METAPHORE: A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them :
A metaphore for what? The question is inane. There are many metaphores in the biblical stories. How is religion a metaphore?
“We” are not insisting on any such thing. So, your rationale can be set aside. You might try beginning a topic on why you think it is someone with male genitalia should not be allowed to call themselves female. A position I happen to agree with.
At the same time, I support our brilliant doctors and people who wish to take advantage of their services in altering their outward appearance. At the same time, putting on the venere of a woman or a man, does not make anyone a woman or a man. Gender roles have long been established. Male = sexually and biologically a man. Female = sexually and biologically a female. It’s very basic. “THESE WORDS ALREADY HAVE DEFINITIONS.” If a person wants to alter their sex and pretend to be something they are not, they are lying to themselves. I do not have to participate in the delusion. The medication being taken each day to alter hormone levels is a testament to the delusion. I get, that they want to be what they are not. I get it. Life sucks. Some people are fat and there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it. That’s life. If they insist they are skinny, they are lying.
So, the transgenders and in fact the entire sexual spectrum need to “Expand” modern vocabulary. Not agree with the current system. I have no issue with the word “Transgender.” I have no issue with people who are transgender. They are just people like everyone else. But one does not enter a healthy relationship or a friendship, without being clear. They don’t lie to the people around them. They don’t live a lie with employers, friends, spouses, the people they date, or anyone close to them. To do so makes them a candidate for the Jerry Springer show.
So I am advocating an expansion of vocabulary. “Male” has been taken. “Female” has been taken. If you want to define yourself in a gender role, find your own word. What really needs to happen is that people need to get honest about who they really are and stop buying into the “2 gender role system.”
Previous cultures that weren’t influenced by the buy-bull recognized gender/sexual diversity BECAUSE it has been apart of human social society. It was recognized and accepted NOT controlled/diminished…
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That’s my theory. A bunch of saying and stories that someone eventually wrote down. Almost exactly like the creation of the Quaran which was put together out of scraps of paper, stones with writing, leaves with writing on them, bits of parchment, remembered stories of old men and then canonized in blood as everything that led to the official publication was destroyed and anyone caught with a non-sanctioned version was killed. There is only one holy Quaran. Ha ha ha ha ha … I don’t doubt for a second the Bible was created in the same way.
Amazing. After this statement you go on a completely unrelated trans-phobic rant as if that is the most egregious example of our continuing foolishness, rather than something like, oh I don’t know, maybe fucking killing each other in wars, subjugating the weaker, disregard for our impact on the health of nature in general, etc. The “other things” to which you refer is so ambiguous as to deserve only ridicule and dismissal as flotsam. If you want to make your case against gender identification, etc., then don’t hide behind a “religion as metaphor” proposition, which is complete nonsense, just come out from under your nasty little bridge and be a “man” (albeit a dick-less one).
At one time the bible was considered 100% the infallible word of god. But once people started to poke holes in it, the song changed, to “some of it is true, some of it is parables, some of it needs content”.
What theists fail to understand that when they cherry pick what suits their feelings or agenda, they are relying on their own personal metrics. But they fail to go that one little step in saying “hey, I decided on my own what was moral and such, without the bible and word of god. I don’t need the bible to guide me through life, I have a better morality than this bible”.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate that these “other things” exist outside of the human imagination?
That’s just your subjective opinion, there is no evidence that gender dysphoria is a mental health issue, prevailing medical opinion doesn’t agree with you.
A rather facile and clumsy generalisation, what do you hope to gain from a such a silly generalisation and oversimplification?
Now you’re wrongly assuming gender dysphoria and treatments are insane, I have to hope this is just a stupid use of rhetoric, or are you actually asserting this involves insanity? I’d love to hear your rationale for asserting treatments for gender dysphoria will “bring society down” as that seems like ludicrous hyperbole to me.
So do Batman comics, this doesn’t make Batman real.
I’ve come to see it that way. World mythology isn’t just supposed to be dry reportage of events, it’s a symbolic narrative that has many meanings. When we dismiss it as just a bunch of stories intended to “explain things” to primitive people, we’re imposing our own mode of discourse on them. We should realize that myth is a valuable window on the mindset of our ancestors, one that lets us see how they related to things like authority, meaning, the unknown, and one another.
