The Problem with Christians

[TheRocketSurgeon]

And you would be entirely wrong in that assumption, since what we consider children now was a totally accepted age for marriage back then and far into the Middle Ages. Not only with jews, christians or muslims, but also with Greeks and Romans.

You might do well to actually look up the ages of brides to wealthy families in the Middle Ages. The best documented period for these kinds of practices.

I'm not in favour of child or adolescent sex or marriage, but I would be interested to know from an evolutionary point of view, why it is wrong for biologically able people to engage in sexual activity before the government-approved age. If you have sexual maturity, why is it "wrong" to use it? Doesn't natural selection indicate that sex at 12 or 13 is normal?

What we do biologically because we can does not make it something we should condone as a society. Yes, in a time when disease and other privations made it hard to survive past 30 (and often, to full adulthood), it would be beneficial to allow for reproduction at a young age like 12-13. That does not mean that, given our understanding of the development of the brain and of child psychology, that we must therefore ignore the damage that can be done to children by the actions of adults-- damage they may not realize is occurring, at the time, because of the lack of brain development (and thus decision-making ability) that they have available when young.

You are the only person in this entire conversation who genuinely thinks that because something was Naturally Selected for the human race, in the past hundreds of thousands of years of our evolutionary development, that it's a good thing for our society. 

Xenophobia (tribalism) and hatred of "The Other" is wired into our genes, for the same reason--we developed as a tribal species--but it does not mean we should be trying to harm one another on the basis of their differences. We play sports like football, instead.

[Cyberman]

No, and there's no such thing as an "evolutionary point of view"; any more than a gravitational point of view, or a fluid dynamics point of view. Stop being silly.

Can anyone answer the question?

You just quoted my answer. I said no.

[Mister Agenda]

No, and there's no such thing as an "evolutionary point of view"; any more than a gravitational point of view, or a fluid dynamics point of view. Stop being silly.

Can anyone answer the question?

That was a good answer, though for some reason you're ignoring it. You're trying to get from an 'is' to an 'ought'. Something being natural is not of itself a valid argument to do it. It's natural to die of disease before you're fifty, that doesn't mean we shouldn't prevent or cure diseases.

[Esquilax]

Then why was homosexuality listed as a mental health disorder by the American Psychiatry Association all the way up to 1973?

Entrenched, baseless homophobia promulgated by your religion?

If that's the question you're going to ask, like it's some kind of gotcha, then why hasn't the fact that the APA hasn't had that classification for over thirty years presented the perfect counterpoint for you?

If a male minor age 14 is interested in sex with a 22 year old female, how is that damaging?

How is that in any way relevant to the thing you were quoting?

Really??? Then how come the massive suicide rate among transgendered people?

"The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality, is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime" UCLA School of Law.

With a suicide rate 10 times higher than average, the "treatment" is clearly an abject failure.

And you've ruled out contributing factors... how? Factors like, say, just for example, off the top of my head... the intense, constant, aggressive and oftentimes violent campaign of harassment, bigotry, and hate that your side has been waging against them for decades?

No, it has to be that they transitioned at all, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the out and out war christians have been fighting against these people who've done nothing wrong, nor the increased levels of harassment, assault, rape, and discrimination they face on a daily basis through no fault of their own, because of people like you. You think maybe their suicide rate might go down if you and yours stopped trying to hard to make it culturally acceptable to treat them as second class citizens?

[Esquilax]

Alright, this should be fun: what should we expect to see in a person's life if they follow your astoundingly hypocritical presupposition that god exists?

Because you just made the beginning of a falsifiable claim here, and I want to see whether you'll flee from that at top speed, or actually present something of value for your position for once.

You would see a changed set of values, ie more of the "fruit of the Spirit" should be evident in your life,

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." Gal 5:22

Oh, and falsified on the very first hurdle! Wonderful!

So, my family has three case studies in it for this: my wife, my brother-in-law, and my father-in-law. The latter two are devout christians with beliefs that roughly align with yours, as far as I've seen what you believe here: they are also highly depressed, aggressive people that lash out at their family, isolate themselves from others, and say the most hateful things. So much for "joy, peace, kindness," and so on there.

