Friday, July 29, 2022

A Philosophically Illegitimate Reason To Oppose Homosexuality

The driving force behind the cultural conflict on the issue of homosexuality is emotionalism on both the conservative and liberal side of the political divide.  Biblical passages that address the subject are taken out of context by both sides or twisted with assumptions in order to subjectively persuade people, logical fallacies are embraced, and personal preferences are treated as moral revelations.  The fact that the Bible does indeed condemn homosexual acts does not mean that the philosophical basis that some Christians who oppose homosexuality use is legitimate.  This issue, like many others, is nuanced beyond what many people, regardless of the positions they allegedly believe, are willing to understand.

Yes, the Bible does condemn homosexual acts and it does prescribe execution for homosexual sex (Leviticus 20:11); yes, whether this is morally good has nothing to do with whether people feel comfortable with it or with how drastically some people would need to change their lives accordingly.  No truth is changed or made true by anyone's preferences.  This means no idea that theological and political conservatives or theological and political liberals would relish is true because it is convenient for their assumptions or preferences.  Whether the full Bible is actually true or not and whether people like it or not, the Bible does oppose homosexual behaviors in multiple passages, even though homosexual acts are far from the most grievous sexual sins (that would be sexual abuse).

At the same time, there are plenty of Christians who seem to just use the Biblical condemnation of homosexual acts, not involuntary or natural homosexual desires, as a smokescreen to hide the fact that they would oppose and despise homosexual behaviors (and in their case, probably the orientation too) out of sheer subjective disgust that ultimately guides their beliefs on the matter rather than reason and the Bible.  The Bible and rationalistic philosophy--one inescapable tenet of which is how feelings do not validate or invalidate an idea--are at best selectively appealed in order to make the primary focus on personal emotions seem sophisticated or epistemologically valid.

These Christians are not ultimately concerned with being rational in their non-Biblical philosophical stances and in their Biblical theology by not making assumptions.  They are instead eager to look down on people with a homosexual orientation because of the epistemological subjectivity of conscience, not because of Biblical teachings.  One evidence for this is how they rarely if ever distinguish between homosexual feelings that might not be wanted and homosexual behaviors that anyone could commit regardless of sexual orientation; the Bible only condemns the latter.  Another evidence for this is how they talk and act as if they would think homosexual behaviors are probably wrong with or without a theistic moral system.

No moral obligation is revealed by the natural world, conscience, consensus, or laws arbitrarily contrived by humans.  Neither homosexual activities nor murder, kidnapping, rape, or any other deed is proven to be obligatory or unjust because of anyone's comfort with it.  Anyone who believes that something is morally right or wrong because of these methods is a fool.  In an ultimate sense, whether moral obligations exist is unprovable and unfalsifiable, but believing in moral obligations because of things like conscience and societal trends is especially asinine.  Ideas about the morality of homosexuality are held to by conservatives and liberals alike on exactly these grounds, though: personal feelings and cultural pressures.

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