Who Is IOZ?: I've Never Been More Certain of Anything in My Life

Thursday, April 19, 2012

I've Never Been More Certain of Anything in My Life

I would not recommend torturing your brain by reading the full epistolary romance between William Saletan and Ross Douthat, but seriously, that dude is so gay.

Obviously Douthat isn't exactly writing in the most sophisticated tradition of apologetics, but you know, there is something about all this hemming and hawing over the proper, ahem, stance toward the gays that is deeply prurient, bordering on the pornographic. You know, like, let us now turn our unflinching, um, gaze upon these divinely incompatible sexual beings in order that we may, carefully and in great detail, determine the most charitable possible means to disapprove of them. If we look long enough, and hard enough, we may yet determine just how we are supposed to feel. We wish to turn away, and yet somehow we feel compelled to keep going. God, Ross, you are going to feel so guilty when you quiver to a deathlike little conclusion on the, uh, issue.

81 comments:

Leonard said...: "I have strong personal reasons for wanting to remove any hint of condemnation from my faith’s view of gay sex."; 1:55 PM
mistah charley, ph.d. said...: Speaking of Foodie Friday, I was looking for a ketchup WITHOUT high fructose corn syrup in the supermarket yesterday, and found that both Hunt's regular price ketchup and Heinz's organic ketchup qualified. I bought the Hunt's, because it was cheaper.; 1:55 PM
IOZ said...: Yeah, Leonard, I lulzed at that one too.; 1:59 PM
LA Confidential Pantload said...: Do-me Douthat: another Eunuchs Operating System; 2:23 PM
Enron said...: Given that no one really knows what the dude from Galilee actually preached, the "Christian view of gay sex" is about what he wants to believe; 2:44 PM
Eerily Lackadaisical said...: "a deathlike little conclusion" - you don't mean "le petit mort", do ya?; 3:05 PM
High Arka said...: Let's set a strong positive example by supporting Douthat's sexuality and not mocking his primitive verbal explorations thereof.

As it becomes gradually acceptable for more and more people to be publicly "gay," we're going to see the giddy, childish outness of 21 year olds who think it's rare and devilish to have a drink. They'll hint at it; they'll start to have open flings; they'll act like they invented sex; each stage will be progressively more patronizing and annoying, like everything else they've been doing. The safest bet, and the swiftest route to them growing up--as it were--is to ignore the same corporate media playpen that provides you with most of your nourishment and intellectual exercise...

Oh, guess it ain't happening. Enjoy dissecting their primitive sexual explorations! Hey, this one's here, isn't she? /dissect; 3:35 PM
Anonymous said...: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKUQI9RAD60; 3:35 PM
Solar Hero said...: I always doubtthat Ross is straight.; 3:47 PM
Rob Payne said...: "Now you’re right, I think, that we have a different and more subtle understanding of homosexuality than did many people in the early centuries A.D."

That's almost the stupidist thing I ever read.; 4:21 PM
High Arka said...: Great Ukko, Rob, you're right...that article is so full of arrogant badness that I withdraw my earlier comment. Please, mock it in every way it can be mocked.

Also, curse you for making me read it. I reinstate my earlier comment. Stop feeding those fuckers.; 4:28 PM
Anonymous said...: Yes, we all got that one, Eerily, but thanks anyway.; 5:45 PM
Inkberrow said...: When Douthat says "humanity as a whole", he apparently means "as a hole", and despite the human body's orificial versatility, and Douthat's own nod to "one-flesh complementarity", he means one hole and one hole only, and that because it's the birth canal. Hence sodomy laws include oral sex along with anal sex? Yah, that makes sense.

Trotting out the hoary old biological/procreation argument as dispositive here makes one wonder at the exact, er, nature of this latter-day sophistication on homosexuality Douthat claims.; 6:28 PM
snuh said...: oh yeah, he's totally a closet case. see here.; 11:52 PM
Christopher said...: You know, I happened to get a book from the library a couple of weeks ago which collected a series of essays on faith by Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, presented as a series of letters that were published in some Italian newspaper.

This Ross Douthat/William Saletan version is, uh, not as good.

You know, I don't really "get" Christians, but one thing that strikes me more and more about American Christianity is how the people who believe in it kind of just say shit.

Both Eco and Cardinal Martini talk extensively about Thomas Aquinas and the formation of the early church. When Martini talks about an issue like why women can't be priests, he talks about earlier groups who thought women should be priests, as well as who in the early church ultimately decided they shouldn't, and what their logic was for making that decision.

