So…I’m a Christian and still can’t for the life of me understand the appeal of these vicious, hateful positions.
I’m even pretty direct-to-the-bible in my theology, thus the ideas that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and that God doesn’t make mistakes, lead me to believe that choosing a different gender than you were born with is probably missing out on God’s best for us.
Yet despite some common ground with the “religious right”, I’m still to this day completely at a loss as to how you would get from literally anything you find in the bible to encouraging or applauding the removal of protections for very at-risk persons.
I promise, you can not read the Bible as a serious undertaking and arrive where these people have.
If god doesn’t make mistakes then the existence of trans people is not a mistake but rather a test of basic regard and compassion or something of the sorts.
There’s one word in what you said that’s the lynchpin: “choice”. Trans people don’t choose to be trans. Who the fuck would choose to be dysphoric.
Yeah exactly, trans people don’t choose to be trans; they choose to treat their dysphoria. When they don’t, they often die.
The medically proven effective and successful ways to do that include transitioning, hormone treatment, etc…
Medically proven ineffective ways are what republicans push for and is what’s happening all across the US: conversion therapy, denying gender dysphoria exists at all, public shame and ridicule, exclusion from society by eliminating housing, employment, and other non-discrimination protections, painting trans people as delusional/dangerous, denial of healthcare, having the state take trans children away from their parents, claiming “transness” is a social contagion, trying to criminalize being trans in schools and in public by banning dressing in a way that’s not stereotypical or traditional for one’s sex/gender, and mocking the 40% suicide rate among trans people that are denied care and lack social support.
I’m sorry but this logic doesn’t make sense to me. If everyone is perfect the way they are, then Trump is also perfect the way he is, and he is a monster in disguise, far from remotely acceptable.
He is perfect. What you need to realise to see that is that his purpose in life is to be a warning example to others. Actually, about 100% of humans are supposed to be that but most of us not to Trumpian degrees.
I disagree with you about the bible stuff, but I have great respect for how you handle it.
You might disagree with trans people’s interpretation of their bodies, but it sounds like you hold more highly their rights to be kept safe. Even if they may be doing something you may disagree with, we agree that vulnerable people should be protected, especially when they’re not harming others.
It’s almost like there’s no asterisk after “Love thy neighbour”!
I’m sure as a result you do not wear glasses, refuse medical care, etc right? God doesn’t make mistakes, right???
I have news for you, every bigot thinks their theology is direct to the Bible. They’re right, it’s a despicable book full of vile conduct, most of which is supported by the ugly nonexistent tetragrammaton tyrant you worship.
None of these people have read the bible, probably never even opened one. Their beliefs are the culmination of their echo chamber of ignorance - what their social peers have told them is ‘in the bible’.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one…
Galatians 3:28
This is one of the few sentiments that’s both in the earliest primary source documents of Jesus and the apocrypha:
“…when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female…”
Gospel of Thomas 22
When Salome inquired when the things concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female.
Lost Gospel of the Egyptians via Clement
At the time Jesus was actually alive, the interpretation of Genesis 1:27’s “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” was widely thought to mean that there was a hermaphroditic original ‘Adam.’ This was widely discussed just a few decades after the time of Jesus among the Egyptian Jews in Alexandria, particularly Philio, contemporary to Paul.
As well, at the time he was alive there was a very brutal form of forced hormone alteration by castrating prepubescent boys to leave them more feminine. Only a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion the emperor of Rome even married someone this was done to (just a few years before the extant gospel of Mark is finalized, talking about marriage only being between a man and a woman).
The ways in which a historical Jesus would have been thinking about the notions of gender or sexuality may be different than you might think back then.
In my mind, the historical people at the center of the tradition has always been more important than the echo of them leftover in books confirmably marred by edits, revisions, and omissions. For both the old book and the new.
And I think the historical Jesus might have agreed.
His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you.”
He said to them, “You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead.” […]
Jesus said, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”
The people who had a version of Jesus saying this also thought he was talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts, something only proven to be true beyond any doubt around a century ago.
It’s easy for false prophets to cast weeds among the wheat, but it’s very hard to plant seeds that mature well with the times. To do that takes true foresight. Eventually as the years drag on, what was wheat and what was weeds inevitably becomes clearer as each grows - it’s an inescapable separator between truth and fiction.
