Mortality Blog

Here’s an interesting idea that struck me just now (while sitting here at work playing around with Flash and listening to incredibly fun and catchy The Hidden Cameras’ album ‘Mississauga Goddamn’).

Religious groups ought to believe in freedom of religion, right? As much as I find that kind of irony amusing, I wouldn’t be at all amused at the hypocrisy of one religious group that wanted to deny rights to another.

And what is religion? It’s all about belief in something. Belief about the way that the universe works - explaining the otherwise inexplicable, solving questions of morality that would otherwise be impossible to answer, and providing a sense of purpose for our lives.

I’m not a participant in any organized religions, but it’s fair to say that I still have certain beliefs that meet that criteria above - do I have the right to keep those beliefs and not be persecuted for them?

For instance - I have no scientific proof that homosexuality is morally acceptable. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to ‘prove’ moral issues empirically. However, I believe that homosexuality is morally acceptable, without any proof. I take it on faith.

The ‘Employment Nondiscrimination Act‘ just passed a House vote (after several decades of work), and will prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. Trans-gendered people aren’t included, which sucks, but at least it’s a start. Naturally, conservative religious organizations aren’t happy about this bill, and they’re complaining about it.

They are hypocrites. They believe that sexual preferences other then heterosexuality are wrong, while I believe that all sexual preference is right.- we both have our beliefs, and we have faith that we are right, but they think there’s something wrong with what I believe. It’s may be tough for you to believe this: I actually don’t have a problem with their belief in the immorality of homosexuality,
I only have a problem with that idea put in to practice. It’s fine if they’re repulsed by gay guys - as long as they act polite and don’t let that effect their judgment, which would result in prejudice.

While I’m at it, random question, true or false: “Being permissive by default regarding rights and rules is a superior system to being restrictive by default.”

I say true - I would rather start at the ‘everything goes’ stage and pare things down until it works.

So I was reading this article -

… it’s weird, this sounds like more of a problem with our culture’s concept of gender stereotypes then a problem with how jesus is represented in modern church. Do we really need something like GodMen where “men can be fully men … when faith gets dangerous”? I guess I would kind of see it as a question of whether you adapt the religion to the culture, or the culture to the religion, where the former would result in a more accessible yet possible less faithful rendition, and the latter would be a lot more challenging but ultimately truer to the original. I don’t know.

… and I’m not even going to point out the obvious male chauvanism in the remarks about what women want from men. Oh wait I just did.