[Shane]

Oh looky! Another lie from "Sex! by Tim."

[Jazuela]

Oh puleeze Tim, get over yourself. If your heritage is THAT important to you, get off the internet and go find yourself a teepee in the woods somewhere. Obviously you have CHOSEN to embrace the rest of the world's modern conveniences. With those, come unpleasantness, such as being influenced by them that evul Christians. You can STILL choose to live as your ancestors did, if you really wanted it. That you are on the internet at all is proof to me that you have no desire, or intention, to reclaim your heritage. And thus, every freaking single thing you have to say about it is a moot point.

[prof1515]

Copernicus could observe and note that the Ptolemaic system did not accurately account for the movement of the stars in the sky with the same simple elegance of the rest of nature. To conform the world to that system required complex formulas and explanations, methods which were not attempts at explaining the movement of the heavens but rather attempts at fitting the movement of the heavens into a pre-existing explanation.

Copernicus therefore operated via a crude form of the scientific method. He observed, gathered data, and only then did he form his hypothesis. Testing of that hypothesis was left to posterity and its success is why we refer to it as the Copernican Theory.

By contrast, Christian beliefs fail the scientific method since they rely on faith, not fact. Faith is irrelevant however since just as easily as you can have faith in one thing, someone else can have faith in the complete opposite, nullifying any justification of your position that "having faith in" can produce.

Another difference between faith and science is that science is willing to alter its views in light of new evidence. By contrast, fundamentalist religions refuse to. That's why they're such a problem. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary and no evidence in support, fundamentalists continue to cling to their outdated and unsupported beliefs.

You're assuming that they chose to be bisexual. Did you chose to be heterosexual or were you born that way? If you didn't choose to be heterosexual and simply are, why should anyone else's sexuality be any different?

Jason

[Shane]

Faith is a relative thing. I have more faith in a concrete bridge than some of these rickety wooden things I sometimes find myself driving over out in the country. I think your charcterization of faith as some absolute reliance on fanciful theories spun from nowhere is pretty much your own invention. I don't know many people outside the vocal anti-Christian community that believe this, much as I know very few outside the vocal atheist community (a separate but similar and included group from the former) who compare all of human religion to belief in invisible pink unicorns, for example. I couldn't tell you how many times I have heard that tired comparison, and all I can tell you is if religion was invented, it most certainly was not by me.

I "assume", as you choose to phrase it, that all people have control over their feelings by virtue of having control of their attitudes, much as I do. One could argue that people do not have control over being disgusted by people having sexual relations with kids, yet it was pretty common in ancient Greece for men to do with teenage boys things that would get them landed in jail in modern times. It seems that suddenly the flexibility of cultural mores is now in question since this particular cultural phenomenon we are speaking of now is one that Christianity would indeed have a hard time encompassing, what with all the nastiness in the Bible about putting homosexuals to death in the Old Testament and the insistance in the New of maintaining sexual purity even though most every other purity expactation of the Jewish religion seems to have been abandoned.

More than anything though, what I believe is that to state that there is no problem with a person who has no ability whatsoever to relate sexually with a member of the opposite gender is "normal" in any useful medical sense of the term is just a gross fabrication. At its worst, it results in people who feel they are trapped in a body of the wrong gender to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars so that they can, essentially, become a person trapped in a mutilated and drug-altered body of the wrong gender built to vaguely simulate the other gender.

And oh yes, I have met some transexuals. No, they are not people trapped in the wrong body as far as I can tell. The difference in simple behavior between the typical transexual I have met and any woman are quite marked. Most of them, alas, could also kick my backside, as the drugs they take do not serve to change the composition of male musculature that was formed earlier in their natural development, for example. They are without a doubt men trapped in the fantasy of being trapped in the wrong body, and though I am not sure what the cure might be, I know it's not just another choice that people can make that has no real consequence to themselves or those around them.

Admitedly, I have not met a female-to-male transexual that I know of. Not sure if they tend to pull off the behavior better than men going the opposite direction do or not, but then again all of this is anecdotal as no doubt someone will complain soon enough.

Medical attitudes towards sex in the enlightened 21st century are pretty spooky to a simpleton like me.

[Splork]

Removed...

[Fifi]

Wow. As conversations on sex go, this one is less fun than most.

[prof1515]

You also have the fact that concrete is stronger than wood and various other factors in consideration when compare those bridges.  I'm talking about faith in beliefs unfounded in fact, based on a fundamental interpretation of a book.

