Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: draft of Identity Task Force statement Message-ID: Date: 23 Nov 90 07:10:10 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 250 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , mib@geech.ai.mit.edu (Michael I. Bushnell) replied to a posting of mine. What happened here is that I misunderstood the list of ministries in the Newark Task Force statement to be EXHAUSTIVE. So when I saw "AIDS ministries" but no other health support, I asked why *only* AIDS. The original poster has assured me by E-mail that the list of ministries in the draft statement was a list of NEW, recently added ministries, and that the Newark diocese does a lot of other kinds of health support. That completely and satisfactorily answers my question. Then Bushnell misread me. I asked why _only_ AIDS. He DRASTICALLY misunderstood me as asking why help AIDS people at all. That is not what I wrote and not what I meant. My question was "why help _only_ people with AIDS" or "why give people with AIDS priority over all others". The answer is that the Newark diocese _does_ help people with other diseases (by supporting hospitals &c) and gave historical priority to those others, the AIDS ministry is a new one. With that cleared up, what the Newark diocese are doing sounds wonderful. Given that Bushnell so completely misunderstood my question, his response is aimed about 169 degrees away from me. I do not advocate that AIDS research should not be done or that people with AIDS should not be helped, and never have done. > Infectious diseases, once treated, are almost always cured. There is as yet no treatment for AIDS, and there is no prospect of a cure this century. It's not clear what inference we are supposed to draw from that sentence in any case: gonorrhea has been treatable, even curable, for some time, but due to human behaviour it was classified by the WHO, at the time my 10-year-old venereology texts were written, as "out of control". > Counting > money spent to treat and cure various diseases is not a useful task. Of course it is. There is not an unlimited supply of money. Money that is spent on one disease cannot also be spent on another, it cannot be spent on prevention, it cannot be spent on education, &c &c. Priorities have to be set. > One glance at the titles of articles printed in Scientific American > over the past 5 years will show how much basic research has been done > on immune function, etc., all as a direct cause of AIDS. Almost all > of this research is applicable to many other areas of medicine. > Arthritis, which serious debilitates even more people than asthma is > usually caused by an autoimmune response, and there are already areas > of research into new approaches to arthritis that have come directly > from AIDS researchers. The immune system was one of the hottest areas of medical research before AIDS was ever heard of. My immunology texts are as old as my venereology texts (it is awesome to think that ten-year-old texts didn't mention AIDS) and they were really gung-ho; aspects of the immune system are also quite relevant to biotech. Let's not be naive about this; what has happened to a large extent is that people who wanted to do immune system research anyway have leapt at the opportunity offered by the current plague. The 30-year-old woman I met on the tram a wee while back who is crippled by arthritis; if the money hadn't been diverted to AIDS research there might have been something that would help her _now_. It's worth noting that some AIDS activist groups are now demanding that research on the virus be curtailed and that attention be focussed on the opportunistic infections which actually kill people. They evidently don't buy Bushnell's argument. > The number of babies dying from SIDS each year are very few, The latest figure I have is that in the UK 1200 babies died in 1985 of SIDS. (For comparison, the number of heterosexuals in the UK with AIDS was 240 in October this year.) If the rate in the USA were comparable, we'd be talking about roughly 5,000--6,000 a year. In this country (Oz), I believe the rate is higher. Is it because they are babies that this counts as "very few", or what? > (Let's agree > to leave to one side the fact that current research on AIDS > vaccines is racist. The AIDS strain that's killing African > heterosexuals hasn't got the protein fragment that Western > researchers are basing their vaccines on.) > > Amazing how you managed to leave it aside while mentioning it. This > "fact" I've never seen from any other source than this posting. Do > you have any references? There is a newer virus, HIV-II, but that is > significantly different from HIV, and is "only" responsible for about > 5% of the people with AIDS in Africa. I think this outcome of AIDS research is worth noting, but it wasn't directly related to the Newark Task Force, which is why I wanted to leave it to one side in that context. The "fact" comes from that notoriously unreliable homophobe rumour mill, the 5th international conference on AIDS in Africa. If the "fact" makes you uncomfortable, keep on ignoring it. I didn't go to Kinshasa myself, so the facts may have been muddled in transmission, but the strain is NDK, it's missing the peptide 'gpgr' in the V3 loop, and in the laboratory it can infect cells without the CD4 receptor. > People who act out a preference for the > same sex enjoy special status in today's society, _dare_ to mention > that the Bible forbids the activity and you are jumped on and > accused of all sorts of things. > Oh dear. I suspect I'm placing myself in the category of jumping on > you in just that fashion. Just so. > There is amazingly little consensus on the > issue. I'm not willing to continue the discussion here, because it's > been had many times. Not since I've been watching soc.religion.christian. I have never in my life seen a reasoned argument that explains how we can ignore what the Bible appears to teach about this matter. However, I've introduced in another thread the question "may Richard O'Keefe visit a legal brothel in Victoria"; it seems to me that the kind of reasoning which can be used to overturn one set of prohibitions can be used to overturn the other. The attitudes to homosexual behaviour that I started with I got from American science fiction: "not a problem", "helps fight the population explosion", "their own business", "let people go to hell their own way". The belief I now have is neither native to me, especially congenial to me, nor expedient. The _only_ reason I believe as I do is that approaching the Bible with intellectual integrity in the light of tradition _forces_ me to that interpretation. If you know better, then enlighten me. If you fear that the issue of male/male copulation is too "hot" to handle, then let's carry out the analysis in the context of the specific question "may Richard O'Keefe