good.... if you got this far in your thinking then you've achieved more in the last few days than in the years before that. I'm seeing this as a personal achievement. We're not there yet but we're on the path.
Why thank you, that makes me feel very proud
I think I can follow your logic up to the point where you assert that it has "negative effects on our world today". This is the point where we previously had to "agree to disagree". With your new found sense of "historical context" do you still think it's all "insanity" "nonsense" and "wild guesses" or can you now entertain the idea that it made sense at the time but that it makes sense to a certain degree.
I think I'm repeating myself, but here we go. The fact that it made sense at some time, or the fact that it makes some sense at all, is irrelevant. Something making sense has no relevance on it being true or not true. There are a lot of things that make sense or seem to make sense, but that we know are clearly wrong. And once we know that these things are wrong, we need to discard the belief that they're true even if they still make sense.
But I'm still not sure what your point is, so I can't elaborate. Do you think that parents pray over their sick children instead of taking them to the doctor because it makes more sense to them? Do you think that this is an OK thing for them to do, because it makes sense to them?
Interesting. So basically you don't want to be told what to do by people with a different belief system that you don't agree with. But I suspect that if you and/or people who think just like you held power & ran the world, you, too, would be telling other people what to do. Unless you're an anarchist, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Another nice straw man there. I think I have a whole army of them collected by now
But let's see where you're going with this.
And some of your posts lead me to think you have this arbitrary belief system that human beings have 'rights.' Since you brought up homophobia, I take it that you believe gay people, for example, have some sort of 'rights.'
There's nothing in science that tells us people have rights, or that such a thing exists as an objective reality. So-called rights are social constructs, just as slavery was and as you purport religion to be. Even if you try to argue that 'rights' are constructed to be pro-social, encourage the advancement of the species, etc
, you'll run into a couple of problems:
Man, you almost had it, until that last part. Yeah, rights are social constructs (or rather based on them), very true. But you fell right into the common Christian/creationist tarpit at the end.
This has nothing to do with "advancement of the species." Not sure if I'd file this under straw man or slippery slope, but anyway. You're talking about Social Darwinism, which is just another social construct and has nothing to do with science. In particular, science has nothing at all to say about morality, rights or values or anything similar. Science is the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Whether humans evolved from apes or not is completely irrelevant to how we should treat each other.
Secular morality is (very roughly) based on suffering and happiness. Life is generally preferable to death. Pleasure is generally preferable to pain. This sort of stuff. Very simple premises. Again, this has nothing to do with science, has nothing to do with whether evolution is true, has nothing to do with advancement of the species or anything else. Science attempts to tell you what's real and what isn't. That's all. It doesn't try to tell you what to do.
Now when it comes to making the determination between happiness and suffering, and determining a course of action to increase happiness and reduce suffering as much as possible, that's where science or more precisely evidence and reason comes into play. Something which increases happiness and reduces suffering is seen as "good" and the opposite as "bad." In a nutshell.
Again, these are social constructs. Society has figured out that if one wants to be happy, it's usually beneficial when everybody else is also happy and agrees with you on this. If I don't steal your crap, then you don't have a reason to kick me in the face. Or the other way around. It doesn't take a supreme being to figure this out.
However, some details that today we take for granted had to be learned by mankind over the centuries. For example the idea that all men (and women) are "created equal" has only been very recently become mainstream thinking and in some cases still hasn't sunk in. Instead, the idea that some people are in some way better than others has always existed. This clearly was the case in biblical times. Other examples are women being inferior to men in various ways (lower intelligence etc). The same was said about black people. Native Americans had no soul and therefore weren't people. Today we know that this is all nonsense and we know this through evidence.
Going back to homosexuals, the question isn't whether they should have rights, but whether they should have the same rights as everybody else, such as the right to marry. So let's see how we can figure this out.
We can look to religion, Christianity in particular. It says that homosexuality is an abomination and that participants should be put to death. OK. Based on what? Nothing, it just says so and there's no explanation. Apparently god really hates gays. Now obviously we don't really want to kill them because that would be wrong (lol) but at least we can deny them the right to marry.
Or we can look to secular morality. A homosexual couple marrying obviously increases their own happiness, so that's good. We know this through evidence, reason and empathy. Does it increase anyone's suffering? Absolutely not, it doesn't affect anyone else at all. Again, we know this through evidence or rather the lack thereof. So why the hell is this even a question?!