Faith is the belief in concepts without the use of facts.  The existance of god is "spun" from nothing.  Faith in Christian mythology is belief in fairy tales.  There are no facts to back it up.  People walking on water, ressurecting the dead, etc. are no different than your aforementioned pink unicorns, the difference being that less people believe in the pink unicorns.

Plenty of people understand that faith isn't fact.  They may choose to believe in something, but they at least recognize it's a choice on their part not based on evidence.

They have control, but they may not analyze their feelings and recognize bias in them.  Lacking recognition of this bias, they do not alter their feelings beyond the prejudice they were taught.

No, it would be a poor argument to suggest that people have no such control because it's a learned reaction.  In the Middle Ages, girls were frequently mothers at ages that today wouldn't even place them in high school.   And you point out the characteristic of ancient Greek culture.  This is because this is all learned behavior as a part of culture.

Homosexuals don't grow up in a culture where they're influenced in that manner to accept such thought.  This is because we're not talking about cultural influence but biological influence here.  The cultural influence is in fact the number of bisexual and homosexual individuals who marry and live heterosexual lives.  It is only by analyzing their own nature that they realize that cultural influences have influenced their behavior in a manner contrary to their biology.

They do have the ability to relate sexually with a member of the opposite gender, they simply do not possess an attraction toward the opposite gender.  How's that a problem?  It's only a problem so far as reproduction is concerned.  But it's natural, for better or worse.

One is only afraid when one does not seek to understand.  Understand something and there is no need to fear it.

Jason

[prof1515]

To attempt to get things back on topic, what would be interesting to see is whether or not some of the same players who emphasize sexuality on MUDs do so in other aspects of their life. Do they tend to look at real-life relationships/friendships in only that respect? Or is their emphasis confined merely to gaming. Of course, the same could be noted about various other aspects of game behavior like politics.

OK, maybe not that interesting. But someone probably has gotten a boring sociological study out of it by now.

Take care,

Jason

[Shane]

No, it is not.  You had a perfectly good example going and then you tossed it.  It is indeed rational to believe a concrete bridge is better than a wooden one, but on the other hand, I may be unaware of a fatal crack in the structure of a concrete bridge and it may give way.  To put things into a more mathematically likely context, I may have a choice between two wooden bridges, one of which looks stronger but has rot that is hidden under the surface.

Faith is a decision made without all the facts, but we make such decisions daily.  6 and 5 and pickem.  

Obviously I don't agree with your characterization of religion either, but let's move on as you suggest.  Perhaps someone has been waiting to steal the thread back and put it on topic.

[Tim]

Not taking the bait, chumok.

[Tim]

Good point. This is what attracts me to MUDs actually. I search for other players who have the cognitive abilities to think outside their own realities and actually Role Play something different than themselves, or even just a different facet of who they are.

On the topic of sex I have tried to play a sexually repressed character and yes, I relied HEAVILY from the Christian dogma. The result is that it gave me the insight into the fear component of Christianity, how a fear-based ideology manipulated an internal human necessity (i.e. sex) into this thing that is not so nice. I did not re-apply the repression to my own life but it allowed me to see quite clearly the force that has infected so many others in my own community. There was, of course, a bit of research involved. I talked to some of my Sociology Profs at the time and two practicing psychologists to kind of check my math.

[Lark]

Tim,

'White','Christian'...you're so willing to lump us all together and say how close-minded we are...it just isn't true.

I understand offended that we're ignorant to your culture; but why not try learning every facet of 'white' (and I'm using the term as loosely as possible) culture? Speak to an Italian, he's not the same as a Frenchman, act one way with the English, but God help you if you do that with the Russians. Figure out the subdivisions within those. Dark, Romanized Frenchman or tall, aryan Galls? How do they feel about things? What are they like?

This one, that one...we're just as complicated and individual as you folks in the Pacific, with the worse factor in that we're not isolated to one another, and thus a thousand subcultures spring up as we intermarry and swap beliefs.

And as for 'Christian', someone made a good point about Judaism's concepts about modesty. What about Islam, for that matter? The penalty for being 'immodest' in parts of the Islam world, as in, letting your burkah show a quarter-inch of ankle skin, is being beaten to within an inch of your life, and sometimes that last inch, too. So what if Islam had gone east further than Christianity had gone west? Would it be Muslims that were awful people as a rule, just because of historical circumstances?

