Would it be 'wrong' to choose to be gay?

[feral chile]

Sounds like a paraphrase of what religionists say about 'God'.

Edited January 13, 2013 by feral chile

[abdoujaparov]

Oh...well id better hurry up and get married then;) Things such as life insurance and pension I have sorted to go my partner if I die and also any possessions if we spilt would be what we bought ourselves and any joint, sold.There would be no need for a legal document of marriage

[zero000]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21004322

It seems that the French aren't fans of gay marriage or adoption.

[eFestivals]

I believe belief in free will IS free will.

you're welcome to have that belief. But if the belief is wrong then everything you've taken from the idea of free will is wrong.

I refer you to your posts in tony's current 'gay' topic - posts that contradict what you say here about your belief in freewill.

Nerrr.

[eFestivals]

Belief in God is faith.

as is your belief in freewill.

After all, you don't have any evidence for it aside from some self-confirming thoughts.

[Guest]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21004322

It seems that the French aren't fans of gay marriage or adoption.

[abdoujaparov]

Yup...

So many people out there think just living together entitles them to something. It entitles you to almost nothing in reality.

Even if you are married your partner is only entitled to the first £125k or something if you have children but don't have a will. £200k if you don't have kids. The rest then gets split between parents, grand parents, aunts and uncles and finally the crown.

[abdoujaparov]

I guess this is out of date then ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/6438627/What-happens-if-you-die-without-a-will.html

[zero000]

'some' of the French aren't fans...

I was surprised at that, but remember, it's not all of them

[eFestivals]

Yes it is some but I don't think you'd find 340,000 people protesting about it in the UK. Which is obviously a good thing.

the Catholic church doesn't hold anything like the same sway in the UK as it does in France. That's why.

If you care to look tho, there's still over 620,000 people from the UK who have signed a petition saying they're against same sex marriages - which would no doubt be a lot higher if the Catholic Church had many more people as their audience here.

<irony> Luckily for the us we have a much less bigotted church in the UK, what with them having female and openly gay bishops </irony>

[Guest]

Yes it is some but I don't think you'd find 340,000 people protesting about it in the UK. Which is obviously a good thing.

[zero000]

If you care to look tho, there's still over 620,000 people from the UK who have signed a petition saying they're against same sex marriages - which would no doubt be a lot higher if the Catholic Church had many more people as their audience here.

[feral chile]

as is your belief in freewill.

After all, you don't have any evidence for it aside from some self-confirming thoughts.

Edited January 14, 2013 by feral chile

[eFestivals]

That's a surprisingly large amount of people but I guess that's middle England for you. They'll sign a petition but they can't be asked to get off their arses to do anything about it

the fact that matters for same sex marriage is the opinion of the people in the country and not the opinion of people in churches.

It's more outrageous that the law is to be worded to make it illegal for gay marriage to happen in some named churches than it is for there to be a ssame sex marriage law at all.

[eFestivals]

Yes, belief in free will is faith. Belief in an external world is faith. Belief in other people is faith. My belief is in a physical world, not a mystical entity called free will that makes decisions on our behalf. Do you deny that the brain gives us a sense of identity, a sense of 'I', a sense that our actions act on our environment, a sense of uncertainty when alternatives are being considered, the means to use reason and experience in order to choose from the alternatives? That's free will to me. It's the brain's decision making process.

So faith itself would be on the level as free will to me. You could measure faith by measuring behavioural change, as you could with free will. Free will isn't omnipotence, it's not independent, it's not a god.

And everyone believes in free will, whether they do theoretically or not. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to function.

we have a sense of "I", sure. And of course everything else comes from that.

But nothing of that gets to mean that our thoughts about thoughts are anything accurate, just as we cannot know if our thoughts about a god or no god are accurate either.

We can test some thoughts to some extent - for their portability to others - but we cannot test our thoughts about thoughts.

And everyone believes in free will, whether they do theoretically or not. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to function.

That's not logically true.

We believe we have choices; we could even say that we know that we haver choices. What we cannot know is if they're really 'free' choices.

But there's plenty of stuff to strongly suggest that they're not free choices. An easy example is around the choice someone might make to end their life, which has a 'survival instinct' acting against it to some degree and so warps the choice that a person might choose to make if *really* free.

After all, life is utterly pointless from any individual perspective; you're born, you exist for a bit and then you die. If we really had the free will that the idea suggests then there would be nothing to restrict our choice to bring about that end sooner than life itself tends to dictate to us.

The idea of 'instincts' says that free will does not exist in the way that the idea of free will says it does. You can reject the idea of instincts as well of course but then you'd have to come up with good reasons for why so few choose to not take a perfectly free choice over their own existence.

I'd say that while we are free to make choices, the choices that we can make are not 'free'. We are predisposed to make some choices over other choices.

[eFestivals]

There is nothing wrong with being gay... But I don't think society is ready to treat it fully on the same footing as a man and women partnership.

the facts of polling done on this issue says that society very definitely is.

It's only the homophones who think it isn't.

The support for gay marriage was 50/50 at best from what I saw.

it's over 75% even amongst Christian church attendees. Edited January 14, 2013 by eFestivals

[feral chile]

we have a sense of "I", sure. And of course everything else comes from that.

