Is there a need to view this as right/wrong? It accomplished their desired goal. So I guess it was right for them. And I guess it was wrong for me because I didn't get to hear him speak.

This thread is about a threat of a boycott on Starbucks. So yes i think its good to know where people stand on that threat and what their reasoning's are for that stance.

Otherwise we are just going to continue talking about variations of hate the sin but love the sinner. Which is fine but why even bring the Starbucks boycott into it.

This seems to be the conversation that people chose to have focus on. If you have more interesting or informed to say than

you're welcome to try to direct the conversation in that particular direction.

I tried to get your opinion on the threat, but i got avoidance until that last post which is still pretty avoidancecy.

Sorry, but I was more interested in the response to the boycott than the boycott itself.

It's irrelevant that many married people are depressed, both because (1) being married scarcely implies a healthy sex life; and (2) even if it did, all that is being claimed here is that taking away these depressed people's sex life would leave them even worse off.

(Is it really controversial that being deprived of sex is a bad thing for 99% of people?! I honestly never know if you're serious.)

This is completely absurd. If Jesus was anything like what Christians believe, he wouldn't give a damn about whether or not a man was sticking it to another man as long as that person was a good, decent human being. Like it or not, that is how gay men express romantic love and sexual desire for their partner. I keep thinking that the refusal to accept that is a result of personal disgust, not just having read some arbitrary restriction in the Bible.

And is it really that shocking that abstaining from having sexual romance and intimacy in one's life would bum someone out? We're talking for life in the case of homosexuals. Sex doesn't only serve reproductive and recreational purposes (although the importance of the latter shouldn't be underestimated), but also relational. And you're saying that if gay people and unmarried people don't deprive themselves of that, Jesus won't love them? You don't see how that's messed up and goes completely against the teachings of someone who was all about love?

I may be an anti-theist, but seriously, kudos to churches who are actually accepting of gay people. If a gay person genuinely believes in Christ and wants to be part of that religious community, he/she shouldn't be made to feel either worthless or broken for being born with a different sexual orientation and he most definitely shouldn't be required to abstain from experiencing something integral to human happiness and fulfillment if he wants to be part of the in-group. What that person does in the privacy of his/her own bedroom with their partner's consent is as immoral as whatever a consenting married heterosexual couple does in theirs.

But you said it yourself that this is correlational! Just a few posts ago you were complaining about there being no studies showing a causal connection between abstinence and depression. Now suddenly you believe that smoking causes lung cancer in the absence of studies that show this causal link. Yes?

A few points:

1. For various reasons the interest in smoking->lung cancer is greater than the interest in abstinence->depression. It could be because (I) lung cancer kills you, depression doesn't; (II) Many depressed people (as a result of their depression) don't have the motivation to seek help and remain unnoticed by the general public; (III) finding the lung cancer-smoking correlation is easy as both groups of people are easy to spot, whereas it's difficult to have information for a large group of people regarding their long-term sexual life and whether they have clinical depression; (IV) etc.

2. The evidence for this link doesn't come from surveys (which is impossible) but from case studies. And case studies are not numerous enough to produce graphs, to compute correlational coefficients, and so on. But there is also secondary evidence for the abstinence-> depression link and it is that sex is an important factor for human happiness. If you take away such a factor, it wouldn't be surprising to any expert that some people are going to be prone to developing clinical depression over it.

3. The most important point: if you agree that there are benefits to having sex, what is your comment on that?! Take one example: having sex regularly reduces the risk of prostate cancer. Those people that you asked to stop having sex are, therefore, going to be more vulnerable to developing prostate cancer, compared to those that are not pressured to stop having sex. Isn't this alone sufficient to make you MAYBE reconsider what you're doing to those people, especially given that you can't name one reason why they shouldn't do it?