I'm not offended by your negation of my family and culture's beliefs, I'm offended that you're willing to write my family and I off for them.

If you were just a nice guy I'd met (and you've pretty much blown that concept with some of these posts) you'd be more than welcome breaking bread in my house, or marrying one of my sisters, and being part of my family.

But just because there's a crucifix hanging in our kitchen doorway, that's it? Me and Shane circumsized your father? Who the #### circumsized me? I didn't ask for it to happen, and as I've thought about having my own children, I realized I'm not going to do it to them.

We're all born into what our parents do. I wouldn't have been able to subscribe into your people's belief system if I'd wanted to, simply for the fact that it's not here, and noone knows about it.

I can understand your anger, man, at seeing your nation in ruins because of some 'well-meaning' assholes who were trying to 'help' you. But becoming an asshole yourself and attacking anyone who brushed elbows with those same assholes isn't a solution to anything. You'll just inspire the kind of hatred in those people for you that you have for them. I was ****ed off myself at your posts till I managed to calm halfway down.

I try to do my best to rise above history and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I deliberately point out to my kids that their friends are this and that race and they're different from us, there's no hope of anybody ever getting along.


And... (this is just my opinion here, too)


Wikipedia is a good thing, because it's breaking down the gates of the way we use information.

Yeah, we get ****ty information, too, but we're finding now that universities and places of learning are a little less straightforward than we'd thought. It might benefit one scientist to suppress a theory for the next fifty years by getting someone else's funding taken away. As we figure out better ways to sort through the muck, it'll free us that much more from the politics our information's had to go through to be known up till now.

So I wouldn't knock it too awful. It's looking decent now, and in thirty or forty years it and places like it are probably going to be refined to the point of overcoming de-centralized knowledge centers.



But we really knocked this thread out of its place. Sex, roleplay, all that jazz. Brody must be tearing his hair out.

[Tim]

Ce vrai, mai je’ettude le cultural en l’Europe. The fact is, however, you have to talk about someone when you are discussing these issues, when you do inevitably you will wind up using generalizations to refer to people. This is why I don’t get down on people who use the term INDIAN in the exact same way. “Whites” however, as I have used it here does not mean Europeans, it means those people of European ancestry who live in America. As an American you do not get to say “I have never harmed your people.” The reason you do not get to say that is because you benefit from the harm given to my people. A true European, en Francais a titre d’exemple, can make that claim as they do not benefit from the victimization of Indian people. See, there is that generalization again. I will promise not to knock you for your loose term of the word “white” if you promise not to knock me for loosely using the term “white”, I'll even do you one better and not get mad if you use the term Indian.

Having been born in Pakistan (Peshawar to be exact) and being a veteran of the first Persian Gulf War I know that this is true on a first hand experience. What you are missing is that these three cultures, Judaism, Islam and Christianity all have the same origin. Medieval Spain is very pertinent to draw this point out ….pre and post Inquisition. So my point here is ... what do you think the chanses are that if you find a style of modesty with historic Jewish tradition that you are going to find that same sense of  modesty among the other two. I made this point earlier in relation to my own peoples sene of modesty (or lack there of, from the Puritanical perspective).

And no, if Islam or Judaism had come to the America’s they would have respected our religions and ways of life, if the broader aspect of history is to be believed. (i.e. the Old Testament wars are an exception for Judaism, not the rule.)

I haven’t yet, unless you are Shane under a different user name OR unless you have accepted the sickness that Shane has. Sickness as I am using here does not necessarily mean Christianity … although it is sounding like you are Shane’s kind of Christian, but I will wait a bit before I decide.

I doubt in the extreme you were ever circumcised forcibly at the age of six as a method of discipline for speaking English … and having the “punishment” inflicted by your own priest and then having that priest tell you it was for your own good or having freaked out on you son because of the trauma and then having your son go to that same priest in his dotage to be told … “prove it”. How that specific example relates to ALL Christians is that it is not an isolated incident. Its not even isolated to denomination. It is, however, drastically more common from the Christian church than it is in other religion and the denial of that fact (if you choose to do so) means you have bought and paid for this because you are trying to cover it up.

Then how about fully discovering how your religion’s insistence on converting the “heathen savage” is destroying those cultures today, as we speak, right now.

There is no hope of anybody ever getting along if we DON’T fully understand each other’s cultures and that we are different. If YOU fully understood MY culture or could even understand that you don’t then you might be able to fully understand my stance on Christianity, or at least accept that there is something there that you do not understand but must be VALID. But you do not and it is an aspect of Christianity that they intentionally attempt to make ANY other religion even other denominations of Christianity as non-valid.