The Old Testament is flat out wrong when Elihu claims in Job that “why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.” This knowledge had even become known in Jesus’s time, in the same Roman book published just 50 years before he was born in the Roman empire which also talked about Greek atomism and survival of the fittest.
The church, in an age where people were still peeing on their hands to clean them, appointed itself an arbiter of what was wheat and what was weeds and proceeded to uproot anything it declared a weed.
TL;DR: Having blind faith in those who have even more blind faith sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind to me. Maybe one would be less in danger of blaspheming the holy spirit and the notion of divine revelation if avoiding declaring anything absolutely true or false for sure until having sufficient confirmable information to evaluate it.
That “wait and watch” approach is even the methodology of how the aforementioned book 50 years before Jesus got all that other stuff right about evolution and atoms. A book sharing word for word similarities with one of Jesus’s most famous parables, about how only what survived to reproduce multiplied. Also the only parable in the earliest written canonized gospel which has a “secret explanation” for what was a clearly public telling of the parable itself to thousands.
Yeah, doesn’t the bible say not to judge, and to leave judgement up to the all-knowing God who is infinitely more experienced than his followers? I assume you agree with that. I wish most Christians would put that into practice and focus on being good to one another. I’m glad that you recognize the anti-trans hate and cruelty when you see it.
I’m so tired of cis people telling trans people that trans people are immoral, or that trans people don’t deserve equal rights, or don’t deserve to exist in society, or are lesser than cis people. And then cis people have the audacity to pass laws that vilify trans existence, restrict trans rights and strip them of their autonomy.
I suggest you make a more thorough reading of the Bible. The vitriol and hatred of what you call the “religious right” isn’t too far off if you compare it to the pettiness of Yaweh through the Old Testament, often killing hundreds or thousands of people, when not provoking absolute catastrophes, just to punish the deeds of one person or a few, or even simply due to his fragile ego.
You sound like a person with much better moral values, however. It would just be strange to me that you’d choose to worship that character when you’re clearly more inclined towards tolerance, provided you’re familiar enough with Christianism.
So…I’m a Christian and still can’t for the life of me understand the appeal of these vicious, hateful positions.
I’m even pretty direct-to-the-bible in my theology, thus the ideas that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and that God doesn’t make mistakes, lead me to believe that choosing a different gender than you were born with is probably missing out on God’s best for us.
Yet despite some common ground with the “religious right”, I’m still to this day completely at a loss as to how you would get from literally anything you find in the bible to encouraging or applauding the removal of protections for very at-risk persons.
I promise, you can not read the Bible as a serious undertaking and arrive where these people have.
I’m not going to get into all of my many healthcare issues, but I’ll just let you read about atypical trigeminal neuralgia.
If your god doesn’t make mistakes, fuck your god. I didn’t deserve that.
If god doesn’t make mistakes then the existence of trans people is not a mistake but rather a test of basic regard and compassion or something of the sorts.
There’s one word in what you said that’s the lynchpin: “choice”. Trans people don’t choose to be trans. Who the fuck would choose to be dysphoric.
Yeah exactly, trans people don’t choose to be trans; they choose to treat their dysphoria. When they don’t, they often die.
The medically proven effective and successful ways to do that include transitioning, hormone treatment, etc…
Medically proven ineffective ways are what republicans push for and is what’s happening all across the US: conversion therapy, denying gender dysphoria exists at all, public shame and ridicule, exclusion from society by eliminating housing, employment, and other non-discrimination protections, painting trans people as delusional/dangerous, denial of healthcare, having the state take trans children away from their parents, claiming “transness” is a social contagion, trying to criminalize being trans in schools and in public by banning dressing in a way that’s not stereotypical or traditional for one’s sex/gender, and mocking the 40% suicide rate among trans people that are denied care and lack social support.
I’m sorry but this logic doesn’t make sense to me. If everyone is perfect the way they are, then Trump is also perfect the way he is, and he is a monster in disguise, far from remotely acceptable.
He is perfect. What you need to realise to see that is that his purpose in life is to be a warning example to others. Actually, about 100% of humans are supposed to be that but most of us not to Trumpian degrees.
Deuteronomy 23:1: English Standard Version “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.