visit a legal brothel in Victoria". > Specifically because it seems that the Task Force for the Diocese > doesn't see anything wrong with same-sex romantic relationships. Romance? Either my venereology texts are wrong about typical male/male contact frequency, or you have a very different notion of "romance" from me. > I'm willing to > admit that we disagree, but to pretend that the Task Force is being > hypocritical is off base. They aren't. They are disagreeing with you > and you are pretending that they secretly agree. Clean your mouth out, sir! I pretended nothing. I will state plainly: I do not see how it is possible with intellectual integrity to profess obedience to the Bible and explicitly deny what seem to be its teachings on sexual matters. I want an explanation. Is there a claim there that anyone is hypocritical? No. There is a claim that I do not _understand_. There is a claim that either they are deeply mistaken or I am, quite possibly both. Did I ever make any claim that they agree with me? NOWHERE! Instead of accusing me of pretending things I did not pretend, how about giving me that explanation? As I said in the posting where I proposed the question "may Richard O'Keefe visit a legal brothel in Victoria", there is a question of sexual ethics which became a major issue in my life this year (no, that's not it, but it is like enough for the mode of reasoning to be the mode of reasoning I want to understand). The question "how is it possible to hold with intellectual integrity a view about a question of sexual ethics which is absolutely incompatible with what the Bible *appears* to teach" is not an abstract issue to me, it is vitally important on a personal level. Being faithful to my God, as I understood it, has made me rather unhappy for most of this year. Intellectual integrity meant that I _had_ to put my beliefs to the strongest possible challenge. I sought advice first from people who identified themselves as liberals. If they could have convinced me that I had misunderstood, if they had even given me something resembling a rational argument which I could have grasped as plausible even if it didn't convince me, I would have been spared 9 months of grief. But they didn't even TRY. I asked advice from ministers of several denominations in four countries. But the invariable rule was that ministers who identified themselves as liberals refused to give me any kind of explanation and demanded that I just accept, while everyone who was prepared to explain to me _why_/_how_ their view was valid held to traditional views. I have come to expect statements like Bushnell's > I'm not willing to continue the discussion here from people who don't hold traditional views of sexual ethics; I have come to expect rational argument (even when I pretend to disagree, which I have successfully carried off on occasion) from people who do hold the traditional views. It would be a very great comfort to me if I could be shown how someone claiming to get their moral views from the Bible could plausibly come to a view which appears to be diametrically opposed to what the Bible seems to teach. I'd have to eat a lot of crow, but I've been sufficiently unhappy this year due to my inability to do what I saw as a betrayal of my God that I am *eager* to eat that crow *if* I can do so with integrity. Every time someone refuses to explain to me, that just reinforces my suspicion that they haven't _got_ a rational explanation, but hold their views because it is expedient to do so. "Always be prepared to give an explanation for the hope that is in you"; if there is someone out there who thinks they know how come what appears to be Biblical teaching about sexual ethics (concentrate on the specific case of "may Richard O'Keefe visit a legal brothel"; no point in inviting people to jump on you without reading carefully what you write) can be safely disregarded, I *BEG* you to enlighten me. It matters. I _want_ to be convinced. -- I am not now and never have been a member of Mensa. -- Ariadne. [I don't know when you started reading, but homosexuality is a subject that typically comes up about once a year. I can well understand that some might not want to renew it. Since you ask how one can possibly believe that the Bible allows homosexual behavior, I will try to summarize the arguments we have heard in the past. First, at least in discussions here there is no question that it is prohibited by the Law and that Paul opposed it. Some classic passages cited on the subject are not relevant. E.g. in the Sodom story, what is involved in homosexual rape, which no one is proposing should be regarded as acceptable. Also, in some of Paul's lists of sins, there are words whose meaning is unclear that may or may not imply homosexual activities. However there are explicit OT prohibitions, and Rom 1:26ff makes Paul's attitude clear enough. So careful analysis will reduce the number of passages that should be cited on the subject, but does not change their import. Generally the argument is that (1) the OT Law is not binding on Christians; (2) Paul's beliefs and advice are not to be taken as a new Law; and (3) The sorts of homosexual relationships that typically occured in the 1st Cent. are not those being advocated by homosexual Christians. (They were often associated with pagan worship, and they often involved exploitation of slaves and children.) There is clearly a difference in attitude towards use of the Bible. Conservative Christians -- and I believe in this case we are talking about the great majority -- believe that we can look to the Bible for specific rules. Usually this means that (1) portions of the OT Law is taken to be moral rather than ceremonial, and still applies to us. (2) What Paul wrote to his congregations can be applied directly to the 20th Cent. unless there is very clear evidence that it was intended only for a specific circumstance. Liberal Christians interpret Paul as saying that the Law has been abolished for Christians, and that Paul's writings ought to be used to create a new Law, since they are often limited by the cultural context and his beliefs. This is a very basic difference in approach, so basic that the two parties generally are almost incapable of communicating usefully. It is obvious to our conservative readers that homosexual Christians are ignoring the clear voice of Scripture. It is obvious to our liberal readers that conservative Christians are ignoring the basic message of both Christ and Paul, and are turning words that were intended to free us from the Law into a new Law. I am slowly beginning to despair of these discussions. It would also be nice if sometime people would be satisfied with a summary of this sort. However past evidence shows that there are lots of people who are unable to resist responding to an argument they disagree with, even though all sides already know the response. --clh]