These are some of the issues that inspired me to tie into Shane. Shane is the kind of superiority Christian that personifies what I am talking about. They tend to be carbon copy cut outs so that is no great achievement. You appear to be teetering on the edge of that, so lets see what you have to say and go from there.

Oh, and I did not knock Wiikipida to awfully. I’ll let you in on a secret <whispers> I use Wiikipidia.
What I do not do is use it as the primary support for any argument I make, ever. Shane was, despite that she/he will cry “THAT’S NOT WHAT I SAID”.

[Lark]

The Wikipedia was more of a general statement, it's been brought up before as a questionable resource.

Christianity's more than guilty of many crimes, but I hope that people understand that it in itself isn't a bad thing. It's just been a vehicle for other people's ambitions.

For example, Hebrews and Christer's alike seem to skip over this bit:

So you see, Jews and Gentiles alike aren't as shy as most folks outside (and quite a few inside) believe.

The killer here is interpretation.

Taking some thing literally while keeping other symbolic, muttering some parts when you shout others, that's the problem. Some parts of the bible certainly do need to be take with a cup (sic) of salt, otherwise any son of Abraham's in trouble if they've had lobster before, but the larger mess comes from people's inability to back up and see the bigger picture.

The Catholic and Greek Orthodox church (especially the first against the latter) committed countless atrocities against each other, all stemming from a disagreement over whether Jesus was half- or full deity.

Everyone forgot at that point that the dude got nailed to a plank for saying to just be cool to each other.

So, let me modify this statement and apply it to near-every problem we've got.

"[Two] words: Fundamental[] A**holes. You know, the sort who [impose on other people] but who are happy to [use a religion, philosophy, or cultural ethic to justify it]. With leaders like these, can you blame the rest of the culture if it follows along?"

That's the point I want to make. Thank you, Tim, you could have said estiritsi (sp?, "kiss my ass", Czech) to me, but instead you at least explained yourself and gave me a chance to respond. Looking back through the posts I can see why Shane has offended you.

[Elora]

This is a sidenote, but I'm genuinely interested to know where the claim that Wikipedia is an unreliable source comes from. Do you have any base for the statement, apart from personal prejudice and grumpy Encyclopaedia Britannica workers?

The only serious done based on peer reviews that I know of does not support your claim. The study found an average of 4 minor errors pr article, where Encyclopaedia Britannica had 3 – the peer reviews were done by the magazine Nature. In total, only 8 serious errors were found, and those errors were split evenly among the two encyclopaedia - 4 to each.

No encyclopaedia is likely to be completely free of errors, and I imagine most of you will be hard pressed to find significant, egregious errors in Wikipedia that has been allowed to stay uncontested. One could be so impertinent to claim that the very fact that Wikipedia allows public contest of the neutrality of its articles automatically makes it more reliable than, for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica, where most would be unable to even pinpoint whichever facts were being disputed.

[Shane]

Wiki had a scandal where false information was printed in the biography of a living man, I believe in regards to the Kenedy assassinations. Apparently it took a good bit of time to sort out.

Wiki is a work in development. I don't think anyone is really against Wiki, Tim just has issues with the way I used it. He seems to have a lot easier time talking to other people than to me, and the feeling is mutual, but by and large I get where he's coming from even if his style is offputting to me personally.

[Tim]

The issue boils down to user submitted content. Which means any specific entry in Wikipedia will run hot or cold in relation to it’s accuracy and there is no way of telling what you are going to get, so random sampling will not give a valid assessment.

For example … I have read a wonderful entry on metallurgy (I do a lot of metal work as a hobbyist and remanufacture armor). I have however found entries like the one on “Knight-errant” which tells you this term “indicates how the knight-errant would typically wander the land”. This is incorrect. Knight-errant is a knight that has no direct tie to the rest of the nobility, which he would have had through swearing fealty. Typically knights-errant were landless.

I could give you examples like this all day, both good and bad.

I do not have the time or the inclination to sit here and page through the countless user submitted entries that are factually incorrect. Most authorities on any given subject don’t either. Additionally, many authorities, be it as academics or otherwise, have their own web resources to go to so they don’t tend to bother with Wikipedia when they have already made the information available on the web.

But if you really want to develop an opinion that is well researched, at some point you will have to get off of the web and into a library or spend some money on your own books.