I wasn't thinking of this difference and I'm not sure I completely understand it anyway. But since your answer is the same for both, we come to this amazing response:

Are... you... seriously going to bite that bullet!? I don't believe you. I can't possibly imagine you would be okay with such a practice, regardless of how many people actually join them. So, how far are you willing to go with this? What if they require people to amputate both of their hands? What if they require them to amputate all their limbs, their nose, and their penis (because things that stick out are the work of the devil)? Would you be okay with such a church in which people truly believe that if they don't join it will go to hell and cryingly agree to undergo the mutilations because the alternative is even worse in their mind? You are seriously going to tell me that you see nothing immoral about that church?

On a related note and for those who can appreciate the humor:

Not that it's really relevant, but I feel obligated to point out that this is wrong. Suicide is a major killer. Though it seems that lung cancer kills 4-5 times more Americans each year than suicide, and not all suicides are necessarily caused by depression.

Yes, definitely. But since depression doesn't kill directly (and not as frequently as cancer), many people don't take it as seriously.

I suppose I should have asked you a question before replying in the first place.

If you were in charge of making all the laws of the land, would you attempt to stop homosexual behavior?

I know that's a fairly vague question but hopefully you understand what I'm getting at.

If you think their behavior is immoral, but would never try to stop them from doing what they want to to, then we have nothing to discuss.

Sorry for jumping to conclusions.

I'll respond to more later, but this stood out:

You're right that I'm not okay with it. But me not being okay with it does not imply that it's immoral. I'm not okay with neck rings, lip plates, or foot binding. But I don't think they're immoral practices. Physical mutilation holds a very high cultural significance for many people in many places, and I feel that it's unhealthy to impose Western values into those societies. Self-mutilation is not that different.

The major distinction lies in your concept of morality. You're basing it on the harm principle, and you place the highest emphasis on physical harm. So you're not very attuned to social/cultural types of harm. You probably have a lot of deeply ingrained ethnocentricity (which includes cultural bias, not strictly ethnicity bias) that you don't even know is there.

Perhaps because it's just a fictitious as invisible sky fairies.

Yeah, I would appreciate it if you responded to the rest of my post too.

This is super weird. In one of the morality threads you did not present yourself as a moral relativist. For one thing, you definitely presented yourself as a moral realist. Well, now you are definitely presenting yourself as a moral relativist and not as a moral realist (not that not being a moral relativist necessarily implies moral realism). Care to clarify?

Also, if you don't consider those immoral practices, can you give an example of an immoral practice?

I am not basing morality on physical harm alone. Well, depends on your definition of "physical", but I consider psychological harm a factor in moral judgment at least as much as physical harm.

Can you define what you mean by social/cultural types of harm?

I think the gay rights arguments have been batted back and forth pretty well in this thread. I'll just say that I think that, just like you can't now find too many Christians who admit that they ever believed the Bible mandated race discrimination, even though that view was the PREVALENT view among white southern Christians until relatively recently in history, and that you can't now find too many Christians who believe that married women should not work outside the home, even though this view was prevalent among most Christians until relatively recently, 30 or 40 years from now you won't find too many Christians admitting that they ever believed that gays and lesbians were unequal.

What we are seeing now is the last gasp of history's losers.

We're talking about the strength of the correlation. I'm not claiming to have a direct causal study, but a very good correlational case. One that is significantly stronger than the abstinence/depression casual relationship that you've claimed.

This point, while true, does not support your claim. You made a very strong claim, and I doubt you actually have the evidence to back it up. (Sound like a familiar criticism?)

In other words, you don't actually have the evidence to support your claim. That's all I'm looking for.

ZOMG! We should hire women and have men have sex with them regularly in order to reduce prostate cancer! And those men will be happier, too! What a noble profession that would be!

You're doing what you did in the thread about values being reduced to facts, which is by arbitrarily creating standards and asserting weak casual links in order to support your position.

Are you going to deny the studies that show that spirituality leads to higher levels of happiness? For example,

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0108082904.htm

This is the first study that I grabbed. It would not be hard to come up with a whole host of these types of studies. I can play the same silly game and suggest that MAYBE you should consider what you're doing to these people. It wouldn't be any more meaningful than the question you've asked me.