Ross barely even mentions the Bible.; 1:09 AM
Filthy Liar said...: It's because the rank hypocrisy coming from Douthat's version of Christianity precludes him from doing more than at best skimming the Bible. Moneychangers in the temple and all that. Jesus was dangerously close to a hippie for most of the people who claim to follow him today. Everytime they ask themselves WWJD? they immediately recoil from the answer. So they use sophistry to try to distract themselves.; 6:00 AM
Professor Coldheart said...: Embarrassed that Eerily beat me to the joke I was going to make.; 6:49 AM
anne said...: it's foodie day ,good morning everyone she said to the empty because all are likely still sleeping or not at their best awake room/pg , hmm, .. mistah, i'm wondering about the heinz puree now .. as i sit eating my gerber's banana puree , that i quite like .. . ,; 8:03 AM
anne said...: oh wait maybe eating isn't the word , ..more a delicate tongue ride .. ,; 8:08 AM
Anonymous said...: Not the empty, anne - this reader in Japan is very much awake; 8:35 AM
anne said...: very odd , because i am just now talking with davidly on something of my cousin christopher's japanese language studies and doctorates , are you japanese or just traveling .. . ?; 8:42 AM
Anonymous said...: EL didn't make a joke. IOZ did (it was a small one, and we've all heard it before), and EL, because he has a poor attention span, is too literal, and is too invested in his own genius, had to ruin it.; 1:57 PM
Desargues said...: To Eerily Lackadaisical @ 3:05:

I doubt that the French would use le petit mort to allude to the thing. La petite morte is more like it. Orgasm resembles a diminutive death way more than it does a small corpse.

To the drugstore psychologists congregated around this comment section: the chubby dude with the face mullet you analyze with such relish may well be a self-hating, closeted homosexual -- or he may be just a hetero dipshit who can't deal with the existence of gay people. The evidence you adduce vastly under-determines your conclusion. Short of catching the man engaged in exuberant gay sex, nothing will establish his desire -- repressed or not - to engage in exuberant gay sex. Dissecting his words for shades of meaning buried three layers deep is about as reliable as using astrology to decide if you should marry someone.

Jus' sayin'.; 5:12 PM
Desargues said...: Sorry, I made a typo above: it should be la petite mort. Apologies.; 5:13 PM
High Arka said...: Your post clearly indicates that you have Libra influences.

...also, deducing subconscious repression from someone's sweaty, turgid prose on a subject is often the only way to examine inner thoughts. It's a perfectly respected method of inquiry. (Besides, IOZ has a PhD in Men's Studies, qualifying him as an expert suitable to perform such an analysis.); 5:53 PM
Desargues said...: ... deducing subconscious repression from someone's sweaty, turgid prose on a subject is often the only way to examine inner thoughts...

It's also an excellent, insuperable way to confirm what you already believe, running around in an epistemic circle while thinking that you're coursing down a straight path.

What you recommend is psychanalyse sauvage, which, if I recall my Freud exactly (I'm an old man who can't be trusted to remember what he read in college), the Viennese Quack himself, for all his quackery, strongly recommended against. So, we must do better than Freud, not worse.

A turgid prose is no proof of tumescence in the writer's pants, let alone a swelling for other men. Try again.

There are no reliable ways to examine "inner thoughts" (are there outer thoughts, too?). Some of them are opaque to the very person who has them, let alone the investigator.; 6:05 PM
High Arka said...: This may be granting IOZ too much of the benefit of the doubt, but he might be in the realm of the "probably."

Is this particular impassioned author (Douthat) homosexual? Maybe, maybe not. His rhetoric is homoerotic, which may lead to fair accusations of such leanings; as long as IOZ is willing to say he's "probably" gay, or that IOZ believes it, that's acceptable. Throwing Douthat off a cliff to see if he can fly up on a gay broom would be (hopefully, to IOZ) going too far.

There are plenty of things we can infer from Douthat, such as:

1) He's a pointless media blatherer just trying to get his salary, with nothing meaningful to say;

2) He's trying to make us remember his name and prose so that we'll read other articles by him and justify his new book deal;

3) He seems interested in homoerotic behavior;

4) IOZ is going to keep reading Douthat and giving ad revenue to Douthat's publications because the writer puts down titillating things that vaguely relate to lgbt stuffs.

All of these things are true. It's not a ridiculous leap of faith to conclude that Douthat might be gay, IOZ might like attention, or that slate.com is as full of crap as Fox News and not worth attention. We may be wrong about all these things, but what else are we going to do until the story ends?

(Spill, spill, ARE you a Libra?); 6:20 PM
anne said...: arka, 5,53, .. i like your comments just above there , ..i had a good little snicker on first seeing the first , / ..and desargues, ... yes there are "outer thoughts ,too "; 6:22 PM
Desargues said...: Please produce an outer thought, anne. I haven't met one, but would love to.; 6:25 PM
Desargues said...: Is this particular impassioned author (Douthat) homosexual? Maybe, maybe not.

That's another way of saying, "there's at most a 50% chance Douthat is gay." In such cases, the only rational way to decide is to flip a coin.

