belief system. People of learning were people who could read and the only thing to read were religous texts. All the educated people were monks (all is used loosly, but not too much so). The people in charge of large groups of people ultimately answered to the Pope (since the ultimate rulers got their ques from the Pope's decisions and opinions). Society was dominated by Christianity, thus is had an influance on the people and society of the times. That is why the church is important in this particular aspect of my arguments (although the arguments don't really NEED to referance the church so we can erase the sentance regarding the church above).

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There is no need to restrict pleasurable activities to merely their primary function. People can afford to use contraception or alternative routs of sexual stimulation, including sodomy.



Reminder: Never involved the Church before you mentioned it.

This is contradictory to your previous argument. If its no longer profitable for the Church to encourage multiplication cuz' people aren't dying as voluminously, why do they have a firm standpoint against abortion?



#1 - How is this a contradiction? People have grown out of the need for sex to be limited to it's primary function. End of story here.

#2 - The church has nothing to do with anything I'm trying to get across here.

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Also, I'd like to point out, once again, whilst one can attain pleasure through sodomy, one can also partake of pleasure from lacerating one's self. Does that make it a viable "alternative route" towards sexual stimulation?



Until cigarettes and tattoos and body piercings are made illegal, yes self-mutilation is a viable "alternative rout" for anything. So long as a person's actions do not step on another person's rights, they have the freedom to partake in them.

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Sodomy is not a harmless act. And either form of sexual stimulation (sodomy/lacerating) involves pre-requisite learned behavior for successful stimuli.



Pre-req learned behavior? What the fuck are you trying to say with that?

Sodomy is not a harmless act? So what? Name one thing that doesn't have direct or potential harm in it? If you don't want to be harmed by the act of sodomy then nobody's forcing you to do it (and if they do it is an act punishable by US Law, among others). If someone wants to take the risk of skateboarding, who are we to stop them? If someone wants to ride a tricycle, nobody screams 'UNNATURAL!' or "GOD DIDN'T INTEND FOR PEOPLE TO HAVE WHEELS!' If an adult picks their nose they run the risk of it bleeding. If a person uses q-tips to clean earwax from their ears it has proven ill effects on the person's hearing, but the cops aren't arresting people for succombing to q-tip's temptation. Sodomy really isn't any different. It's not a problem to have vaginal sex, it's not a problem to have anal sex.

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Again looking at animal behaviors, there is a class of Ape that is heavy on the sex-for-pleasure attitude. I believe it's the Bonobous or something like that. The primates have been observed in captivaty and in the wild engaging in non-reproductory sexual acts with each other, supposibly merely for the pleasure they recieve doing it.



Is this supposed to illustrate animals as being designed to be deviant, and therefore, a non-cooperative standard for the Church and Christianity altogether? If so, you've completely overlooked the fact that Christianity doesn't feel that animals are on the same level as humans--They don't even have souls. Their demonstration of their predisposition to the baser instincts and incapability to reason as higher sentient lifeforms proves nothing.



You must have forgotton that I don't believe in 'god' or any of that. I will not use faith as a basis for my arguments.

Animals are not designed to be deviant. Animals are animals. I'm just showing an example, like the penguins, of other living creatures (this time more genetically similar to ourselves) engaging in sex for fuck's sake, not to make babies. It doesn't matter that animals don't have souls according to you. They are, as you mentioned, more predisposed to the baser instincts. Since it is a base instinct to reproduce it is interesting that a 'soulless creature' such as an ape might have survived when they like to have sex without creating babies.

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My point is, homosexuality is not unnatural or something detrimental to society in any manner.



