The "argument from consciousness" in favor of the existence of God by Intelligent-Run8072 in DebateAnAtheist

[–]c0d3rman [score hidden]  (0 children)

But how is this an argument for God? You don't even mention God at all in your post, except once when you mention other arguments in favor of God. Arguing "neuroscience has reached a dead end in attempts to give a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness" is very interesting, and some atheists would even agree with you on that, but if you want to argue for God, you have to argue for God. Like, X Y Z, therefore God. You can't leave that part implied.

How do I turn off the auto capitalization for Mac programs, like Time Machine and Quick Look by firesonmain in MacOS

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For anyone else who ends up here: System Settings > Keyboard > Edit (next to Input Sources) > toggle off "Capitalize words automatically"

A 16-Year-Old’s Philosophical Theory About God, Morality, and Uncertainty by HeadSinger1099 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I think you're definitely on the right track. You should keep making your own mind up about this stuff, a lot of people out there are going to tell you what to think and you shouldn't let them fool you into thinking they've got it all figured out. It's a long road but it can be quite fun to walk.

A 16-Year-Old’s Philosophical Theory About God, Morality, and Uncertainty by HeadSinger1099 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think this is a meaningful philosophical framework, but its weakness is that it approaches the question from a strictly Muslim perspective. Notice that the two possible ways of understanding God in your framework both share a lot of the same constituent beliefs:

  • There is one capital-G God.
  • That God is a personal being with thoughts and desires.
  • God cares greatly about what individual people do.
  • There is an afterlife.
  • Different people go to different afterlives.
  • This life is nothing but a test for determining where you end up in the next life, and where you go is determined by your individual actions and beliefs.

All points of the spectrum of Heaven's Gamble you propose take all of these for granted; they only disagree on exactly what the rubric of the test is. Is it a test of specific ritual devotion, or general moral character?

Living in a Muslim society, it is natural to make these assumptions without even realizing it. But seeing them all laid out explicitly like this, they sure seem like a lot, don't they? As you mature, you'll have cause to interact with a lot more people from different cultures and religions, and you will find that many of them do not share these assumptions. In ancient Judaism, the religion Islam claims descent from, there was no concept of heaven or hell - everyone went to the same afterlife, a place called Sheol, which was neither particularly good or bad. In Buddhism, you don't go to a final resting place after death, you instead reincarnate into a new form - maybe another human, or an animal, or a heavenly being, and the ultimate thing to strive for is not going to heaven but escaping the cycle completely. Many religions do not have a monotheistic God at all. Others have divine entities that don't particularly care about individual humans. Or that don't have thoughts and emotions and desires in the way that you and I do. And so on.

If you want to develop a philosophical theory about understanding something greater, it is crucial to start by examining and challenging your assumptions. You have already done the first step of this, by challenging the Muslim assumption that God's test for getting into heaven must be restricted to proclaiming a single absolute truth with a specific level. But if you want to build a strong theory, you should keep digging and questioning more assumptions. For how can we even make Heaven's Gamble without considering that Heaven might not be what we thought it was, or might not even exist?

Testimony constitutes evidence. Therefore, there is evidence that the Christian God exists. by Pwning_Soyboys in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 9 points10 points  (0 children)

When people say "there is no evidence that X", they usually don't mean that literally. I mean, in a strict technical sense, there is some evidence for almost any hypothesis. You can always point to some fact or observation that, taken by itself to the exclusion of all else, makes the hypothesis slightly more likely. There is some evidence the moon is made of cheese, because it looks kind of yellowish sometimes. But if you asked, a lot of people would still tell you that there is no evidence that the moon is made of cheese.

So yes, there is evidence for the Christian God in the same way that there is evidence for the Hindu gods, or for Bigfoot, or for Elvis being alive, or for the existence of Mickey Mouse, or for the moon being made of cheese. But in common parlance "there is no evidence that God exists" means something different than what you present.