His rhetoric is homoerotic, which may lead to fair accusations of such leanings;

I wish I knew what homoerotic rhetoric looks like, and how you distinguish it from the rhetoric of a mildly fascist Catholic who takes up the flag of his side but can't come out and call gay people by all the foul names they used to have for them in the past.

as long as IOZ is willing to say he's "probably" gay, or that IOZ believes it, that's acceptable.
Ah, yes, that trusty old form of inference, the modus dixens: a gay man asserts it; therefore, it must be true.

There are plenty of things we can infer from Douthat, such as:

1) He's a pointless media blatherer just trying to get his salary, with nothing meaningful to say;

2) He's trying to make us remember his name and prose so that we'll read other articles by him and justify his new book deal;

Here, you're inferring from Douthat's product and the nature of his profession, not his "inner thoughts." It's different evidence.

3) He seems interested in homoerotic behavior;

As do all religious propagandists nowadays who can't stop harassing gay people. Surely these persecutors must all be gay, then. Your iron-clad logic dictates it.

4) IOZ is going to keep reading Douthat and giving ad revenue to Douthat's publications because the writer puts down titillating things that vaguely relate to lgbt stuffs.

Possibly true, but definitely irrelevant.

All of these things are true. It's not a ridiculous leap of faith to conclude that Douthat might be gay, IOZ might like attention, or that slate.com is as full of crap as Fox News and not worth attention.

You just inferred to a disjunctive conclusion, which can be validly inferred from absolutely anything whatsoever.

We may be wrong about all these things, but what else are we going to do until the story ends?

Um, try to be rational?; 6:47 PM
anne said...: desargues, ..arka made that first bit of commenting back to you ,.. i started making a comment there on that , then someone ..has started playing their lovely .. from mouth instrument.. out on the street just below my window and i got up as i often do in the middle of making a comment .. to do something else .. this time being to listen sitting in the window , i'm thinking that maybe my cousin ( that i mentioned a few days ago ,of something that we are doing that may be going in to the globe and mail here ..in a grand way in the next month , she does some work for the globe ) ..anyways i'm thinking that she is teasing me with this player some how , it is reminding of my uncle roddy pops, her father .. / that said distracted , then back here and arka wonder wo man has already posted more comments i see , /of your query give me a bit ..; 6:48 PM
Anonymous said...: Jesus, another one. Could you boys piss off now to a different and other blog, momma's got a migraine.; 9:21 PM
High Arka said...: "In such cases, the only rational way to decide is to flip a coin."

Actually, Mr. Dent, it's even more rational to just "suspect." A "decision" is not always required. Concluding "a 50% chance" is as much a leap of faith as concluding either way. All things are not reducible to mathematics.

I wish I knew what homoerotic rhetoric looks like, and how you distinguish it from the rhetoric of a mildly fascist Catholic who takes up the flag of his side but can't come out and call gay people by all the foul names they used to have for them in the past.

If you want a good take on homoerotic rhetoric, start with the New Testament. Posit that all monotheistic man-religion is homoerotic, as indicated by the Torah's keen interest in manlove and the subsequent violently, repressedly homosexual leanings of monotheistic men's groups in the centuries since then.

If you don't take "women are unclean" and "men must never, never touch other men, on penalty of death!" and "a group of rebellious young men follow a single beautiful man who is a child of the most important man and who is so good that he died after bsdm for all of us" to be homoerotic, then there's little chance of you figuring out Douthat.

as long as IOZ is willing to say he's "probably" gay, or that IOZ believes it, that's acceptable.
Ah, yes, that trusty old form of inference, the modus dixens: a gay man asserts it; therefore, it must be true.

Read acceptable not as "he's right," but as "it's not a ridiculous logical leap for him to presume that."

There are indeed Catholics who meet the definition of "straight," and who have teh gay problemz as a result of other sicknesses, but there's a point somewhere shy of catching the murderer driving in the knife when you can reasonably conclude "he did it."

What would Douthat have to write for you to find IOZ's suspicions reasonable?

Here, you're inferring from Douthat's product and the nature of his profession, not his "inner thoughts." It's different evidence.

The nature of lifelong membership in, and free-willed subscription to, the biggest and most powerful human manly no-manlove organization in the world--the Catholic Church--is a reasonable basis from which to infer, "This subject has an unhealthy fixation on the repression of certain types of sexual behavior."

You allow that we can infer things from his being a slate writer. We can also infer things from his being a proactive public Catholic.

As do all religious propagandists nowadays who can't stop harassing gay people. Surely these persecutors must all be gay, then. Your iron-clad logic dictates it.

Strawman (again). They're not necessarily "all" (or maybe even "most"), but the absurd fixation is more than enough to infer that "there's something going on, there."