We have no problem mocking those who think the Genesis stories should be taken literally. But we’re essentially doing the exact same thing when we make corny jokes about where Adam’s sons found wives or what happened on Noah’s Ark. Maybe we should develop an appreciation for what myth tells us about people’s search for meaning and purpose rather than handwaving it away as fairy tales.
Hi, Istvan.
Not sure who the “we” is doing this mocking you describe. Atheists? Do some folks who identify as atheist mock others? Yes. Do all? No.
I do agree that studying myths can provide insight into culture, etc. I also don’t disregard fairy tales as less valuable. Actually, I far prefer fairy tales as they are purposefully designed to teach. Myths, it seems to me, are created answers for discomfort with the unknown.
This is true of most fictional ideas. Attaching meaning to something the human imagination creates makes sense, since there’d be little point creating it otherwise.
Ah one can almost hear the that wheezy old pony clip clopping its way behind your cart. We don’t need to dismiss anything until someone demonstrates it is supported by some objective evidence, beyond that it can have whatever meaning those who wish to indulge it as more than human imagination want it to, but when you insist your toys are real, and bring your toys to my house, and insist I play with your toys, well then you have to objectively demonstrate those toys are real to me. No insisting I close my eyes and imagine the are real either, just because you want imagine they are.
Straw man fallacy, who says we can’t or even don’t do this, who says we need indulge unevidenced supernatural beliefs before we can realise this?
If there is a point in there you’re going to have to clarify it sorry?
Are the two mutually exclusive then? I don’t think they are.
Gender is assumed to be decided by a penis with testicles vs. a vaginia . . . and this isn’t neccesarily true.
Gender is also determined by chromosomes, and a man has a XY arrangement, while a woman has an XX arrangement.
So, what is to be said of conditions (like Kleinfelter Syndrome) where a man has an XXY, or even XXXY sex chromosomes? Chromosomes are at least as relevant as genitalia.
A James Bond girl (and European supermodel) named Tula was a person with XXXY sex chromosomes who transitioned to female.
Or maybe we can look at this in another way: Below is a photo of someone with an extra appendage from thalidomide, which causes severe birth defects (see below).
Thalidomide can cause a finger to grow out of your back.
So, if a woman was born with a penis and testicles growing out of her calf or back, we wouldn’t bat an eyelash if she wanted them amputated, simply because they don’t belong there.
What’s the difference with a “man” who wants to transition to female when he has unwanted and inappropriate body parts from a birth defect or excess female chromosomes or hormones?
People counter this point by quoting the Bible . . . and the Bible says everyone is male or female. I believe that this was true in Biblical times because prenatal care was nonexistant, miscarriages and still birth was common, and so forth. I believe that we have more such people today because modern medicine and prenatal care means that fetuses that would have died from defects are now carried to term.
I believe that in Biblical times, fewer transgender and intersex people would have survived gestation.
So, that Biblical statement was true back then.
Please note that my claims about intersex people less likely to survive gestation is a belief that I have, and not something I quote as a fact.
This. This right here.
Just because I don’t believe any of those stories really happened, doesn’t mean I don’t value the peripheral knowledge gained about the authors. (And possibly more important, that of those who read and believe it in my era.)
I think the original poster has a simplistic view of human ability to read something, not believe it actually happened, yet still get value from it. Like a Batman comic, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or The Scorpion and the Frog, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Perfect example of why we should not only promote disbelief in the factual nature of these archaic stories written for the self-service of their authors, but also dissuade viewing them as “possibly metaphorical but still good sources of morality”.
This may not even be the case. It’s not illogical to think that infanticide of “deformed” offspring was one of those things everyone did but just didn’t talk about and didn’t include in their traditional stories. But as you rightly point out, many mutations likely perished prenatally at the time.
The only issue I have with your statements is the term “gender”. Isn’t that more of a socio-cultural construct nowadays? The terms sex and gender were used interchangeably when I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, we had A, B, and A+B, and that was it. But etymologically they have both taken on new significance. I see a need to distinguish the physical, chemical reality of sex and it’s non-binary reality (which you gave given an awesome explanation of) from the socio-cultural construct of gender, which is evidenced in many cultures around the world as not always congruous with physical sex.