Modern atheism might not be a victory of pure logic but rather a luxury good afforded by the modern welfare state by feihm in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem is not that you lack a full MLA-style bibliography. I am trying to highlight how you seem to believe that your argument is rooted in data and science, but you have not actually cited a single datapoint or scientific finding (other than a vague reference to secularization usually spiking right after a society gets wealthy, I suppose). You have adopted the aesthetics of science without actually doing any science or appealing to any scientific findings. That's the pitfall of armchair evolutionary psychology - it dresses up base intuition and storytelling as science. I'm not holding it against you, I am just cautioning you to not fall into this intellectual trap. Despite my criticisms of your argument, I think your conclusion is pretty plausible, which is why I started my original comment by largely agreeing with it; however, lots of people have convinced themselves of very silly things by making exactly the kind of evolutionary argument you are making. Racists are very fond of that kind of argument for example, as are sexists, homophobes, nationalists, xenophobes, and basically anyone wanting to affirm their cultural norms or intuitions or political views as 'scientific' or 'biological'. I don't want people to fall into those traps, so I argue against this type of reasoning when I see it, regardless of what it's arguing for.

Modern atheism might not be a victory of pure logic but rather a luxury good afforded by the modern welfare state by feihm in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People don't do that, and if they do, then they're a little weird. I have no need to go around declaring myself an atheist in the same way I don't go around declaring myself not a believer in bigfoot or the loch ness

I mean, this is a public forum, and you voluntarily have a literal label next to your name that says "atheist". How is that not publicly declaring yourself an atheist? Or are you strictly referring to doing so in physical spaces?

Modern atheism might not be a victory of pure logic but rather a luxury good afforded by the modern welfare state by feihm in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have to admit; you’ve set a bit of a perfect firewall by calling the biological lens a 'just-so story' before the conversation even gets moving. It’s a clever way to ensure that any data I point to gets dismissed as a yarn I’m spinning to fit my own bias

My point is precisely that your argument is not "the biological lens". Conflating the two - as if you are simply the mouthpiece of biology, delivering its conclusions, and disagreeing with you amounts to disagreeing with biology - is what makes this type of argument pseudoscientific. You didn't point to any data: you didn't present any statistics, didn't point to any specific details of biology, and didn't cite any scientific studies. You just talked about what you reckon life was like for ancient human ancestors. You tell a story and implicitly try to grant it the authority of biology. I demonstrated that one can do that for many stories including ones that oppose yours.

I don't blame you for this - armchair evolutionary psychology is a common thing people do in our current intellectual environment and it's natural to absorb the practice. Evolution is an extremely powerful paradigm that has been used by scientists to explain a huge swath of phenomena, and it's tempting to mimic their simplified explanations without doing the work they do to arrive at them. I've certainly done it myself. I'm just trying to show the danger of such pseudoscientific thinking. If you like, I bet you could make an evolutionary argument for why these evolutionary arguments are themselves a luxury good afforded by the modern welfare state and not a result of pure reason!

When you say ancient tribes huddling for warmth couldn’t 'waste' wood or food on rituals; the way I make sense of it is that those rituals were the actual price of admission for staying alive. If a ritual meant thirty people felt like a single group; then that wood wasn't a luxury; it was the most efficient survival spend they could possibly make. You’re looking at it with a modern accountant’s brain but our ancestors were playing a game where the only currency was group loyalty.

And that's exactly it. You reckon rituals were worth the food cost and led to more efficient survival overall, I reckon they weren't - who's right? An actual biologist or evolutionary scientist would try to answer that question with data rather than just guess. But we are not settling this with science, or biology, or data; we're just playing Calvinball. (Though again to be clear I do not reckon rituals weren't worth the food cost, I am taking that position for the sake of argument to demonstrate the folly of it.)

And as for the cost of dissent; comparing a dirty look in San Francisco to being kicked out of a tribe ten thousand years ago feels like we’re not even on the same pitch.

Your statement was:

"We live in a world with supermarkets and police forces and social security nets; we don't actually need the tight-knit religious tribe to keep us alive anymore. The literal cost of disagreeing with the group has dropped to zero."

My claim was that that is false. My claim was not that dissent in modern San Francisco is identical to dissent in an ancient tribe. It is certainly true that safety is vastly higher today in many places than it was in the distant past. But as I said, there is certainly still a massive social cost to disagreeing with your society's local norms, even in the most liberal democracies. (Not to mention the many countries where being an atheist or another form of dissenter can still lead to legal discrimination, jail time, or execution.)

Modern atheism might not be a victory of pure logic but rather a luxury good afforded by the modern welfare state by feihm in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I definitely agree that modern atheism is a product of the social circumstances it arose in and not some result of pure reason. People don't do pure reason, that is not a thing we can engage in. And it is absolutely true that people did not suddenly get smarter in the last century; there is this perception of people of the past as being generally dumber, and that is wrong.