What may be giving you trouble is that "gay" and "straight" are not bright line definitions into which people constantly fit in a certain way over the courses of their lives. Douthat may have only the tiniest interest in sitting close to Saletan, so that their wool-suited thighs brush together for a split second--he may actually not want to have anal intercourse with Saletan for three straight hours. But even wanting to brush thighs is "gay" enough to justify saying, "gay," just like a man thinking that a woman has "pretty eyes" and wanting to hold her hand could be called "straight."

Still trying to be rational.; 11:03 PM
Desargues said...: Still trying to be rational

Trying--and failing. No offense. It's hard to stay rational, when you give up on basic reason, or the elementary rules of logic. Exempli gratia: from the (real) misogyny of many writers behind the biblical books, you infer their "manlove." That's a clear fallacy. From the true premise 'Some gay men don't enjoy sex with women' it doesn't follow that 'All woman haters must be into gay sex.'

We're not helping the cause of oppressed sexual minorities with non sequiturs.

And your invocation of an alleged sexual continuum undermines the very point you're trying to make. If 'gay' and 'straight' are not discrete denominations but lie on a line with an infinity of degrees in between, then everything one does is both gay and straight at the same time--just in different proportions. To make your point, you must prove that Douthat's (alleged, but unproven) desire to brush thighs with Saletan is closer to the gay end of the spectrum than the straight one. But you haven't proven that. Anyway, what are paradigmatic behaviors and desires for 'purely straight' and 'purely gay,' so that we may decide where Douthat lies? Is it Ted Nugent's hysteric machismo at one end, and Nathan Lane in drag at the other? I'm mystified by the assumptions behind your reasoning.

I'll stop here, before I get too caught up in this thing. Nonny's comment above at 9:21 instilled a little bit of self-awareness in me.

To M'sieur IOZ: What happened to the picture that used to be at the top of your home page? I loved the look of that little dog, peeking from under the blanket. Could you bring it back?; 2:57 PM
High Arka said...: What portions of the Bible make you feel that some of its writers are misogynist?; 3:21 PM
anne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 3:48 PM
anne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 4:21 PM
Desargues said...: @ High Arka:

Oh, gee, where do I start. Um, how about at the very beginning, Genesis 3:16: "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. ... Thy husband ... shall rule over thee."

Then right after that, god punishes Adam by having him work for a living, on account of the man "having hearkened unto" the woman's voice. That is some woman-hating shit, right there at the outset.

The New Testament fares little better. Paul, the West's first Taliban, lets the Corinthians know that "the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man." (11:8)

Better yet, I'll let a woman biblical scholar, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, do the talking for me: "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of woman's emancipation."; 4:59 PM
High Arka said...: okay...would the following statement then be true(?):

If the Bible says that something intrinsic to an act or condition will cause sorrow and/or subjugation, the Bible is taking a prejudiced stance against those who possess that condition.

...? That's the logical framework that justifies calling the Bible misogynist?

That's what Ms. Stanton seems to be saying, but I want to be sure that's what you're arguing also.; 5:10 PM
Desargues said...: I guess.

It's not about a logical framework or anything like that. Logic is a formal theory: it says nothing about the world -- or people, for that matter. It's just a set of rules for what can be validly inferred from statements. Even false statements. Logical reasoning is no guarantee of truth, unless you already star with true premises.; 5:15 PM
Sorry said...: We're not helping the cause of oppressed sexual minorities with non sequiturs.

Sometimes a non sequitur is just a non sequitur.; 7:00 PM
anne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7:08 PM
High Arka said...: Curiouser and curiouser. And so, whispers this one's ghost, the stage is set.

Now that we've accepted that statement as true, let's try it with a different set of variables plugged in, and see if you still agree with it:

The Bible says that something intrinsic to homosexuality will cause sorrow and/or subjugation. Therefore, the Bible is taking a prejudiced stance against those who possess that condition.

In the event you were missing that before by virtue of holes in biblical theory, consider it alongside:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

-Leviticus 20:13

We've painted ourselves into a corner, but lo, there waits another house to which we may proceed. Out the window, across the lane, and we've concluded that the Bible is anti-homosexual (or misogayous, if you'd prefer).

Comes now the next obstacle.

(1) Why, out of all the many things that happen in the world, were the writers (was the Writer?) of the Bible so vehemently, obsessively against homosexuality?

(2) Why have celibate male religious orders spawned by this anti-homosexual book lent themselves to a long and sorry history of the sexual abuse of children, particularly male children?

(3) Is the correlation discussed in (2) above a stunning coincidence spanning centuries of human history? Or an obvious explanation for the outward form that an extreme repression of sexuality would necessarily take?

(4) Does there seem to be a connection between some of the possible answers to (1) and (3) above? Why might this be?