My point here is that you really need to stop making these claims when you don't have the evidence to back it up. You don't have a study that says that abstinence leads to depression. It's not there! Nobody has done such a study. It might be true and it might be false, but what is clear is that you lack sufficient evidence to make the claim.

I'm a cultural relativist and a moral realist. I am not a strict moral relativist. Morality is a structure that stands over culture. Certain aspects of morality are bound by culture, and some are not. For example, an adult forcing himself/herself sexually on a child is immoral regardless of the culture. There is no moral neutrality in that action.

Having small feet... that's morally neutral. In Western culture, foot-binding is probably immoral. But a couple hundred years ago in China, it would have been morally acceptable. Having bound feet did not affect your ability to enter and interact with the culture. In fact, having bound feet made it EASIER (in some sense, it's like how those with affluent parents tend to be better educated and live more prosperous lives).

See above. Selling children into sexual slavery is immoral across cultures. I think homosexual activity is immoral across cultures. I would say that leveraging deception in "harmful ways" for selfish personal gain is immoral across cultures (intentionally using quotes because I don't want to expand on what I mean -- I hope there is a reasonable picture of what I mean by it).

Cultural harm would be to impose something that would be viewed as culturally unacceptable. At the moment, my mind is going towards Apocalypse Now:

There are a large number of "acceptable harms" that can be accepted because the cost of addressing the "harm" is greater than the "harm" itself when viewed within that culture. I need to use quotes around each of these because the understanding of "harm" is culturally bound.

There is a sense where Western culture embraces the worship of the human body. There is a sense that the greatest good is to focus on the human body as the ultimate key to understanding "the big questions" of life fulfillment and things like that. If only we lived a few years longer, our "quality of life" would be better. Or if we had fewer physical diseases, we would be "happier."

I simply reject that these things are actually sufficient to leading us to a better understanding of ourselves as humans, and leading us towards better lives. This does not reject these things as being components of it, but rather I'm saying that to focus basically exclusively on these things is short-sighted.

One of the things that's quite problematic about Aaron's thought is the assumption that because HE rejects what he calls "worship of the human body", that this has anything to do with the morality of the actions of OTHERS.

To me, when I hear a social conservative go off about how some aspect of gays' and lesbians' lives or their sexuality runs contrary to the natural order, my first reaction is "why, exactly, do people not have the right to define the natural order differently than you do and act accordingly, and if they do so, under what basis can you condemn their acts as immoral?".

In other words, at best, you have a sort of morality where you say "well, *I* would never do that". Which is fine. You don't have to. You can even think it would be immoral for you to do so. There's still an objection to that sort of morality-- i.e., it is REALLY easy for a heterosexual to condemn a sex act that he or she DOESN'T want to engage in as immoral. But nonetheless, saying "I personally would never engage in sexual intercourse with a member of my own gender because I think it is immoral" is not really that much more problematic than saying "I personally would never open my store on a Sunday because I think it is immoral".

The problem is that isn't enough for social conservatives. They want to be able to say that not only have THEY made a moral choice (as I said, to do something they didn't want to do anyway-- takes real courage, guys) but that OTHER people who don't agree with them nonetheless have an obligation (to them? to God?) not to engage in the activity. And social conservatives have no basis for saying that.

Let me compare this to something. I assume that for any serious Christian believer, rejecting Jesus Christ is immoral. Indeed, it is the most mortal of mortal sins, right?

And yet, unless one is a Taliban-style theocrat, I assume that just about every serious Christian believer respects the right of another person to not only reject Jesus Christ, but to also REJECT THAT IT IS EVEN IMMORAL. Not only do you accept this, you think there is nothing unusual about it at all, right? Of course someone who doesn't agree that your religion is true isn't going to feel that he or she is nonetheless bound by your religious tenets.

And this is why harm to others-- the moral principle that social conservatives decry-- actually has to be the touchstone of PUBLIC morality. Because harm to others is the one thing you can identify as a basis for public policy to reject someone else's moral position that is in disagreement with yours. The reason, after all, why Christians accept that nonbelievers have the right to reject Jesus Christ is PRECISELY that they are only harming themselves, correct?