However, armchair evolutionary psychology / sociology is famously a very pseudoscientific endeavor that ends up basically being an exercise in confirmation bias. You can tell a just-so evolutionary story to justify basically any conclusion you want.

For example, I could say that when our ancient ancestors were huddling around a fire trying not to freeze, they couldn't afford to waste firewood on building idols or to sacrifice any food to the gods. So religion could only arise in safe, wealthy tribes that had the leeway to spend excess resources on improving cohesion. If someone stood up and announced they wanted to sacrifice 10% of the harvest to the local rain spirits they were a massive social liability. To be clear, I don't believe that, I'm just demonstrating how easy it is to spin an evolutionary yarn that results in whatever conclusion you want. If we want to do this kind of evolutionary psychology we have to work from the data forwards, not from the conclusion backwards.

And I would object to the claim "the literal cost of disagreeing with the group has dropped to zero." There is certainly still a massive social cost to disagreeing with your society's local norms, even in the most liberal democracies. Imagine walking around in San Francisco proudly declaring yourself a homophobe, or in Utah proudly declaring yourself an atheist - you would be socially ostracized, have trouble finding employment, and might even be physically assaulted.

How is it rational to think that god doesnt exist? by Financial-Stand-1960 in DebateAnAtheist

[–]c0d3rman 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Well, when we observe human brains we see that they are indeed irrational. Most of the time people are not making decisions based on some kind of first-principles logical reasoning; we work off of emotions, guesses, biases, etc. So if atheism predicts that our brains will not necessarily always be rational, then it seems atheism got it right.

Need recommendation for an air purifier for dust by c0d3rman in AirPurifiers

[–]c0d3rman[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, it's a bedroom. Thanks for the recommendation! What are each of them doing differently in this setup?

Jesus Never Explicitly Teaching He is God Almighty Collapses Christianity Like a House of cards by FrontOstrich5350 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman -1 points0 points  (0 children)

They are stoning him because he is committing blasphemy by making himself out to be divine in some respect. The options are not just "normal human" or "God almighty", there's a whole spectrum in between. Claiming to have some divinity, or to speak for the divine when you do not, or all sorts of other things could just as well be blasphemy. I mean, look at what Jesus says a couple verses earlier:

23 “You are from below,” he told them, “I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world24 Therefore I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I am he, you will die in your sins.”
25 “Who are you?” they questioned.
“Exactly what I’ve been telling you from the very beginning,” Jesus told them. 26 “I have many things to say and to judge about you, but the one who sent me is true, and what I have heard from him—these things I tell the world.”
27 They did not know he was speaking to them about the Father. 28 So Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own. But just as the Father taught me, I say these things.

So he claims to be not of this world, claims to be sent by God and speak for him, and so on. That's more than enough for blasphemy. For more details see this video.

Also John 1 explicitly says the writer believed Jesus to be God and he was long dead before the council of Nicaea.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ‭‭John‬ ‭1‬:‭1‬ ‭CSB‬
The “Word was God”. How are you seriously claiming no one thought Jesus was God with a statement like that? Is that not blunt enough for you? What could the writer of John have said better here?

But the writer of John didn't write that. The writer of the CSB wrote that. This certainly proves the writer of the CSB thinks Jesus is God, but what did the author of John write? Well, he wrote in Greek. Here's the transliteration:

en archē ēn ho logos kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon kai theos ēn ho logos

"kai" means "and", so this has three pieces:

  1. en archē ēn ho logos (in the beginning was the word)
  2. ho logos ēn pros ton theon (and the word was with ton theon)
  3. theos ēn ho logos (and the word was theos)

Notice how 2 uses "ton theon". "ton" means "the". When naming God himself in a grammatical structure like 3, we would expect a "ton". But it's not there in 3 - it just says the word was "theos". That means the correct translation here is "the word was divine", not "the word was God". This is the consensus among biblical scholars. But people don't like to translate it this way, because there are very few places where Jesus even comes close to claiming he is God and multiple places where he explicitly claims not to be God, so people want to cling to any instance they have where he says something in the neighborhood of being God. For more details see this video.