(5) Presuming that there is a connection between repressed sexuality and an unhealthy, frequently obsessive interest in sexual expressions, what may we infer from those who demonstrate an unhealthy interest in homosexual expressions alongside an anti-homosexual religious lifestyle with such a sordid repressed-homosexual history behind it?*

* If you chose "coincidence" to (3), skip answering (5).; 8:46 PM
anne said...: pen disargues, for if you look back, sorry, i didn't get back to answering your question to me on out , because i haven't been following along with your talking with arka here, .. and in not knowing you at all with my difficult enough to read with my odd refiguring .. ., it has taken the few here that know me well a while to figure out what i'm doing with my wording on a line with hums and perched ..; 9:57 AM
anne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11:40 AM
Anonymous said...: @HA

because the sexual abuse and/or or other illegal forms of sexual activities in other realms and by other identifiable groups, e.g., government sponsored child rearing, organized sports, organized child activities, does not receive the same level of msm scrutiny.

The Dull Sicophant (fka The Christians); 1:05 PM
Desargues said...: @ HA:

My previous comment got eaten up by the void, so here goes again

Well. I never thought I could make someone give up going out on a Saturday night just to stay put and pen a reply to my ramblings on someone else's blog. Huh.

But I get a faint feeling that you may be mistaking me for someone I'm definitely not -- someone who's out to defend the bible from various accusations or something. I don't give a shit about the bible, and I pity the fools who choose to guide their lives by that collection of insulting, preposterous fairy tales for morons, bed-wetters, and sadists.

What I do care to defend, though, is sound reasoning -- call me a man of the Enlightenment, if you will -- and the sin of weak argument afflicts people on the left too, not just right wingers. For instance, I object to IOZ's claim that Douthat (a man whom, to be clear, I find repulsive in every single individual way: physically, intellectually, socially, and morally) has a 'prurient interest' in sex. Maybe he has. But it's not clear yet. There's another explanation for that: Douthat is there to be the Catholic voice on the NYT's perch of self-entitled dimwits, their "opinion writers" (except Krugman, who actually has proven independently his intellectual merits and credentials). As the Catholic dude, and as someone who gets to write a mere two pieces a week, inevitably he's gonna end up talking about sex a lot. But that's because Catholicism in general has been reduced to policing the sexual lives of people these days; it doesn't have a cosmology, anthropology, or political theory worth giving a shit about any more, so all they do to get people's attention is talk about sex; in every other intellectual domain, Catholicism is about as relevant as Aristotelian physics. So that's why Douthat writes about sex. Maybe he also does have a personal, prurient interest in sex; it's possible, but I'd like to see the evidence for that. His weekly op-eds don't establish that claim.

Then you presume to assert a link from his syntactic patterns and semantic choices to an alleged homoerotic tendency. But your link these two via a dreadful mish-mash trying to pass itself as a theory: a mixture of psychoanalysis (itself a badly discredited field) and rhetorical analysis. The phlogiston theory of combustion was intellectually more respectable than this psychobabble "theory." So, try again.

And your attempted inference fails, it seems to me. Your premise (1) is dubious: the writers behind the bible were not "obsessively" anti-gay. They were anti a lot of things: women, gay people, whole ethnic groups, whole groups inside their own ethnic group, and so on. In general, they were anti-humanity, and against most of what we take to be good about the modern world. Your premise (2) needs reliable numbers to be established. I don't know for a fact that these abusers preferred boys to girls. And it wasn't just about sexual abuse -- to judge from revelations from Ireland, what they enjoyed was power and control over other people, not just forcible sex. Premise (3) asserts a spurious link between vastly different groups -- a handful of writers of religious texts and the monastic establishment of the medieval West. (4) asks a loaded question, similar to "Have you stopped beating your wife?" And (5) answers a question based on a link presumed, not proven.

Alright, I think we're done here.

@ Dull Sicophant:

Nice try. If only it worked.; 1:24 PM
High Arka said...: Okay, we're attacking premise 1. The problem with that is that you already supported it. You said:

[It is true that if] the Bible says that something intrinsic to an act or condition will cause sorrow and/or subjugation, the Bible is taking a prejudiced stance against those who possess that condition.

You said that with regard to misogyny. Perhaps it's the adjectives that trip you up. Would you accept premise 1 if it were sanitized into:

Why, out of all the many things that happen in the world, were the Bible's writers so violently opposed to homosexuality?

?

And if that were changed, and "obsessive" or "vehement" no longer appeared, would it change your answers to the next of the questions?

Perhaps, as far as adjectives go, what you are missing is the history. Monotheistic religious orders were sexually abusing children for far longer than the latest Catholic "scandal." The Catholic thing was a scandal because a few tidbits slipped out. Ever heard of an altar boy? An acolyte? The right place to drop off orphans? The strict discipline required of a religious upbringing?