So why can't you guys extend the same courtesy to gays and lesbians you extend to nonbelievers?

Compound for sins they are inclin'd to
By damning those they have no mind to
Still so perverse and opposite
As if they worshipp'd God for spite
- Samuel Butler, "Hudibras"

Does not rhyme.

1) You should consider that there are many behaviors which "social conservatives" view as immoral, but *DO* in fact engage in. Consider any of a number of sexual scandals that happen to public figures, and consider further that there are many others that go unannounced to the world. Therefore, this particular line appears to be quite false. "Social conservatives" decry plenty of activities which they themselves do.

2) This is plumbing the depths of moral relativism, for one can pick any particular issue and play the same game back to you. Let's just pick rape. It's not problematic for you to consider rape to be immoral on the basis of you would never do it. This fact simply has no power to negate the validity of any particular moral claim (nor does it have the power to validate such a claim). It's just an ancillary fact.

Not at all. I have no idea where you came up with that idea. Oh wait... I think I do, and it's not a place where I want to go (and not because it would be immoral for me to go there).

Actually, yeah, that would be pretty awesome.

And you should get a tax rebate if you're in a high-risk group for prostate cancer.

Society as a whole would be much happier. Apart from prudish milquetoasts like you, of course.

Aaron:

I never said ALL moral strictures of social conservatives are convenient. It's enough that this one is.

And I also never said that convenient morality can also not be right. But it does give it a whiff of "we're going to declare that people we are prejudiced against are immoral". Which is easier to do than saying "we are goung to declare that people we like and exalt are immoral".

Finally, yes, I do think the reason why Christians tolerate nonbelievers despite thinking the denial of Jesus is a mortal sin is because they are only hurting themselves, indeed, that God's plan was to afford people free will to deny Jesus. Indeed, that strikes me as a pretty basic tenet of Christian theology.

Again, I ask, how come deniers of Jesus are afforded tolerance but if some man loves another man that is a violation of PUBLIC morality that social conservatives need not tolerate?

Technically, the strength of the long-term abstinence->stress/depression/loneliness connection is stronger than the strength of the smoking->lung cancer connection, since only about 15% of smokers develop lung cancer, whereas almost anybody who is abstinent for a long time has some sort of unhappiness. What you really want to criticize is the sample size, which is fine, but

1- I offered a secondary explanation saying that sex accounts for a good amount of the variance of human happiness (and there are studies which address this more directly than the studies about depression) and if you deprive people from such a factor, it wouldn't be surprising at all that that will lead to unhappiness.

2- The existing evidence is good enough for the claim I made. I don't know what kind of strength you are imagining, but I said that lack of sex leads to certain negative consequences (and it is implied that I am not saying 100% of the time, since no factor in the field of psychology has an effect 100% of the time) and this claim is verified by the existing studies.

Wow. Case studies are one of the three main descriptive methods in psychology and you just declared that they are not one. Interesting insights you're having there.


Did I say we should do this (although there already is a very similar profession and I don't think it's a shameful one)? It' enough to not interfere with the natural process: it's not necessary to *find* sexual partners for men who can't do so themselves, but it's absolutely terrible to stop people from doing something healthy for stupid reasons.

Absolutely not. Spirituality does lead to higher levels of happiness.

Lol. First of all, what am I doing to what people? Do you think atheists don't have spirituality? This is one of the biggest clichés in Christians' repertoire. Second, I want people to be more educated and make decisions about their beliefs on their own. I would never blackmail Christians to give up their beliefs if I was in a position to accept them as members of an institution (unlike what that guy's church, and possibly your church, is doing). Third, I love it that you posted a study that not only doesn't support your view, but goes against it. Here's a quote:

So, let's see. Spirituality (the thing which I absolutely don't want to take away from children) leads to happiness; religious practices (the thing that I would be fine if people gave up, even though I would never force them to) doesn't? Interesting.

Another quote from the article:

Teaching children, some of whom will turn out to be gay when they enter their teens, that homosexuality is an abomination is definitely going to do a solid job in developing a strong sense of personal worth in them!