Reply #67: Neither is quite a choice.

[Scuadrado]

As another atheist, I don't think religion is a choice either. Mutable yes, but that does not entail that it's a choice.

I could not choose, for example, to believe that the moon is made of cheese. At best I could pretend this is so. Similarly, I could not choose to become a Muslim or Christian or what have you.


What's more, many anti-gay organizations like the Catlick Church do not deny that sexual orientation is immutable, but claim that acting on one's urges is wrong (if you're gay, anyway). This is a self-consistent position. That is, if someone has an innate, immutable urge to do something wrong, there's nothing wrong with holding them to a standard that requires them to deny that urge. The problem here is that there's no convincing argument that there's anything wrong with gay relationships or sex. And there definitely is something wrong with trying to get people to deny what will make them happy if it's not violating the rights of someone else.


Finally, what's so bad about hating people? The threshold for hating them should certainly be higher than that for hating their ideas and beliefs, but there should also be a finite limit. Some people really are evil, repugnant monsters and deserve to be hated. More people are just mildly disgusting, but have deeply repugnant beliefs often stemming from puerile superstitions. It looks like the guy in the video falls into this category.

I don't hate him, but I view him with a great deal of contempt.