Yeah, I knew I wasn't going to do a good job explaining it. That's at least the fourth attempt I've made at posting about that idea, and I threw away all the other tries, even one I put probably an hour into.
Let me try to break it down more clearly:
- Religions promote value systems that allow large-scale societies to form.
- Not all of those values are required to make the society work; many are unimportant, superfluous.
- Over time, societies shift away from those value systems; their increasing comfort levels disconnect them more and more from the realities of where things like food and medicine come from. Gradually, stranger and stranger ideas become popular, even very destructive ones.
- The religious parts of the society see the clear shift away from their values in the superfluous areas first, and don't see even themselves shifting away from the stuff that really matters.
- Hatred of gays is a non-core value of Christianity that does nothing to promote society as a whole; it's a value that Christianity completely doesn't need. It was grafted on by Paul.
- When the society fails, people try to explain why; they make up stories.
- The real reasons are complex and difficult to understand. Because of that, the religionists will latch onto the loss of the ancillary values as explanations, rather than the real ones. They think that all the rules matter, that God actively punishes people who disobey, and that because they "were following God's rules" (actually their twisted interpretations of the earlier values that made the culture work), they couldn't possibly share any of the blame for the failure
- They conclude that "God hates gays and societies that allow them".
Does that make more sense?
OG_slinger wrote:goman wrote:Malor - What you did there is called the narrative fallacy and it is a false dichotomy.
Narrative fallacy is creating a story post-hoc so it sounds like is has a definite cause.
The false dichotomy is your pinning your story vs the hypothetical "conservative" one.
Well, religious conservatives like Pat Robertson and John Hagee blamed gays for causing Katrina (or causing God to cause Katrina) and Fawell said they caused 9/11 so it's not really a hypothetical situation or a hypothetical "conservative". Both are very real. And it's hard for the conservatives to back away from Robertson and Fawell because those guys helped define and create the current incarnation of the Republican Party.
That is the conservatives of now. Who knows what the conservatives of future would think.
Christian conservatives aren't going to disappear anytime soon. It's taken them three decades to become a force in politics and they're currently battling financial conservatives for the very control the Republican Party. I can confidently predict that the Christian stamp on the Republican Party and conservative ideology will continue for at least a generation or two, much like Cheney et al harbored an imperial view of the presidency for 40 years before being able to realize it during Bush's administration.
OG_slinger wrote:KingGorilla wrote:You know, Jupiter did it.
FTFY.
What Would Jupiter Do?
I'm not sure, but it apparently has something to do with Uranus.
That is the conservatives of now. Who knows what the conservatives of future would think.
Oh, I missed that sentence. I think that's a fundamental misfeature of human thinking; you see very similar things in, say, the Middle Eastern conservatives and their hatred of burqa-less women and rock music. Above all other things, conservatives crave certainty, and I do not believe these fundamental thought patterns will change unless all of the Abrahamic religions are somehow wiped out. I think the chance of that happening while we are still recognizably human is almost nil.
NathanialG wrote:OG_slinger wrote:KingGorilla wrote:You know, Jupiter did it.
FTFY.
What Would Jupiter Do?
I'm not sure, but it apparently has something to do with Uranus.
Probably involving fingers.
LobsterMobster wrote:NathanialG wrote:OG_slinger wrote:KingGorilla wrote:You know, Jupiter did it.
FTFY.
What Would Jupiter Do?
I'm not sure, but it apparently has something to do with Uranus.
Probably involving fingers.
δάχτυλο --> πρωκτός?
Stengah wrote:LobsterMobster wrote:NathanialG wrote:OG_slinger wrote:KingGorilla wrote:You know, Jupiter did it.
FTFY.
What Would Jupiter Do?
I'm not sure, but it apparently has something to do with Uranus.
Probably involving fingers.
δάχτυλο --> πρωκτός?
I think so, but it's all greek to me.
λ --> ω
Stengah wrote:LobsterMobster wrote:NathanialG wrote:OG_slinger wrote:KingGorilla wrote:You know, Jupiter did it.
FTFY.
What Would Jupiter Do?
I'm not sure, but it apparently has something to do with Uranus.
Probably involving fingers.
δάχτυλο --> πρωκτός?
You did what to whom? While they were sleeping?!
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