[Fifi]

Is it late to change the topic name from SEX, which keeps seeming so inviting, to sex, but only tangentially?

[Shane]

When I saw the thread I was all excited and then the first few posts were all about how it's not all that great, the sex aspects, and seemed to poo poo sex in muds. Then I hit the post about how the problem is fundamentalist Christians and possibly I just should have walked away, but the fact is it is hard to joke around and have fun in an atmosphere where you are basically being told you are simply not welcome. This is why I feel politics doesn't really belong on a thread like this.

So what did I do? I responded to the politics.....

Sorry.

I have always enjoyed sex in muds, and perhaps it is because it is not real sex it gives me an outlet for wild fantasies that I personally would never feel right about actually doing. See, even there, now knowing the attitudes of some of the posters here, I am self conscious that someone is just going to burst out, "because you are a prudish Christian." But I think it has as much to do with my upbringing in a broken home and my determination not to take chances where family is concerned as it is anything about Christianity.

Mud romance and mud sex have been great outlets for me. Sadly, most people who participate in such activities, in my experience, draw a heavy line of demarcation between the characters and themselves, so that often you find yourself sharing something really beautiful with someone that, after furher developing the offline portion of the relationship, you begin to realize is just not open to carrying things any further. On the other hand I know of people who met over muds and got married. Perhaps most of them spent little if any time mudsexing. I never got that personal with any of them to ask.

[Tim]

You sound like you are approaching the conversation honorably. I can work with that. One of the reason I haunt boards like this is for a good argument that challenges me to reconsider my point of view. I would like to offer that to other as well, which is why I do not shy away from making someone angry … “I can make you feel but I can’t make you think.’ ;-) (Jethro Tull)

Let me give you an example of something though, and I will use my own people as metaphor so if I am hashing on anyone I will make myself first in line.

In the old days, and for quite a while after contact, my people used to eat human harts. We also tortured prisoners to death and we all sat around and watched them die. Now, we did these things because, in the case of eating human hearts, they were always hearts of people who were particularly good in battle or people (almost always men) who were seen as being powerful. The idea was that the eater would ingest some of that power, strength in battle etc. In the case of torture it was a way of giving the captured a way of defeating us even though he had been taken. You see, if he went through the torture, yes to his death, without crying out then the people got nothing out of doing this. I know it sounds sick but many people would watch honestly hopping the man would not cry out. In a small way it is like people watching car racing today, no one goes hoping to see a car crash.

So at one point in our history this fellow named Decomsee (most Whites say Tecumseh) made a very powerful speech against these practices. He was a kid at the time, something like 14 or 16 years old. Even though Decomsee was Shawnee his speech changed the way all Ahnishnabek did these things. In fact, we stopped. Decomsee was speaking out against a religious practice that had gone on for countless years and had the full backing of the Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society). At no time did anyone vilify Decomsee, no one tried to de-value what he said or attack his character instead of his words. They argued greatly about what the boy said but they did it honorably. In the end, as is our way, (and ultimately was all Indians undoing) we left it up to the individual to decide what was right.

By comparison, as Shane has proven to us, if I say that Christianity has issues with sexuality (which is analogous to Decomsee saying the Ahnishnabek have an issue with torture) I can expect, and do expect, an immediate list of variety of spurious responses from Christian people that follow along pretty consistent lines. One of those is that Christians immediately assume the argument is wrong and then go about some pretty contorted means to justify their own point of view.

Now that is not absolute, I have friends who are Christians. I go to their houses. We have fine arguments together. What none of my friends do, however, is the kind of dis-honorable argumentation that Shane stereo-typifies from the Christian community.

What I would like to challenge you to do Lark, is to keep more than an open mind, keep an inquisitive mind. If I tell you that my belief is that Christ was a militant messianic Jew and was the Osama Binladin to Rome in the first century …. I would challenge you to not get mad at that statement. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a bit of an attack and mentioning Christ and Osama Binladin in the same sentence is bound to get you, or any other Christians, hackles up … and for good reason. So ask me to support that (which I can and am willing to do) and take exception to it, you should your Christian but don’t simply assume that there is NO POSSIBLE way that I could have ANY basis for saying that and then just roll over anything I have to say as if I never said it. At the end of the day feel free to walk away thinking that I am still full of $&!T. I am perfectly all right with that, but walk away with a clear understanding of how I validated my argument AND that my argument IS valid, just not one you agree with.