“If you insult my religion, you’re literally insulting me!”

I think one of the most pernicious elements in society is the degree to which people identify with their conclusions.

Because none of us is omniscient, all of our conclusions are tentative. I insist that unicorns do not exist, but if you were to show me a breeding population of unicorns (and get some respected zoologists to study them and confirm their legitimacy) then I’d be compelled to change my mind.

Now if you accept that all conclusions are tentative (and if you care about being correct) then you must also concede that identifying very strongly with your conclusions is bad. It’s bad because building your identity around an idea makes you far less likely to change your mind about it. Fundamentalist religious people are a good example of this — in many cases they simply cannot change their minds because doing so would involve dismantling their entire selves. But this problem is certainly not limited to religion.

This is one reason I value being brazen and forthright. Treating ideas as delicate things worthy of the greatest admiration encourages or at least enables people to identify more strongly with them. I want to live in a society that treats ideas as transitive things that might change at any moment, so I can’t abide the undue value we’re supposed to afford bad ones.

This is not an excuse to be an asshole. We all need to have enough empathy and tact to recognise that some people really can be greatly hurt by the wrong idea at the wrong time. Part of my goal is to reduce this problem by discouraging people from getting so attached to their ideas in the first place, but once the parasite has taken hold, care is needed in its removal. Whenever I get into a religious discussion, my first question is “How much do you have riding on this?”. I’ve no interest in making people miserable.

“Well, I want to believe there’s a God.”

What?

“…I said, I want to believe there’s a God.”

…What? What does that even mean? You say you want to believe there’s a god as though you have some sort of choice in the matter.

“Well, I can choose to believe anything I want!”

…Really? Prove it. Believe you’re an elephant.

“… … … <Half-hearted elephant impression>”

No, you see, you can’t. You can act like an elephant, you can make sounds like an elephant, you could disguise yourself as an elephant, you could even consort with elephants and become one with elephantine culture, but at no point will you actually believe you’re an elephant.

We don’t have any choice in what we believe. It’s absurd to suggest that we do. We can hope that something is true, we could prefer that something were true, we might wish that something were true, we can even live our lives under the tentative assumption that something is true, but either you’re convinced of something or you’re not. You can’t choose to be convinced of something. I want to believe I’m a superhero. But I don’t. ‘Cause I’m not fucking mental.

What really gets to me, though, is not so much that your statement is incorrect. What really pisses me off, what frustrates the hell out of me, is that you presented a meaningless, vapid bit of platitudinous nonsense as though it was not only relevant but a weighty, indisputable hammerblow of a point that won the argument. I am consistently baffled by religious people’s apparently complete inability to separate what they would like to be true from what is true. These are entirely separate things, and that you want to believe there’s a god is no more relevant to this discussion than my wanting to believe there’s ice-cream in the freezer.

If you don’t want to talk about something, that’s fine — you started it, by the way; I wouldn’t have brought it up — but don’t enter into an argument and then think you’ve won by using vague language to present as relevant an utterly irrelevant bit of incoherent tripe.

Came across a Pharyngula thread which had a few posts with some very clever insights into homophobia:

KillJoy:

I’m always amused by the habit people have of conflating ‘bottom’ (ie: the receptive role in anal sex.) and some sort of femininity. As if womanhood, or manhood for that matter were somehow simply defined by who is putting what body part in who. I have been asked, quite unabashedly, and quite seriously, “Which one of you is the woman?” After staring at the questioner for a few moments with what I hope was a withering glare, I responded with “Neither. We’re both men.” Which confused his poor little brain. When I bottom, I’m ‘playing the role of the woman’only in the sense that I am being penetrated.

It is difficult for some people to understand that you can be a man who likes having a penis in side him. And you know..still be a man. Im pretty sure there is something to be said in there about these types of people being shamed, and frightened by women and womanhood, and entirely insecure in their own sexuality. But I will leave it to the other more eloquent posters. I have a frozen burrito to eat. Oh, and beer to drink.

See? Frozen burritos and beer! Its difficult to get much more manly than that! 

MAJeff:

But this is the core of so much homophobia as well: het men’s terror of becoming “the woman.” After all, men fuck and women get fucked. If a gay man even so much as looks at a straight man….well that’s almost like fucking because the straight man is being placed in the feminine role, that of object for someone else’s erotic pleasure, and that’s a bit too much for a lot of men to handle.

It’s not always “who’s the woman?” It’s also, “I know he’s looking at me,” and that leads to the gay panic defense and similar.

And we faggots? Not real men; bitches really. Gender traitors on top of it.

Homophobie is strongly linked to misogyny.

KillJoy:

Fear of being feminized is pretty much the root of homophobia. Men who view women as something less than themselves, objects to be used, weak and impotent…fear being put into that role. Its a reflection of their own attitudes toward women. And any man who would willing put themselves ‘in that role’ and even *Gasp* enjoy it, clearly cannot be a real man. 

Its a sort of emotional castration for them.

Josh,Official SpokesGay:

I’d go so far as to say homophobia isn’t just linked to misogyny, it’s actually a subset of it.

Caine, Fleur du mal:

Yep. And everyone knows there’s nothing worse than being a woman. Homophobics always do a twofer on the hate front, they don’t see women as full humans and gay men are even worse, because they “choose” to be women.