Who gave these rules?

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Reductio ad postmodernism is not a valid argument form.


Does it go along similar patterns? You're resorting to an argument from analogy - never a good start. That sounds like an empirical claim - if people's sexual preference has a lot to do with wiring (which, frankly, being animals, it probably does), then their choices are going to only be modestly influenced by their environment and hence the analogy seems to imply a line of reasoning which wouldn't happen in reality.

Furthermore, because we are dealing with people and their introspective attitudes toward things, it seems highly likely that the similarity of A and B is largely subjective and hence subject to the way the society reasons anyway. For example, if I say "sex is two consenting adults doing what they want with their naughty-bits" then hetero sex is the same as any number of things. If I say "male sex is a man sticking his thing in a hole" then hetero sex is the same thing as any kind of deviant sex.

Point is, the similarity between two sexual preferences is something which is largely dependent on the way in which the mind of the animal manufactures the meaning of a sexual act, and hence the analogy fails to show that increasing permissiveness is even a likely consequence of being permissive of homosexuality in the general case.

More twaddle, more intellectual masturbation. Your vocabulary is mighty, but brevity is not your thing. Restate all that in a single paragraph, using words no bigger than they have to be.

Bad argument.

Animals can't consent, they aren't sapient. And bestiality risks spreading animal STDs to humans.

"Having sex with a muffler" is just a stupid way to jerk off.

Necrophillia is bad for public health, rotting flesh ya know...

My argument was good. It featured bad ideas in an ironical manner.

Uh, no. His arguments are perfectly fine and certainly isn't "postmodernist." He's asking for empirical proof of the slippery slope assertion used by the homophobic bigots. The fact that you are trying to dismiss his argument shows that your side is not willing to let your assertions to be examined.

Our assertions are always being challenged. And every time they're challenged, we restate our core thesis. From a dozen different angles, we restate the same damn thing so that now its
an ad nauseum debate.

Well, this is just me being nit-picky, but technically you could call them uneducated. They might be highly experienced and competent, but as there were no real schools, the majority of people back then wouldn't be educated. This is mostly a case of nuance though, and your point still stands.

Regarding the gay debate, Andrea Camperio-Ciani, a researcher at the University of Padua in Italy, has come up with a few interesting studies as to why men being gay makes sense.
Originally, he was trying to figure out if the X chromosome had anything to do with the gay phenotype, by seeing if gay men had more gay male relatives on their mother's or their father's side. It turned out that the mother's side had more gay relatives in it, but that wasn't the weird part of the study - it turns out that gay men tended to have more relatives then straight men do total. Andrea then interviewed the mothers and aunts of the gay men, and found out that they had three to four times as many sexual partners as average, indicating a higher sex drive.

From these studies he theorized that there might be a 'man-loving' genetic phenotype within these families. This could lead to a predisposition towards homosexuality in men, making them genetic duds, which is counter-balanced by the extra kids of the more sexually active females relatives.

The reason why I feel this is important to the debate is that the fact that this suggests a different hypothesis as to why men might be gay then simple sexual deviancy. Homosexuality wouldn't lead to a slippery slope of sexual perversion, as there is no genetic advantage to being attracted to sheep.

Note: not all relatives of gay men where gay, so this would only be a tendency towards homosexuality. Its effects also were also not enough to account for the total number of gay men at large, and in no way explained lesbians.

This is very interesting information. Was the proportion of gay relatives on the mother's side higher, or just the total number? Was the effect (more relatives total) still very significant when only the mother's family was considered, or only the father's for that matter?

I have suspected for a while that the way that variations that include tendency to end up homosexual are maintained in a population has is that the variations that produce them have some benefit to heterosexuals who carry these variations (analogous to heterozygote advantage, but polygenic). Something like this might be a point in favor of that hypothesis, though a "man-loving" gene is only one possible mechanism.

Well, there's some evidence they have had a population bottleneck in the last couple thousand years, which is a more likely explanation (a priori) than massive amounts of incest between close relatives (nominally close, as opposed to genetically).

This might be compelling to a vegetarian (I have no idea if you're one or not), but eating animals is well enough within the societal norm, that this can't be considered the primary reason that bestiality is abhorred, especially when not all sex acts are actually damaging to the animal.



One could make a similar argument about homosexuality. It doesn't introduce new pathogens, but there's a case that male homosexual sex is a public health concern.

In a population of heterosexuals, the average number of sexual partners anyone has is pretty much limited by women's willingness to have sex with new partners. Men are typically less reticent to have sex with a new partner when the opportunity comes up. This is why male homosexuals tend (on average) to have much larger numbers of partners than heterosexuals. The more sex acts are going on between different pairs of partners, the greater the probability that an STD will spread from one person to multiple people. This is borne out by the fact that gay men tend to have higher rates of most STDs than straight men or women.

The question then is whether the public health concern is sufficient to trump individual freedom of determination in this case. In this case, I don't think that it does. Most people only get moderately worked up at best, even about more egregious public health risks (refusing to be vaccinated, or over-using antibiotics for example).


One can certainly find negative things about bestiality, but I think that it's easier for many people to condemn because very few (if any?) people claim exclusive attraction to animals, so it doesn't come up much.

I think that the reason (in most people) for considering it immoral is basically aesthetic in the same way it is for most people who are grossed out by gay people.


With incest and pedophilia I can see more compelling arguments. Children not only aren't developed enough to consent (there are shades of gray, but typically one can draw a legal line on the side of caution), but there's also evidence that it has psychological harm on children. Moreover, most of us value children/humans more than any other species.

Incest poses significant risks to potential offspring (though one could question how necessary actually banning it is given natural avoidance, or whether couples who find they both have a detrimental recessive allele ought to be restricted for the same reason).


In both these cases, though, I don't think these are the real (causal) reason that most people are opposed to these activities. For most of them, I think it's simply a matter of visceral disgust. The rest is mostly rationalization (sometimes compelling, sometimes not).

Sometimes visceral digust is all you need. The intellect cannot defeat visceral disgust, try as it may.

They are annoying with their assumptive language, high sounding (yet utterly stupid) ideas, and how they praise each other while ridiculing us.

Who are you referring to, parakeet? And what do you mean by "assumptive language?"

Stupid ideas? Explain.

Them in general. Assumptive language is where they imply their world views are the only correct ones in the words and premises they use.

Stupid ideas: (1)people with too much free time wrote the Torah. (2)They knew about genetics back then. (3)Incest was even approved of by one person.... The list goes on and will continue to increase.

They'll come up with anything rather than think.

I hear that. I hear that.

I wonder what an orthodox rabbi would say if you told him the Torah was written by people with too much free time? For that matter, what do you suppose an imam's response might sound like if you made a similar assertion about the Koran?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was thinking about the Islamic viewpoint an hour ago. Thing is that the Qu'ran overrides and contradicts the Tanakh and New Testament, whereas the New Testament doesn't contradict the Tanakh. The New Testament, in the Gospels, fulfills the Messianic prophecies and shows in text (particularly in Matthew and Luke) which ones those are, and in the Letters it explains and interprets the Torah according to the words of Christ. The Qu'ran, on the other hand, is about replacement and contains contradiction of the previous.