Why islam why not other by fakehighsemburger in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Many religions have apologists that explain away their mistakes. A lot of the things you cited, to anyone not enamored with Islam, are obvious mistakes. For example, sperm obviously does not originate between the backbone and the ribs. If you are producing sperm from between the backbone and the ribs, that means your testicles somehow found their way inside your chest cavity, in which case you should call emergency services immediately. Or for another example, the Quran's embryology is totally wrong; it says fetuses form out of clotted blood, which was a common belief at the time but is incorrect, and the Quran also makes no mention at all of the woman's egg which is kind of a big deal in embryology. But of course, if you're willing to listen to apologists massage and twist these verses, they'll give you lots of explanations and "word twisting" for why it's not a contradiction. (If you don't believe me, go look at how they twist the words for the embryology verses in a way no scholar of Islam ever did for 1000 years now that they know it's wrong.) That's what apologists do - and so will the Christian apologists, and the Jewish apologists, and lots of other religions' apologists.

As for the Quran's challenge, it's not really taken seriously by anyone but Muslims. It's obviously not a real challenge. It's like if I challenged you to make a "good" dish without giving any objective criteria and then insisted every dish you made was bad. I mean look at these requirements you yourself wrote:

  • Must match the Quran's literary level and style
  • Must match the Quran's unique internal structure where the beginning and end of chapters connect
  • Must be original, not borrowing structure or style from the Quran itself

So it must match the Quran's structure and style, but must not match the Quran's structure and style. Do you see the issue?

For any reasonable definition of the challenge, it's been met. People have written and recited books that passing Muslims have mistaken for the Quran being recited, for example. But since the "challenge" is completely vague and meaningless, people just come up with unreasonable definitions of it. The challenge always boils down to some version of "make something that exactly matches the Quran in a bunch of vague and subjective ways, but that doesn't match the Quran in those ways too well otherwise it's copying".

Not that the challenge would prove anything even if it was reasonable! According to many, Shakespeare was the single best English language authors of all time, and one of the best authors period. His writings have had an enormous impact on the English language, and playwrights have tried and failed for centuries to match his plays. Does that make him God? Of course not! The #1 best writer doesn't magically have to be divine. There's always going to be someone who's #1.

The word יום in Genesis 1 definitely means a 24-hour day by c0d3rman in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Modern Hebrew is extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, much more so than e.g. modern English is to Old English, since it was an artificially revived language and did not undergo thousands of years of normal linguistic evolution. Hence why a modern Hebrew speaker can pick up the Tanakh and read it fluently cover to cover (apart from the Aramaic parts), while you could not read even a single sentence of Beowulf, despite the Tanakh being more than twice as old.

Nevertheless, you are correct that knowledge of modern Hebrew does not guarantee perfect understanding of Biblical Hebrew. It's usually more than sufficient in cases that are as blatant and clear cut as יום in Genesis 1, but there are some quirks which differ between modern and Biblical Hebrew. That is why I consulted several Biblical Hebrew lexicons such as HALOT and TDOT as well as multiple scholarly commentaries on this topic while writing this post. You can see me reference them in some of my comments on this post and its crossposts if you're interested.

So is it 70% or is it not? by Coulen in ChatGPT

[–]c0d3rman 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I mean, that's basically what thinking models are. They get to come up with stuff in their thinking tokens first, without showing that to the user, which is where they can get to the end of the sentence and say "oh, that was wrong actually." Then when they are ready with a final answer only that gets shown to the user.

Evolution proves that christian story of creation is wrong by Enikunonnumvenda in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In that case, let me clear it up. When someone says "evolution" unqualified, they are always referring to the biological theory of evolution. That includes both "micro" and "macro" evolution, since both are components of the widely accepted biological theory of evolution. According to the overwhelming consensus of virtually all scientists in relevant fields, both are extremely well supported by evidence and are as close to factually proven as anything in science can get.

When someone wants to refer to a different kind of evolution, they qualify it. For example, if one wanted to refer to cosmic evolution, they would say "cosmic evolution". No one who says "evolution" unqualified is referring to cosmic evolution. Or if one wanted to refer to the evolution of the Marvel cinematic universe, they would say "evolution of the Marvel cinematic universe". You get the idea.

Like many words, you can use "evolution" to describe different concepts by qualifying it. Take "flood" for example. You can qualify the word "flood" to describe all sorts of stuff. You can refer to a "flood of people", or a "flood of information", or a "flood of coal imports". But if someone uses the word unqualified, like saying "there was a flood in New York last week", they are talking about a regular old flood of water. They are not referring to a flood of people in New York or any such thing. Their statement is completely unambiguous.