But nothing of that gets to mean that our thoughts about thoughts are anything accurate, just as we cannot know if our thoughts about a god or no god are accurate either.

We can test some thoughts to some extent - for their portability to others - but we cannot test our thoughts about thoughts.

That's not logically true.

We believe we have choices; we could even say that we know that we haver choices. What we cannot know is if they're really 'free' choices.

But there's plenty of stuff to strongly suggest that they're not free choices. An easy example is around the choice someone might make to end their life, which has a 'survival instinct' acting against it to some degree and so warps the choice that a person might choose to make if *really* free.

After all, life is utterly pointless from any individual perspective; you're born, you exist for a bit and then you die. If we really had the free will that the idea suggests then there would be nothing to restrict our choice to bring about that end sooner than life itself tends to dictate to us.

The idea of 'instincts' says that free will does not exist in the way that the idea of free will says it does. You can reject the idea of instincts as well of course but then you'd have to come up with good reasons for why so few choose to not take a perfectly free choice over their own existence.

I'd say that while we are free to make choices, the choices that we can make are not 'free'. We are predisposed to make some choices over other choices.

[zero000]

On the free will debate this is a good article in Nature, which is free to access. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

Here's a snippet:

" The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters¹. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided."

Edited January 14, 2013 by zero000

[eFestivals]

A quick can of that shows something of a 50-50 mix on average....

a quick scan of that gets to show ever-stronger support for same sex marriage as time moves on.

The highest more-recent number i've heard reported is of 75% support for same sex marriage and that it was barely different even amongst Church attendees (don't forget that there's a sizable number of churches that fully support the idea, as well as many within those 'anti gay marriage' churches).

But, from the way what you've quoted jumps about so much, I guess it depends on the exact question that gets asked.

Whatever the actual percentage might be with an even-handed question, those religions which are anti have clearly lost the argument on this. It's not like there's going to be an upsurge of anti-gay-marriage support come from anywhere but the churches, and history gets to show that their unmoving views are forever becoming more of an irrelevance.

[philipsteak]

That's a surprisingly large amount of people but I guess that's middle England for you. They'll sign a petition but they can't be asked to get off their arses to do anything about it

[eFestivals]

I'd agree with this. I don't think free will is autonomous from everything that makes us who we are, drives, instince, experience, mind sets etc. Otherwise, it wouldn't be 'our' free will, and we'd be back to square one. And it's doubtful that we have much choice over what we want in the first place, only on the means to attain it, and maybe the order of priority of our wants, though that's open to debate.

They're not 'our' drives, etc. They are drives, etc, of our species (and perhaps life itself).

If I put before you 4 bits of paper each with a colour written on them but tell you that you are not allowed to choose blue, then you do not have a free choice of those 4 colours.

We have choice but we do not have a free choice.

[feral chile]

They're not 'our' drives, etc. They are drives, etc, of our species (and perhaps life itself).

If I put before you 4 bits of paper each with a colour written on them but tell you that you are not allowed to choose blue, then you do not have a free choice of those 4 colours.

We have choice but we do not have a free choice.

Edited January 14, 2013 by feral chile

[zero000]

That was what struck me as crazy about the Paris march. I get the point of marching FOR rights, or I can see people sitting at home or in the pub grumbling something along the lines of 'bloody queers, perverts, its wrong etc' but to care about it that much that you go and on a protest just seems nuts. 'I'm going to give up my time, and probably money to protest about something that doesn't affect me, but I feel the need to deny others the same rights I have.' Weird.

[eFestivals]

But if it's not informed by our innate drives, physiology and experience, then how can it be us who makes the choice?

but if it's informed by our innate drives, physiology and experience, then how is it 'us' who makes the choice?

While my experiences might be 'mine' alone, unless they can be completely separated from my innate drives and physiology - which they can't - then those experiences are not mine and the same applies.

I remember that you've before presented how psychology gets used to help sell stuff, because us humans get attracted to some sales set-ups over other set-ups .... which of course gets to mean that free choice is not happening. Our ability to make that supposed 'free choice' is pre-shaped by everything prior to that (including what might be 'natural instincts').

A bee is attracted to bright colours for the benefit of its lifecycle, and not its free choices. Us humans get attracted to food displays of particular colours.

It's human arrogance that says we're doing something different to the bees. We like to believe ourselves as somehow special when we're no different to other animals.

[Guest]

but if it's informed by our innate drives, physiology and experience, then how is it 'us' who makes the choice?

While my experiences might be 'mine' alone, unless they can be completely separated from my innate drives and physiology - which they can't - then those experiences are not mine and the same applies.

I remember that you've before presented how psychology gets used to help sell stuff, because us humans get attracted to some sales set-ups over other set-ups .... which of course gets to mean that free choice is not happening. Our ability to make that supposed 'free choice' is pre-shaped by everything prior to that (including what might be 'natural instincts').

A bee is attracted to bright colours for the benefit of its lifecycle, and not its free choices. Us humans get attracted to food displays of particular colours.

It's human arrogance that says we're doing something different to the bees. We like to believe ourselves as somehow special when we're no different to other animals.