Why? (does society’s choices determine morality).
Because that’s how things work. It’s repetitive, but it was once considered immoral by our society for a ‘proper lady’ to allow people to see her ankle. Today, it’s considered immoral (in the US anyway) for a ‘proper lady’ to allow people to see her breasts. The ankle thing went by the wayside hundreds of years ago, and I predict the breast thing will eventually to. (In europe, topless women are much less scandalous, and in NY laws against topless women were struck down on equal protection grounds (because you can’t have a law that applies to women but not men). I predict that should the issue ever reach the supremes they would rule similarly, thus invalidating any law against topless women in the country.)
Now, you can claim that it’s an immutable declaration of God that women showing their breasts in public is immoral, but someone, somewhere, at some point in time thought the exact same thing about the ankle. Unless you happen to agree with that, you’ll see that things thought to be immutable statements of God tend to shift over time.
Change in public opinion does not mean change in what is moral right or wrong. In that case at some point the extermination of Jews was a good thing for a German to take part in and racism was a good thing for Americans to partake in back in the 50’s, if we follow that logic.
I would like to think the extermination of Jews was not widely believed to be a good thing to the German people, even if they felt the need to say so out loud so as to not become a victim themselves. With the exception of those few born without empathy for their fellow man, the idea of right and wrong is pretty simple. To me it boils down to a single test.
Try to do no unwelcome harm.
Now, the try part is important, because life is inherently dangerous. If the test was ‘do no harm’ many things that would be considered moral under the ‘try’ standard would fail because of the small but real chance of harming others. Skydiving, as an innocuous example. It’s hypothetically possible that a skydiving accident could harm or kill others. But as long as reasonable steps are taken to avoid that, you have to accept that there’s never any such thing as guaranteed safety and act accordingly.
The ‘unwelcome’ part covers acts, such as BDSM, that would most certainly be immoral if done to someone lacking their consent, but are okay once consent is granted. You may not be into getting spanked or whipped, but plenty of people are.
Frankly, these arguments about religious vs. secular morality boil down to little more than sexual issues. Nobody is arguing that mother raping or father stabbing is a good thing, nobody is endorsing theft, and I doubt anyone is going to endorse beating someone up as a fun and moral thing.
My standard also means the same action can be both moral and immoral depending on the context. Casual sex with a person who desires (and can handle) casual sex is quite different than casual sex with a married person who very much believes in the sanctity of a monogamous marriage, even though the actual act is the same.
But remember that it was you who presented this argument that homosexuality in times of starvation was more common in the wild.
You have me confused with another poster, I made no such argument nor can I say whether or not it’s true, as I simply do not know. Whether or not the fact that animals will behave homosexually can be used as a point to declare it ‘normal’ really depends on your definition of ‘normal’. If you label any act, such as homosexuality, as ‘abnormal’ simply because it’s done by a relatively small portion of humanity, you will likely never be convinced that it’s ‘normal’. Of course, by that standard many things become abnormal, such as the aforementioned skydiving, because only a small percentage of us does it. ***Statistically ***speaking, homosexuality IS ‘abnormal’, but as another poster pointed out, so is being left-handed.
Still we see homosexuality appear. So it is not a matter of how much food is around.
At the risk of redundancy, that is not my argument and I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion one way or the other.
Why do you keep pushing the argument that I said homosexuality is spreading like some sort of infections disease?
Because your point requires that it be spreadable to matter. You have argued that homosexuality is bad for the procreative future of humanity, and though I haven’t seen what exactly you endorse (e.g. making homosexual acts illegal, or banning SSM, or whatever), the simple fact of the matter is that homosexuality has existed, does exist, and will continue to exist in roughly the same portion of the population, likely for all of human history, and that to come. Unless you’re advocating going medieval and quite literally killing anyone who acts in a homosexual way, you’re never going to change that, and even if you are (and I doubt it) all it will do is force people to act contrary to their nature out of a sense of self-preservation and fear.
As an example, legalizing same sex marriage will not cause homosexuality to spread, ergo it will not impact the procreative future of humanity whether it comes to pass or does not. It doesn’t matter either way. It’s almost certainly true that homosexuals have less children per capita than heterosexuals, but that will not change. In fact, you could even make a case that by allowing marriage, homosexuals will be more likely to have children, either adoptive or by surrogate/implantation, ergo the procreative future of humanity gets brighter, assuming you define brighter as more average children per capita.