Of course I may be an idiot in his mid-50s trying to understand what all the cool kids are talking about and getting it embarrassingly wrong.
You have to admit, the way “myth” has come to mean “lie” and the ubiquity of corny jokes about “talking snakes” aren’t the most reliable evidence that we take mythology seriously on any level.
You count how many times someone on the atheist message boards talks about how symbolically and philosophically rich mythology is, and I’ll count how many times it’s dismissed as bullshit. Wanna bet whose bucket fills up first?
BULLSHIT! The corny jokes specifically address the “BELIEVERS,” who adopt the stories as REAL and TRUE. The corny jokes say nothing at all about the value of the mythology in any Biblical story. If you can swing an interesting mythology out of the story of Adam and Eve, more power to you. I like the idea that it is a mythology for the origin of the 'Fase Dichotomy."
The tree in the garden that they are told not to eat, is “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The tree of black and white thinking. In eating of it they became as gods, knowing good and evil. They began “Judging Shit” as good or bad. They saw themselves as naked, and that was bad, and they hid from God. (They lost their humanity because of dualistic thinking.) God finds them, notices they have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and removes them from the garden (NOT FOR THEIR ACTION AS THE CHRISTIANS ASSERT.) Specifically, they are removed “Less they eat of the tree of everlasting life and become as Gods.” God does not want them to have everlating life… so he kicks them out of the garden.
[Genesis 3:5])
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
…16And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
And they did die. They were no longer free of sin. They separated themselves from their humanity. They began making judgments. (This is original sin. Making judgments about the world around us is what sin is all about according to the Adam and Eve story. Making Judgments is the reason for Paradise Lost.) God’s fear that humans would become immortal is the reason for being removed from the garden. Really, dumb story in some ways… God was too stupid to remove the trees. But then without the magical trees it would not be a myth.
And anyone stupid enough to believe in magical trees, talking snakes, an omnipotent and omnipresent god who can not find Adam or Eve because they are hiding, is deserving of Mockery!
The corny jokes have nothing what so ever to do with the value of mythology. NOTHING. They are targeted at belief in the absurd.
Yeah I have to agree. There are many of us who understand that there may be value above and beyond the literal in the myths. Many different cultures had/have myths which, if taken literally, are indeed absurd. That said, many also harbor evidence of an understanding of the world in which those cultures perceived themselves to exist. The practical lessons that can be gleaned are numerous and valuable, even in the world we currently inhabit. Some lessons of morality or personal responsibility can be found, even in the animal stories. Here is a Cherokee story of a boy and a rattlesnake. The Little Boy and the Rattlesnake - A Cherokee Legend.
There are many many more animal stories which contain lessons for children and adults alike.
Concurrent with this is the demonstrable reality of a world of non-speaking snakes. To believe otherwise is to deny reality.
I vacillate between patient tolerance and outright brutal mockery. What determines which, is largely determined by the attitude of the “believer” and my sensitivity to their “mental state” as well as their cultural indoctrination.
I am reluctant to accept that Atheists as an identifiable group, can be casually referred to as “we” when referring to a particular attitude towards such a subject as mythology, considering the wide range of educational/cultural exposures present among those who self-identify as atheist.
Edit: it’s all Eve’s fault
Well. I have a strong opinion on this but. But first …
Did you guys hear about the guy with a big dick who played the guitar?
He was strung like a horse.
Did you hear about the guy with the big dick who got a rim job in the bathroom?
He was tongued like a horse.
Did you hear about the guy with the big dick who liked to climb ladders?
He was runged like a horse.
Did you hear about the guy with the big dick who like to eat pea soup?
He was munged like a horse.
And finally. Did you hear about the guy with the big dick who couldn’t take a shit?
He was bunged like a horse.
If you’ve heard about any of these men, you’re encouraged to call your local police. Please do not approach the subject. He may be armed. Stay safe out there boys.
I always remember the story my grandmother told me about “The Kind Chimpanzee and the Smelly Rat Shit.”
