morality, sex, homosexualityGenerally speaking, is the atheist community more accepting of alternative sexualities than more religious communities? (eg: homosexuality, polyamory, etc.)
In my experience, due to a lack of a ‘Sky Daddy is watching you masturbate’ mentality, atheists are absolutely more accepting. But that may also be because the people with whom I associate are more on the Humanist side of the atheist spectrum.
There’s a great talk about this by atheist/feminst Greta Christina at Purdue University:
Greta Christina on Atheism & Sexuality
The gist of the talk is that as soon as you take prejudice, tradition and an Ancient Book out of the equation, the only remaining criterion for the morality of sexuality is consent. No other argument remains valid.
I apologize beforehand if my response seems … disjointed.
After Adam and Eve ate the apple in the biblical story of Genesis, they became aware of the fact that they were naked and sought to hide themselves. There are times that I wonder if this passage is used to teach young children to be ashamed of being naked. I have two young sons, ages 4 and 6 and I can speak with an absolute certainty that neither one of them is ashamed of being naked. That, however, may be as much a function of their age than anything. I do not teach them to be ashamed but that being naked is generally an in-home thing. And they’re fine with that. I wonder what’s going to happen as they get older.
There are times when I go back and forth between the question of whether it is more important that I identify myself as an atheist or as an antitheist. The times when I consider myself an antitheist are often the net result of my distaste for the teachings of conservative religions as relates to sex and sexuality. And it manifests itself in a lot of different ways:
– being opposed to all birth control. In other words, they want to instill a fear of either pregnancy or disease that causes people, while simultaneously encouraging organic growth of the faith through a large number of births
– treating gays as second class citizens. This one makes no sense to me whatsoever. Depending on how you read the bible, there’s anywhere from one to three verses that say not to engage in gay sex. In the entire bible. (And for reference, the Bible lists more things that you shouldn’t eat and/or more ways by which you shouldn’t prepare them.) Speaking as a straight man who has never felt an attraction for another man, I don’t understand why anyone should care one way or another whether someone would prefer to sleep with men or women. I can understand apathy, but not the antipathy that conservative religions espouse and embrace.
– Opposition to the Gardasil vaccine. Having a vaccine that reduces the risk of cervical cancer will cause girls to sleep around the same way having the typhus vaccine will cause you to want to go to Calcutta to drink the sewer water.
– abstinence pledges. I think they’re a downright bad idea and not a concept to be emulated or encouraged. I recognize that there aren’t many people out there who hold these kinds of pledges to the level of disdain that I do, but I would like to provide more explanation to this statement. Ask any divorce lawyer the most common reasons why people get divorced, and they’ll probably say money first and sex second. A breakdown in communication stemming from sex generally means that one partner has some sexual need or urge that isn’t being satisfied by the other. Although I’m not trying to say that you should sleep with everyone you meet, how can you possibly know what you do and don’t like, sexually, if the first time you do it, is with the person you’ve promised to spend the rest of your life with? Sure, it’s possible you’ll – forgive the choice of words – get lucky and find that you and your partner do and don’t like the same things, but isn’t that an awfully big risk?
Of course, I recognize that my disagreement with the official doctrines of the religions that espouse these ideas doesn’t implicitly imply atheism, but if you seek to turn away from a religion for any reason, doesn’t it make sense to turn away from these doctrines as well?
I don’t think you can say that it follows; plenty of hippy dippy free-love, church of the orgasm religions out there, in addition to more liberal mainstream faiths that are tolerant, at least of homosexuality. And there are certainly plenty of hardcore, intolerant religious types who are secretly closet cases.
I think it’s perhaps more that atheism tends to correlate with education, and education tends to correlate with tolerance, but that’s pretty thin as well. More likely we simply want to believe we’re different, and it’s delusional.
While I agree it doesn’t follow that being an atheist implies that you are more tolerant of sexuality, I think we can indeed make a generalization in this case.
Most atheists are de-converts (at least in the US). De-converting eliminates the dogma that condemns alternative lifestyles in the first place. It can’t possibly add new stigmas. Therefore, unless every de-convert retains his or her previous level of sexual intolerance, it stands to reason that atheists as a group will grow more tolerant over time, if they aren’t already.
The question displays a distinctly western christian bias toward sex and morality. The idea that conservative sexual behavior is somehow equivalent to morality is not found in many other cultures. I have lived and worked in countries which were very religious and very conservative. Sexual behavior was not seen as a moral issue. There was wide acceptance of different sexual orientations. Sex education was commonly given by parents who were open and free with knowledge. Sex was not spoken about in whispers and was a common topic among people past the age of puberty. The only moral issue around sex is informed consent. Your choice of sex partner and sexual activities are not moral issues any more than your choice of dinner partner and cooking methods would be.
My personal experiences (personal - anecdotal, not scientific at all!) are that, in general, Atheists tend to be more accepting. This was something that it took me a while (personally) to come to. I had become very accepting of homosexuality while I was in high school, and still considered myself Christian. Recently, I had a friend who I found out was transgender. One of the big questions I had to ask myself was why it bothered me. I realized it bothered me because of the religious connotations - i.e. “God made them the sex they are, they should be that gender” - which is completely and utterly rediculous. Once I realized that, it stopped being a question for me.
Personal anecdotes aside, those whom I see as Rationalists, whose numbers seem to be larger amongst Atheists, seem to be more accepting. As one other person answering said, “as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else” and “consenting adults” - those are the keys in my mind. I have found most other Atheists I know (all 4 or 5 of them) to be in agreement with me on this.
Sorry if this is too meandering of an answer.
Yes I think they are more accepting but there is a maybe in there as well.
Generally speaking it is the person I want to know and respect. I dont give a toss what the person does as long as it does no harm to others. I have a friend who is a Priest who devoted his adult life to giving comfort to the dying of any faith and of any disease. He would help a aids victim with nobody to see them off as they died, he would bring God into it only if asked and only to bring true comfort. Then there are gay people I have fallen out with because they are dicks.
I would say, generally speaking, atheists do not base their sexual morality upon prescribed dogmas of any of the world’s religious faiths. We analyze and think and discuss morality, so the group will have a wider range of “acceptable” sexual practices than any religious faith or dogma.
We, the individuals, choose and negotiate what is moral with our sexual partners, and while there are always gray areas for “societal norms,” I think those who mention “informed consent” as THE primary concern are on the right track.
What religious dogma (holy book) contains THAT as its “sexual morality?
Sexuality, It had to come up, something I find rather disconcerting. While, no doubt, atheists would agree that there needs to be some form of regulation of sexual activity in relation to consent and capacity for consent I wonder why the discussion of sexuality is so common in our society? I think at best it is a religiously inspired method of social control that has become such a institution that it detracts us from the more important consideration; can a state be considered legitimate if it seeks to impose sexual morality on it’s citizens beyond the aforementioned consent criteria
I would say yes, for two reasons:
1) No religion, no guilt. There’s no authority telling you that sex is only for specific reasons, between specific people, after a proscribed ritual has been enacted, and only certain acts (and sometimes in certain positions!) are allowed. You don’t have to constantly question every sensation you have and wonder whether it’s making some grand authority angry that you’re responding to your own body.
2) As atheists, we are on the outskirts of every modern society I can think of, and so are generally more accepting of others also on the “outside” of whatever the “majority” decrees.
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