If the firstborn child in a noble house is groomed for taking control of the family business, the second one sent off to the army, and the third and fourth given off to the Jesuits, and no one reports any sexual abuse, does that mean there's no sexual abuse?

Are you familiar with the reason the British pushed open houses of juvenile female prostitution, pre- and early-industrialism? To keep their boys safe from male predators, it was believed that the provisioning of female children as available for sexual abuse would protect the next generation of factory workers and war drones. There was even a PR campaign behind it--see the Harris book, which is a great feminist read as well, if that's the ism you're more keen on.

Here's a tidbit of information you can use to consider humanity's past without looking for articles to prove it in the corporate media: age of sexual development.

When a young girl is sexually abused, her body responds by undergoing puberty faster.

When a young boy is sexually abused, his body responds by postponing puberty.

When we look at, say, the Romans, we discover how commonplace it is that 1) girls are considered ready to take to wife and give birth much earlier than we typically think of, for example, 11; and 2) boys are written of as developing their first signs of facial hair as they approach twenty.

Now, most of those references are literary. Like old-style Twilight, they are mere background details. They are not (gasp!) articles published in honorable papers like the NYT, or by honorable publishers like Bantam, consisting of formal 21st century studies conducted by people with the right degrees after their names.

What do they tell us about our past, however, and about our children? That it was actually only very recently, in a historical sense, that humans stopped raping most of their children.

If you don't find more fault with the Bible, or the history of the Torah and/or the Christian church, we can go beyond Leviticus in a scholarly sense. You seem to have adopted the sanitary modern view that the Bible is misogynist first, negative second, and fantastical third. Which is why it's no wonder you're missing Douthat's leanings.

Also, this one couldn't restrain herself from the closing cheap shot: "alright" is not a word.; 3:40 PM
Desargues said...: Will you give me "a'ight," then?; 9:24 PM
High Arka said...: Of course. Conveying a spoken dialectic that deliberately eschews a norm is different than misspelling an otherwise standard form.

Any room for substance? Are we really contesting the issue of whether the Bible and/or Judeo-Christianity is violently anti-homosexual? That's fine, but this one didn't expect to see resistance to that particular issue on IOZ's board. That's the kind of thing that can go either way with stormfront refugees, or more dangerously, Gingrich devotees, but it came out of left field to see it challenged here.; 11:14 PM
Anonymous said...: HA,

You be yanking our chain, or simply pigheaded?

TDS/ fka The Christians; 10:00 AM
puppylander said...: i don't see it.; 10:08 AM
Desargues said...: Jesus, HA, are you for real? I just acknowledged openly, several times above, that the bible is violently anti-gay. Was that completely lost on you? All I questioned was, what follows from that, i.e., what can be reasonably inferred from it. All I objected to, was quick and rash moves from the undeniable anti-gay bias of the bible to various things, like Douthat's wanting to rub thighs or meat swords with Saletan, a number of priests sexually molesting children, and so on. That's what I want to see -- the inferential links from one thing to another. Instead, you hit me with an array of facts and allegations I don't see the connection between -- e.g., sexual abuse and puberty, the third-born in noble houses, Britain pre- and post-industrialism -- and, when I fail to see how they're related, you hit me over the head with Stormfront and Gingrich and shit. For real? That's some serious shit you threw at me, yo. You better check yo'self before you wreck yo'self, homegirl.

As I didn't know what to say in response to your random facts above, I turned facetious at your springing the grammar police on me. Instead of answering in kind, or just ignoring me (that'd be cool with me), you lost your shit. Holy shit, talk about shit coming out of left field.

And, if you wanna play word cop, two can play that game. I ain't no native speaker of English, but I know for a fact that "alright" has been in usage since 189-motherfuckin'-3. Over a century of uninterrupted usage, so there.; 1:25 PM
anne said...: de' , i just read your last comment here ,the "are you for real " set off a little bell ..of a memory ..,so i read on (nothing to do with she's building a boat,three children though , of my name for who you are addressing here )..of the memory,of something i said of that quoting when i worked in a tiny book shop , it is how i said it that was important ,so can't be told well this way , .... , of what i said to someone that came in to the shop ,the wife of a man with the largest amount of real estate in this city, anyways it's a long and very odd telling of what happened with that, nothing to do with the shop or land , but of what she wanted me to do for her , ... , back on track .. ) so i read on , wanting to ask ..if not english .. what is your first , please , i'm very curious on that .. ?; 2:34 PM
Desargues said...: I was born behind the Curtain, Anne.; 2:44 PM
anne said...: there are so many curtains here , ..i'll come back to look more closely at your wording here ..when my sky stops falling .. .; 2:52 PM
High Arka said...: It's delightful to discover that we are in agreement on the Bible being violently anti-gay. For the purposes of our discussion, we agree that "The Bible is anti-gay."

