Did God Really Make Only Males and Females
This has been seen before, but making the rounds on the net today is a picture of a bird in someone's backyard, a Cardinal, which has both male and female plumage. How could this be when the Bible says God created only males and females?
A bit different is the topic of homosexuality in nature, that is in animals. Over 450 different species have been observed in homosexual behavior.
So, we would have to conclude that if there is a God, it would have created not just male and female but other varieties of gender as well. The Bible would be flat out wrong.
I know this will not detour some believers. They are sure both both God and the book he guided or wrote by guiding the hands of ancient writers could not possibly be wrong on this issue. This issue is very important to those who do not like homosexuals.
Plenty of Christians continue to believe what those during slavery and segregation believed. This is that God put different races on different continents because he did not want interracial marriage. Keeping them separated was carrying out God's plan for humans.
The idea some god did not want interracial marriage is no more ridiculous that the current idea that homosexuality is an affront to that god.
The trick of justifying prejudice against a group or justifying control of others by using God or the Bible is as old as the Bible itself. One can see that when the ancient writers wanted emphasize some point they would put it in the mouth of Jesus. They were free to do that because no writer of the Bible claimed to be present when Jesus spoke or claimed to be reading from notes of anyone who was present.
Best to get over dislike of homosexual and transgendered people.
hmm?! if you are a good Darwinian you would say that we live only to survive, including the view that we exist only to reproduce. homosexuality -- the extent to which it exists -- must then be seen as an undesirable mutation, something adverse, something undesirable.
ReplyDeletehmm? if you are a good Darwinian you know things take place to increase odds of survival. Sometimes limiting population growth does that. Animals kill each other so there is enough food for the survivors.
ReplyDeleteOK. so adverse mutations help to kill off human populations, something that we do with fair regularity, surplus populations or not. you say, then, that homosexuality is good, helping as it does to slow population growth. yet the fact remains; the male-female business is, in principle, pointed toward reproduction, keeping the species going no matter what. interesting, tho' that nature, from the Darwinian point of view, is in the business of destroying life while simultaneously in the business of promoting life. a real conundrum, at least for anyone that stops to reflect on the matter. but if all that is true, then way so much moral outrage when religious people omit homosexual acts? are they, then, just doing nature's will; that homosexuality qua homosexuality is "beneficial"?
ReplyDelete"from the Darwinian point of view is in the business of destroying life while simultaneously ..promoting life.. a real conundrum, at least for anyone who stops to reflect on the matter." Anyone who stops to reflect on the matter remembers there is a food chain. Animals eat other animals. I don't see any conundrum about the food chain.
ReplyDeleteand we eat animals big time. I am, however, speaking of the matter from a philosophical point of view. Life struggling/striving to survive only to be destroyed, whether by natural death and/or by violence. A tad ironic, puzzling don't you think. Besides where is your vaunted notion of human rights in all of this?
ReplyDeleteYou have a good Catholic view. When I speak of life, mostly I'm talking about survival of our planet and humans on the planet. Catholics are speaking of fetuses. Death is necessary for us to survive. Thus, I don't see any philosophical dilemma in talking of life of the human specie and death of humans. There is talk in the Bible of "stewardship" but its meaning changes over time. I remember in my farm boy life the word belonged to draining cropland so it could be farmed. Now we know that this just drowns people downstream and puts farm chemical in our water supply.
ReplyDeletewhat? Iwas talking about no such thing. You commonly use this line of argument to promote atheism: why would God create something, only to have it suffer and then die. why create dinosaurs only to cruelly wipe them out? and so on? Christians, too, are attuned to this question/mystery: why death. why suffering, does any of this make sense? In other words, we all ask the same questions, we just have different answers. And for you, I think, they are merely utilitarian questions/answers. And while I'm at it, here's one for your consideration. You like to argue that religion exists only in the mind, a pastel of yarns that humans make up to explain their place in the world, a kind of a cosmic comfort blanket. Fast forward to post-modernism: now it seems that your vaunted Enlightenment faith in reason, progress and all that good stuff also exists only in the mind, just a comfy meta-narrative that we have made up to make us feel good re our place in a meaningless universe. In other words, we are all living in an imaginary, magic castle of one sort or another. or to change the metaphor, we are all just floating over the abyss in a beautiful hot air balloon of our own making.
ReplyDelete"In other word, we are all living in an imaginary, magic castle of one sort or another."
DeleteYes, reason exists only in the mind. And, a god exists only in the mind. If that is your view, we agree. However, if it is your view a god exists somewhere else other than in the mind, which is what is taught by the Bible, then we disagree.
for the moment, forget Scripture. I was merely making the point that the post-modern view tends to treat all myths/human metanarratives -- your enlightenment narrative notwithstanding -- as fantasies, as in a sense, delusional. If atheists are right about religion then the atheists should be prepared to go down with rest of us. and reason only exists in the mind?! if I were of a mind to do so, I could really have fun with that one.
ReplyDeleteYou remind me of a poster that was on my old blog way back. He insisted I engage with him in a debate--he was confident he could prove through debate that I did not exist. I knew that if he made all the rules and assumptions he could indeed do that so I declined to participate.
ReplyDeleteyou should have risen to the challenge. he must have been a philosophy type, doing what philosophy types do: namely seek out a little intellectual combat. BTW, I think that you exist. But do I know that you really, truly exist. You could be any number of people other than the one you claim to be. You could be Descartes' evil demon, seeking the deceive me regarding your existence or, for that matter, the existence of just about everything else. Bottom line: you exist as an entity in my mind, a mental reality that captures something (but certainly not the whole) of your extra-mental reality as a thing in the universe. At the end of the day, then, I accept your existence based on what I call "natural faith". I naturally believe but I cannot prove. Strictly speaking, then, I don't claim to have indisputable PROOF of your existence (or, for that matter of anything "out there"). That said, things are just there, whether I want them there or not. Some people, of course, get all mixed up in this regard: we call them men, demented, psychotic.
ReplyDelete