Maybe let’s not base any ideas of morality or law on the bible full stop.
I disagree with you about the bible stuff, but I have great respect for how you handle it.
You might disagree with trans people’s interpretation of their bodies, but it sounds like you hold more highly their rights to be kept safe. Even if they may be doing something you may disagree with, we agree that vulnerable people should be protected, especially when they’re not harming others.
It’s almost like there’s no asterisk after “Love thy neighbour”!
I’m sure as a result you do not wear glasses, refuse medical care, etc right? God doesn’t make mistakes, right???
I have news for you, every bigot thinks their theology is direct to the Bible. They’re right, it’s a despicable book full of vile conduct, most of which is supported by the ugly nonexistent tetragrammaton tyrant you worship.
None of these people have read the bible, probably never even opened one. Their beliefs are the culmination of their echo chamber of ignorance - what their social peers have told them is ‘in the bible’.
This is one of the few sentiments that’s both in the earliest primary source documents of Jesus and the apocrypha:
At the time Jesus was actually alive, the interpretation of Genesis 1:27’s “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” was widely thought to mean that there was a hermaphroditic original ‘Adam.’ This was widely discussed just a few decades after the time of Jesus among the Egyptian Jews in Alexandria, particularly Philio, contemporary to Paul.
As well, at the time he was alive there was a very brutal form of forced hormone alteration by castrating prepubescent boys to leave them more feminine. Only a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion the emperor of Rome even married someone this was done to (just a few years before the extant gospel of Mark is finalized, talking about marriage only being between a man and a woman).
The ways in which a historical Jesus would have been thinking about the notions of gender or sexuality may be different than you might think back then.
In my mind, the historical people at the center of the tradition has always been more important than the echo of them leftover in books confirmably marred by edits, revisions, and omissions. For both the old book and the new.
And I think the historical Jesus might have agreed.
The people who had a version of Jesus saying this also thought he was talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts, something only proven to be true beyond any doubt around a century ago.
It’s easy for false prophets to cast weeds among the wheat, but it’s very hard to plant seeds that mature well with the times. To do that takes true foresight. Eventually as the years drag on, what was wheat and what was weeds inevitably becomes clearer as each grows - it’s an inescapable separator between truth and fiction.
The Old Testament is flat out wrong when Elihu claims in Job that “why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.” This knowledge had even become known in Jesus’s time, in the same Roman book published just 50 years before he was born in the Roman empire which also talked about Greek atomism and survival of the fittest.
The church, in an age where people were still peeing on their hands to clean them, appointed itself an arbiter of what was wheat and what was weeds and proceeded to uproot anything it declared a weed.
TL;DR: Having blind faith in those who have even more blind faith sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind to me. Maybe one would be less in danger of blaspheming the holy spirit and the notion of divine revelation if avoiding declaring anything absolutely true or false for sure until having sufficient confirmable information to evaluate it.
That “wait and watch” approach is even the methodology of how the aforementioned book 50 years before Jesus got all that other stuff right about evolution and atoms. A book sharing word for word similarities with one of Jesus’s most famous parables, about how only what survived to reproduce multiplied. Also the only parable in the earliest written canonized gospel which has a “secret explanation” for what was a clearly public telling of the parable itself to thousands.
Yeah, doesn’t the bible say not to judge, and to leave judgement up to the all-knowing God who is infinitely more experienced than his followers? I assume you agree with that. I wish most Christians would put that into practice and focus on being good to one another. I’m glad that you recognize the anti-trans hate and cruelty when you see it.
I’m so tired of cis people telling trans people that trans people are immoral, or that trans people don’t deserve equal rights, or don’t deserve to exist in society, or are lesser than cis people. And then cis people have the audacity to pass laws that vilify trans existence, restrict trans rights and strip them of their autonomy.
I suggest you make a more thorough reading of the Bible. The vitriol and hatred of what you call the “religious right” isn’t too far off if you compare it to the pettiness of Yaweh through the Old Testament, often killing hundreds or thousands of people, when not provoking absolute catastrophes, just to punish the deeds of one person or a few, or even simply due to his fragile ego.
You sound like a person with much better moral values, however. It would just be strange to me that you’d choose to worship that character when you’re clearly more inclined towards tolerance, provided you’re familiar enough with Christianism.