That will return us to (1) above:

(1) Why, out of all the many things that happen in the world, were the writers (was the Writer?) of the Bible so vehemently, obsessively against homosexuality?

This one feels that understanding such a question could lead us down a line of inquiry that could result in an understanding of why IOZ's conclusion about Douthat is accurate. Perhaps we could use this net to bring one or both of our processes into alignment as to this issue.; 4:27 PM
Desargues said...: Why, out of all the many things that happen in the world, were the writers (was the Writer?) of the Bible so vehemently, obsessively against homosexuality?

This question has no answer. We do not know those people personally, nor do we have enough evidence from which to infer anything reliable about their penchant to condemn gay people and behavior. To suppose otherwise is to engage in wild speculation, which is exactly the point that I have been making for lo these past few days on this forum.

Second, while I agree with the vehemence above, I challenge your use of the term "obsessively." Maybe they were obsessively anti-gay, but I don't see that. Explain what makes it obsessive -- if you mean it truly (it's a clinical term, by the way) or just as a metaphor. To me, they seem obsessively misanthropic, taking a dim view of humanity in general and its moral capacities.

And thereby I withdraw from this discussion. It's going nowhere, and I have no desire to engage in idle speculations.; 7:02 PM
High Arka said...: What, for you, defines "obsession"? I'm curious to see how the Bible is not obsessively anti-homosexual.; 8:35 PM
Desargues said...: Sorry, HA, that's not how this game works. You don't get to shift the burden of argument on me by asking what I take to be 'obsessive.' You made the claim that the biblical dudes are obsessively anti-gay, you back it up with evidence.; 9:31 PM
High Arka said...: The passage from Leviticus (If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them) reveals an obsessive anti-homosexuality. Here's a look at working obsession:

1) Becoming aware that many humans exhibit a certain type of behavior, e.g., homosexual behavior.

2) Devoting vast amounts of time and other resources away from survival, and instead using said resources to promulgate rules in a book that decrees that this behavior should be punishable by death.

3) Ascribing this mandate to a divine being responsible for all creation, and who, despite said universal breadth, takes a particularly keen interest in this behavior and its punishment.

4) Detailing at length how homosexuals are the thing that makes God the angriest out of all of creation's many sins, fueling His wrath to its greatest that they may be made faggots to burn the hottest in eternal torment in the flames of Hell.

obsess to dominate or preoccupy the thoughts, feelings, or desires of (a person); beset, trouble, or haunt persistently or abnormally: Suspicion obsessed him.

The Bible is thoroughly occupied with cursing many people, but the damnation of the faggots is one that God takes a very keen interest in.

You, however, feel that it doesn't rise to the level of obsession. Either because of lack of familiarity with the Bible--or a differing viewpoint on what an "obsession" is--you see it as just one in a laundry list of things the Bible's God has a problem with.

So, we return again to the question you were afraid to answer. What defines obsession?

The reason you don't want to define the word is that you were trapped before when you defined something, and you now see that, by defining logical structures that will allow us to determine a given fact--say, that the Bible is misogynist--you realize that those same structures can be used, with different variables, to draw conclusions that you don't like, but which result from a framework you already offered as valid.

To follow a Socratic inquiry beyond "the Bible is misogynistic" to "the Bible is anti homosexual" to "the Bible is obsessively anti homosexual and misogynistic," you would eventually be forced to conclude, if you had the courage to continue exploring, that "Judeo-Christian religions are obsessively anti homosexual and misogynistic," and ultimately, "those adults who advocate and advance Judeo-Christian lifestyles are far more likely than a randomly chosen population set to be obsessively anti homosexual."

You could slow things down in hopes of getting out of it by attacking terms. "Obsession" means this degree of interest, but not that degree of interest. "Anti-" homosexuality means this degree of condemnation, but not that degree of condemnation. Et cetera. More likely is a dissonance spiral, counterattack and shutout. As your subconscious struggles to avoid the cognitive dissonance it perceives on the horizon, you come up with the perfect solution: "This argument is ridiculous and bores me! I withdraw from it!" Satisfied that you have nothing new to discover, you have a long list of reasons why certain questions are not necessary to answer.

You've already tried to escape this way several times, but the positive aspects of your character have kept you returning. This could fail at any time, but we must keep our hopes up in favor of learning and sharing.

The inquiry would, if pursued openly, lead to us discovering the "why" of the anti homosexuality: repression. Obsession is often (usually? always?) a hallmark of subconscious interest, ergo why violently anti-homosexual celibate male religious orders tend to attract self-loathing homosexuals who do not acknowledge their own interests.; 10:41 PM
High Arka said...: This type of repression can also lead to the sort of showboating that Douthat was engaging in, where sexuality becomes a subject of a joke. Mild teasing of the funny, different freaks helps reassure those doing the mocking that they're not really interested in that kind of stuff--after all, look how easily they make light of it!

