(August 1, 2015 at 4:40 am)Exian Wrote: Well, it's not usually all that bad, but I do bite my tongue a lot. It's getting to me more and more lately, because there have been more opportunities for me to speak up, with the recent Supreme Court ruling and all of the instances of police brutality.
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I find it easy to be okay with the Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage without mentioning religion at all. The religionist arguments are, for the most part, deranged and silly. The only honest one is that they believe God doesn't like it and so it should not be done. Everything else I have heard is completely irrational drivel, that is easy to demonstrate is irrational drivel.
Take, for example, the idea that gay marriage will destroy marriage. You must have heard that claim a few times. The only way that would be true is if married people all said to themselves, "damn, if only I had waited, I could have married someone of my sex," and so they get a divorce to do that. I am a heterosexual man, married to a woman. Whether someone else marries a man, marries a woman, or does not marry, makes no difference for my marriage. My marriage is what it is, regardless of what other people choose to do. It is just silly saying that gay marriage will destroy marriage. Frankly, it would be hard to come up with something that is more personally irrelevant to my life than same sex marriage. The same is true of every other heterosexual person who has no desire to be in a same sex marriage. Having same sex marriage legal means, for them, that they now can legally do something that they are not going to do anyway. So it being legal or not seems completely irrelevant to them personally. (By that, of course, I do not mean that they do not care about it, but that it does not affect them personally.) Either way, they don't marry someone of the same sex, so it has no impact on the options they would consider.
You have probably heard the claim that it is "unnatural." First of all, that is demonstrably false, because quite a few different animals engage in homosexual acts. So as a matter of fact, it is natural. Second, even if it were unnatural, that would be totally irrelevant to whether it is good or bad. If you break your leg, going to a doctor to have it set is "unnatural." But no sane person is going to tell you that that is the wrong thing to do.
Notice, no mention is made of religion in these arguments, because they really have nothing to do with religion. Religionists use arguments that are not directly connected to religion because they want to pretend that their position is objective or universal, rather than just that it is part of their religion. If they were to just argue on the basis of the Bible, one could then throw at them all of the other prohibitions in the Bible, or one could argue about the wisdom of enforcing a particular religion by law (as was done in the Dark Ages). But they typically use bullshit arguments like those mentioned and demolished above.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