This is pulled from another board I posted at regarding the same subject since I already explained this ad nauseum there AND here. Since I've talked about it on Rob's more though, I just decided to use this quote:

The current regulatory commissions of society adhere to rules that dictate the safety of said society. Down to the last individual. That's a given. But this is usually taken for granted in light of what people want as opposed to what's needed by their shared community of citizens. The harvested idea that sodomy is a harmless action is an anti-utopian ideal--And as a society, Utopia is precisely what we strive for. To allow the typical homosexual process to be considered a harmless venture in the face of society is fallacious. Someone saying that homosexuals practicing sodomy is isolated within a minority and, therefore, should be tolerated is no different than someone who reasons that drug trafficking shouldn't be fought against since the effectiveness is below minimal and the cost isn't worth the fight. The subtext, while slightly different, interacts adequately well with homosexual statutes as an analogy: To tolerate hallucinogenic/acidic drugs and let the conception spread that their presence is a harmless societal constant would speed up the governmental entropy and make society crumble. Just as the homosexual civil rights movement hammered the government for their now attained civil unions, the notion that their form of intercourse 'isn't something to worry about' would eventually, on a long enough timeline, cause a mass-spread of positive opinions regarding it. World-wide consideration for casual sodomy as a neutral-good thing would cause a severe negative impact on its recesses. Society dictates that we put people who are mentally imbalanced in the psyche-ward because their actions are a danger to themselves and other people around them. Since homosexuals feel a need to consummate their relationship, they unnaturally and very abrasively abuse their colon. They "feel the need to" have sex in an unorthodox and dangerous element of predisposition. Considering there's correlating feelings/factors between them and sado-masochists, that creates a definite concern as to whether or not we're adhering to ad hominem from an uncredible source. Moreover, this exemplification of a type of civil domino effect could be related to the dangers of the ever-constantly evolving popular culture that has been sewing seeds within politics for the past century. If these opinions caused by kindred forces that only dictate a voluminous voice, and not necessarily a benign one, continue to grow without proper analysis/regulation, their presence could permanently imprint themselves as crucial factors for the domineering political hierarchies of modern-day structural archetypes associated with business and government. No matter what the reality of their presence may be, they'll be viewed as a possible fore-thought that deserves its place in law. This is exactly how NAMBLA was able to get in its own two cents with a degree of success.



Wow. That's what's called a 'slippery slope' argument. Those arguments are invalid and mostly brought up by zealots jumping to a great amount of conclusions in a short time-frame. The association with NAMBLA at the end was similar to someone saying (without justifying how) someone is acting like Adolf Hitler.

Homosexuality will cause society to crumble and be destroyed? Really? Christianity killed Rome, not their homosexual practices (which made their warriors more ferocious to defend every one of their lives). Romans and Greeks and many many other societies lasted for LONG periods of time when sodomy was acceptable.

This seems to be the only thing I can find that isn't fluff in the above:
"Someone saying that homosexuals practicing sodomy is isolated within a minority and, therefore, should be tolerated is no different than someone who reasons that drug trafficking shouldn't be fought against since the effectiveness is below minimal and the cost isn't worth the fight. The subtext, while slightly different, interacts adequately well with homosexual statutes as an analogy: To tolerate hallucinogenic/acidic drugs and let the conception spread that their presence is a harmless societal constant would speed up the governmental entropy and make society crumble."

Sodomy is minority = drug trafficing is small and costly to fight

=== speed up governmental entropy therefore we fall into anti-utopian anarchy

Is that right? Give some evidance to support this claim. Show me how homosexuality is making the govenrment disintegrate. Show me how what homosexuals have done to gain rights as humans has done anything not comparable to what Womens Liberation and the Civil Rights Movement did for women and blacks.

One last thing: Pariah, since when do you give a flying fuck about other people's colon health so much as to demand they change their ways? What does it have to do with you? How are the big bad homosexuals out to get you and how have they made your life worse so that you find it necessary to wage a personal tirade against them collectively?

And I hope Batwoman replies to my reply to her since that's who I started this conversation with. I dislike arguing with Pariah. No offense, P.

Old men, fear me! You will shatter under my ruthless apathetic assault!

Uschi - 2
Old Men - 0

"I am convinced that this world is of no importance, and that the only people who care about dates are imbeciles and Spanish teachers." -- Jean Arp, 1921

"If Jesus came back and saw what people are doing in his name, he would never never stop throwing up." - Max von Sydow, "Hannah and Her Sisters"