2 comments

1. 

   Mike W. says:

   November 14, 2010 at 9:32 am (UTC -8)

   Just listening to the podcast now. I just wanted to say something Richard said got my mind going.

   Now I know this was a hypothetical example of a potential argument from theist and atheist alike that gay marriage could be argued to be infringing on the rights of others – the example was children.

   Consider this to be a general point and, hopefully anyone who reads this comment will think back to it, the right to marry whatever gender you like is not the same right nor has anything to do with the right to adopt or care for children. That’s an entirely different debate. A marriage between two women/men cannot conceivably infringe of anyone else’s right to the pursuit of happiness.

2. 

   mxyzptlk says:

   November 29, 2010 at 11:56 am (UTC -8)

   Wanted to respond to Joe’s point about wife-beating rapist Muslims. First, let me preface this by acknowledging none of that behavior is ever okay. But where I get confused is how much of this is religious-based and how much of it is culturally-based selectively backed up by religion.

   In other words, in a particular part from northern India over to, I dunno, Turkey, if we went back in time well before Islam or even Christianity (Judaism didn’t spread that much), would we find tribal customs that declared there could be more rape in a marriage? And was scripture conveniently crafted to accommodate that custom? And do such customs exist to the same extent in places like Indonesia?

   That’s always been one of the more interesting things to me — how much religion accommodates for prior tribal custom by putting a holy stamp on it, which helps guarantee those tribal customs serve as a vector for the religious meme. As tribes transitioned from hunter/gatherers to agricultural, you also get staid populations, which means rules to maintain a civilization within a cultural identity (Hammurabi), and religion becomes the short-circuit to establish and maintain those rules.

   It seems to me one way to test this would be to identify religious inconsistencies and then look at which cultures adhere to which inconsistency, and then see if their particular choice reflects deeper tribal behavior and customs.

   Wrote this here while listening to the podcast, but may repost it at Atheist Nexus.