Where we come to at the end is that IOZ was quite reasonable in identifying the homoerotic dialogue of an adult, very public member of a religious cult with a massive history of homosexual obsession and child abuse. But let's not spoil the ending: would you like other references to biblical anti-homosexuality, to help you understand why this one calls it an obsession? Do you concede that point? Or, are you sufficiently familiar with the Bible that you feel it is not obsessively anti-homosexual, and have reasons why? What, for you, defines obsession?; 10:41 PM
Desargues said...: Taking our modern understanding as standard, in the bible -- the two Testaments -- there are 2174 absurdities; 1539 endorsements of blatant injustice; 1314 instances of approving of violence and cruelty; 700 intolerant pronouncements; 428 mistaken attempts to explain natural phenomena and history; 230 instances of prophecy; 253 statements about sex in general; 348 misogynistic statements:

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

And, in all this, a mere 25 -- twentyfive -- condemnations of gay people.

I'm not trying to minimize the gravity of biblical anti-gay prejudice, but, in comparative terms, it looks to me like the writers of the bible are obsessed not with gay sex, bur rather with social control, exclusion, cruelty, and maintaining power over people by means of alleged, but false, explanations.

But all this appears lost on you, who does a quick sleight of hand from "the bible is anti-gay" (true) to "admit it, the bible is obsessively anti-gay" to "this means they must all be repressed."

Think about how astronomically improbable it is that a group of men scattered over five centuries or more -- the men who wrote the books of the bible -- were all repressed homosexuals. To me, that's about as likely as the Earth getting struck by an asteroid next month.; 1:37 PM
High Arka said...: You've googled a site that has a postmodernist take on homosexuality in the Bible. Note that condemnations of "sodomy" do not fall into the rubric of "condemning homosexuality" under these types of reviews.

You've not answered the question, though. What, to you, defines "obsessive"? If not the horrifically violent condemnations the Bible offers, then what? Does something become non-obsessive if you obsess over other things "more"? If the ancient Jews committed righteous genocide against seventeen different other varieties of Middle Easterners, and also repressed women and murdered homosexuals, do their other murders mean that they were not obsessively anti-homosexual?; 7:22 PM
puppylander said...: *tweet tweet* 10 yards for holding.

arka, i have to agree with desargues that the bible doesn't seem to "obsess" over the gays. (rather, it's numerous modern day christians who obsess over it.)

i agree with you that we can infer, on occasion. (so, not necessary to see perfectly into anyone's mind in order to make a reasonable guess.)

but i again agree with desargues that there's not too much in the douthat/saletan exchange to suggest douthat's orientation. in the back-and-forth at slate, it's actually saletan who raises the homosexuality question. douthat only treats it as an, um, open question.

(though, saletan seems to say douthat's book hits on, erm, touches, uh, broaches, eh, fellates the topic often. i couldn't say. i haven't read douthat's book.); 7:55 AM
High Arka said...: For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another;
men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet

If someone writes slasher porn with a lot of plot buildup, does the buildup make it no longer slasher porn?

Douthat isn't necessarily gay; that could go either way. What sparked the argument to this length was that desargues said IOZ had no rational basis for the inference. IOZ did have such a rational basis, even if he didn't know it when he made it--which, this one will admit, is quite likely.

I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.

Genocide as punishment for gay. There are many clever ways to take "sacred texts" and claim that they are pro-gay. That's a necessary financial step for extractive spiritual businesses to take as popular opinion moves in one direction.

Much like pretending that the Founding Fathers weren't slave-whipping elitist scum--in an attempt to revere "the Constitution" and encourage positive behavior for current Americans--permuting the Bible in order to make it seem nice and encourage positive behavior for current Christians, however well-meaning, is not only unnecessary, but tragic. If we forever shackle our hopes for a better world to the icons of the past, then we must continually apply new layers of paint over old murders, to pretend that "Bibles" and "Constitutions" were heroic, good, and only so dangerous because they were misunderstood.

A lot of the motivation to sanitize the Bible right now comes from attempts to encourage Christians to view the Bible in a "good" way. It seems like a good idea, at first, because they might respond more quickly to a message of tolerance delivered in the context of their own terrible sacred object--but it will backfire, as all demonic bargains ("compromises") do. Witness, say, voting for Obama because he's better than Bush.; 12:05 AM
Desargues said...: If you think IOZ has a rational basis for inferring that Douthat is gay, I'm forced to question your concept of rationality, HA. I've been trying for a week now to explain to you that his inference is invalid, but that was apparently lost on you. Oh well.; 10:14 AM
High Arka said...: To you, what would be a rational way to define "obsessive"?; 2:07 PM
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Thursday, April 19, 2012

I've Never Been More Certain of Anything in My Life

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