My wife is no longer a christian, but she was for many years, and before you begin baselessly speculating about how she totally wasn't, I will tell you that my wife spent several months in an intensive care unit, refusing medical treatment in favor of praying to your god, while her organs shut down and she drew ever closer to death. If faith in god nigh unto death doesn't make you a christian, I don't know what will. She also reports being much happier now than she ever was under your religion, and that now she doesn't spend her life in fear of demonic influences and the supernatural. Her stress levels have fallen, her instances of hateful behavior have reduced, and her love, joy, patience and so on have increased, since becoming an atheist. The opposite of what you said.

So, you made a testable claim, and right away, I have three examples of that not being the case. Your evidence is falsified. Good job.

[Esquilax]

Why isn't there a ban on discrimination?

We haven't established that discrimination is the cause for the suicide. I would think that mutilating the body and taking foreign hormones really isn't "fixing" anything. The underlying problem is psychological, so a psychological solution should be sought.

So... "we haven't established that discrimination is the cause," is sufficient reason for you to dismiss it as a factor out of hand based on nothing, but... the fact that you haven't established that transitioning is the cause is not sufficient reason to dismiss your claim out of hand. The more you talk, the more it becomes clear that what you consider to be good argumentation relies solely on how much it aligns with what you already believe. It's just all presuppositions with you.

By the way, not all trans people chemically or surgically transition, you know. There's an actual, demonstrable reason why you should rule out transitioning as a cause for the suicide rate, and it's that. You are demonstrably wrong, but that tends to happen when you don't care about evidence beyond what confirms what you already believe.

[Angrboda]

This comparison of suicide attempt rates is also faulty in another way. The proper comparison group for transexuals is the mentally ill, not the general population. They have a difficult and stressful life long condition. A comparison to people with a chronic illness would be more appropriate. Does your study differentiate between pre-transitioning rates and post-transition rates? That's another aspect that needs to be considered.

[abaris]

Does your study differentiate between pre-transitioning rates and post-transition rates?  That's another aspect that needs to be considered.

Did he even bother to post a link? I might have missed that part.

[Redbeard The Pink]

Then why was homosexuality listed as a mental health disorder by the American Psychiatry Association all the way up to 1973?

Because systemic bigotry used to be a much bigger problem in America than it is now. The real question is this: if homosexuality is actually a mental disorder, why did doctors stop diagnosing it as such over 30 years ago?

Really??? Then how come the massive suicide rate among transgendered people?

"The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality, is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime" UCLA School of Law.

With a suicide rate 10 times higher than average, the "treatment" is clearly an abject failure.

Because of people like you, fuck-stick.


Seriously? Are you really serious right now? Transgender people are one of the most marginalized and stigmatized groups in society, so much so that most of them would rather hide who they are and waste away from within rather than come out and get help, and that is why the suicide rate is so high. It's not because of the failure of the medical treatments for gender dysphoria; it's because of the failures in how society treats people in general, especially those who are different.


Many trans people are too scared to come out for fear of how they'll be treated, so they hide who they are until they can't take it any more and end it. Many others do come out and are treated so poorly by their family, friends, and/or everyone else that they decide not to go through it any more. How dare you suggest that these suicides are caused by the people who were trying to help, especially without the background or knowledge to be leveling such a shameful accusation?



What you need to do is dig out the statistics for the difference in suicide rates between transgender people who transition and those who don't. Unless you can show that the suicide rates for post-transition trans people are as high or higher than the rates for pre-transition trans people, your assertion is baseless and you need to fuck off.

[Angrboda]

Data from the U.S. population at large, however, show clear demographic differences between suicide attempters and those who die by suicide. While almost 80 percent of all suicide deaths occur among males, about 75 percent of suicide attempts are made by females. Adolescents, who overall have a relatively low suicide rate of about 7 per 100,000 people, account for a substantial proportion of suicide attempts, making perhaps 100 or more attempts for every suicide death. By contrast, the elderly have a much higher suicide rate of about 15 per 100,000, but make only four attempts for every completed suicide. Although making a suicide attempt generally increases the risk of subsequent suicidal behavior, six separate studies that have followed suicide attempters for periods of five to 37 years found death by suicide to occur in 7 to 13 percent of the samples (Tidemalm et al., 2008). We do not know whether these general population patterns hold true for transgender people but in the absence of supporting data, we should be especially careful not to extrapolate f indings about suicide attempts among transgender adults to imply conclusions about completed suicide in this population.

Actually reading the study is rather illuminating, both for the limitations of the study and the inherent dishonesty in only quoting a couple of numbers from the study.