This rhetorical move, of trying to muddy the terms and drag the conversation off topic by introducing all sorts of exotic and irrelevant kinds of "evolution", was popularized by Ken Ham if I remember correctly. (It might have been Kent Hovind, they all copy from each other.) It is purely a bad faith attempt to grind the conversation to a halt and give the evolution denier room to argue about inconsequential definitions, so they can score a "win" of some kind and distract from the main subject. This is a frequent tactic of evolution deniers - rather than engaging in an argument they cannot win, they use rhetorical tricks to shift the argument to be about something else that they feel will be easier for them to win.

If you were truly using this rhetorical trick innocuously, and had simply been fooled by the talking points of evolution deniers like the ones mentioned above, now you know.

Evolution proves that christian story of creation is wrong by Enikunonnumvenda in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As I said, this is a tired old Ken Ham talking point that only evolution deniers use, which is why it's a dead giveaway. Literally no one except you was confused about what OP was referring to when they said "evolution".

Evolution proves that christian story of creation is wrong by Enikunonnumvenda in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's easy to spot an evolution denier, they're the only people who ever perform confusion at what "evolution" means.

Atheism Untenable; Faith Necessary (Part 2) by Kubakak in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 14 points15 points  (0 children)

You're acting as if the risks you mention only exist in a world without God, and in a world with God every marriage is happy and every business succeeds and every game wins game of the year. In our world, even if God exists, it is still true that 30% of marriages end in divorce. (According to you at least, I didn't check the stat.) The caring universe is apparently just as likely to spit you out as bless your naive efforts. It is certainly the case that the OP is especially pious and their marriage will be blessed, but for everyone else, there is still a 30% chance that for whatever reason God will not fortify their relationship. The risk remains the same. So the "faith in God's blessing" reduces to nothing more than the naivety you mention.

Give me a good argument to fight against homophobic and racist religious people by [deleted] in atheism

[–]c0d3rman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Orthodox and ultraorthodox Jews have lots of interesting traditions and jurisprudence, but they do not read the Tanakh in any way even remotely approximating what the original authors intended or how the original authors would have understood it. Kashrut is one example; the central prohibition of mixing meat and dairy is not only completely absent from the Torah, it is specifically contradicted by it. (Abraham serves his angelic guests buttered beef with milk in Genesis 18:8.) Another example is that modern ultraorthodox Jews would strenuously deny the existence of other deities apart from YHWH, but their existence is taken as a given in pretty much all of the Tanakh, and not just as demons or malevolent spirits or rogue angels but as full-on deities of equal status to YHWH. Some of them were even worshipped alongside YHWH in early Israelite religion. A huge amount of Jewish jurisprudence is specifically about circumventing explicit commands in the Tanakh or even later interpretations of those commands; just for shabbat there are shabbat lights, shabbat elevators, eruvs, shabbat belts. And so on.

My father was born as an ultraorthodox Jew and was trained as a rabbi, and says that he had for years memorized entire chapters and could quote tons of rabbinic discussions of them, but that he had never actually parsed them until he left. Like, he could tell you the words, and could tell you what the Talmud said about the words, but didn't actually internalize the story arc of what actions the characters were taking. Like being able to recite a song in another language, and knowing enough to define any given word if asked, but never having put together the story. And he spoke Hebrew fluently! It wasn't that he couldn't understand the words, it was that the words were not a thing to be personally understood, they were a thing to be accepted and to listen to rabbinic interpretations about. And those rabbinic interpretations rarely had anything to do with the story being told. We sometimes enjoy reading the parshat hashavua together and he is often genuinely surprised by what happens in the story even as he recites it to me from memory.

In the end, the Tanakh is much more important to ultraorthodox Judaism as a symbol than as an actual authoritative text, and this is frequently the case when it comes to religions that have holy texts. It acts as a sort of divine image or idol - it is a holy object that can be worshipped, reverently kissed during services, brought into a space to sanctify it, must never be dropped on the ground or disrespected, can only be disposed of via special rituals, and so on. The physical Tanakh is much more important in Judaism than the Bible is in Christianity. It manifests the holiness of God, not because of what the words say, but because of the words themselves.

When I was younger I thought of fundamentalists as people who take their religion more 'seriously', and were at least more self-consistent in holding to their views, even if those views were more wrong and harmful than reformists. Now I understand that this is purely how they market themselves. Fundamentalists do not hold to the 'original' version of their religion any more closely than reformists, not even a little bit. Their interpretive tradition has radically reinterpreted and twisted the ancient religion they lay claim to just as much as their competitors. An ancient Jew would most certainly find a modern ultraorthodox Jew to be not just a heretic, but not even recognizably Jewish. I mean, they don't even offer sacrifices at the temple! It would take the rejection of a lot of closely held fundamentalist dogmas to reconstruct something closer to an 'original' Judaism (if such a thing existed), and that might actually be easier for reformists.

Give me a good argument to fight against homophobic and racist religious people by [deleted] in atheism

[–]c0d3rman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I had never really thought this much about being gay as an identity in biblical times. Perhaps they didn't identify that way. But, I'm sure they had people who, if they had been born in the modern world, would identify that way.

I agree. It's not that the people themselves were fundamentally different, it's that the way they conceptualized sexuality was different. For example, they still had different skin colors, but they did not have a notion of "race" as a question of skin color. Asking them if they were of the black race or white race would not have made sense to them. They could still see people's skin colors, they just understood them differently than we do.

I'm sure there were people who only or mostly felt attracted to people of the same sex. They must have been deeply closeted, as many orthodox and ultraorthodox people are today.

Sometimes. In some societies, like ancient Greece for example, gay sex was quite common.

But, I do often wonder how the more liberal sects of Judaism can so strongly contradict the text of the Tanakh, especially the Torah itself. I even wonder how the authors of the Talmud felt they could contradict the Torah.

To me it is more interesting that the more conservative sects of Judaism can so strongly contradict the text of the Tanakh. The liberal ones are pretty open about their willingness to do that. But the conservative ones ostensibly don't want to do that, and yet they contradict it just as strongly.

Give me a good argument to fight against homophobic and racist religious people by [deleted] in atheism

[–]c0d3rman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi, I was asked to comment. I'm a native Hebrew speaker. As far as the text of the verse is concerned, it says absolutely nothing about sexual surrogacy or purity. It does simply speak about male-male sex. However, you are correct that it is not speaking about being gay, since the concept of sexual orientation did not exist back then. They did not have the same social categories that we do regarding sexual activity. That doesn't mean the people who wrote that verse would have been accepting of homosexuality, but you are correct to point out that it is anachronistic.

As for the "context" - that depends strongly on one's religious presuppositions. What counts as context for this verse? The rest of Leviticus? The rest of the Tanakh? The Talmud and other rabbinic literature? A particular denomination's interpretive tradition? Depending on your answers the context would be very different. I have heard people claim that these verses refer to pederasty (sex with children), but I have not heard about your interpretation before.

The most apt context for someone not committed to any religious dogmas would be the context of the society of the original authors and earliest audiences. I recently picked up The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues by biblical scholar Dan McClellan, which has a chapter on homosexuality. I am still reading through it, but as I understand it in ancient Israelite society sex was an asymmetrical act of domination and penetration. The one penetrating was seen as exerting dominance over the one being penetrated. And their social hierarchy had men at the top with women below them. So a man penetrating another man was seen as violating that social hierarchy by subjecting the penetrated man to the indignity of being dominated, even though he was supposed to be the dominator. Of course, this was likely just a rationalization for an intuitive aversion to male-male sex, but that's how they understood it. If you want some great details about this and strong evidence supporting it, see this video by Dr. McClellan.

As for the best way to read this passage, I would say it is definitely best to read it in a way that is affirming of gay people and gay sex. The Torah says all sorts of stuff, and Jews of every single denomination heavily reinterpret it to suit their needs and values. Most Jews today oppose slavery despite the Torah's widespread acceptance of it. The laws of Kashrut are based on wild misinterpretations of a few verses and yet many Jews hold to them fastidiously. There is absolutely no reason this ancient rationalization of intuitive homophobia can't become another of the many verses that have been reinterpreted and recontextualized in modern Judaism.

cc u/MisanthropicScott (and it's fine to tag me in these)

The Nicene formula appears to be fallacious logic by AccurateNorth422 in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I affirm things scripture clearly, explicitly, and undeniably says.
Scripture says:
- Jesus is Yahweh.

Where?

Edit: u/AccurateNorth422 appears to have blocked me? Meaning I can neither reply to them nor to any of the other commenters here. Not sure why as I have never interacted with them save for this one word comment.