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I would hate to think that Diane, in her stated desire not to be confronted with a subject which, because of her internal world she personally finds uncomfortable, just as one or two others explicitly stated, would successfully have the thread closed and the discussion censored due to purposefully posting content the effect of which is an attempt to drag the thread into the gutter.

That kind of behavior should not be rewarded.

You either believe in absolute freedom (which would require a fundamental belief in "speculative bronze age myths, fairy tales or magic" if you're to trust the coldly deterministic principles of physics {or, um, if we're to go to a quantum level, you *could* believe that sentience is that which organises the seemingly random quantum chance factor [which gets you in a whole mess of trouble]} as well) or you believe in determinism. Um...so...if you believe in the latter, Diane had no less choice in writing her post than homosexuals do their orientation, but if you believe in the former you have to accept that sexuality is chosen; hopefully you can understand wherein an opinion so different to your own may lie. I mean, I don't think Diane's post was altogether too awful a thing to say (though, um, the usage of "verbally abuse" ticked my pedantic side , though it shouldn't); perhaps she (forgive the assumption) simply gave more information of her views than most and depicted them in a manner less...socially acceptable. I'm certainly willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but that's my choice. Or not, who knows? Oh, um...Joel (if you've read this far ), your faith in memory is, I'm afraid to suggest, perhaps ill informed; there's such marvels as repression and amnesia to take into account, but, assuming nothing severe is occurring, there's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias to deal with...I mean, um, this piques my interest as perhaps we *are* all born without sexuality and "choose" it early in development (based on what I daren't suggest )before planting memories of always having been that way (and removing those that contradict it)...um...I don't necessarily believe this but it's an interesting view to consider...I'm not trying to force anything down your throat (or anywhere else), just trying to cast a new light into this shadow-play.
Xxx

You left out another choice, which is not to believe.

FSO: Hem... Are you equating the sexual orientation of a person, with the inability to click on 'preview' instead 'post' or to just wait up a few secs to think? I sure hope not!

Ach, I forgot to account for the whole nihilistic and philosophically disenchanted demographic...you...you...grr

About the choice factor, I side with Schopenhauer: Der Mensch kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. [A man can do as he wills, but he can't will as he wills].

Diane...

I remember the first time I learned what women do for men, oral sex. I couldn't believe it.


Homosexuality gets forced down my throat!

No, no, oral sex is not homosexuality. It is straight men that ask women to perform oral sex.

They tell me that all gays are nice people, they are loving, they are kind,... & bla bla bla . . . Well I remember the first time someone told me what homosexuals do.

Lots of heterosexual males love anal sex with women.


Well, as a women, you don't have to go that far.

Anyways, there are some of us (me) who will never understand how men want men or how woman want woman. It's not that we are "homophobic" just like if I don't want to take "illegal drugs" makes me "drugaphobic"! I don't want to get high, I have a right to not do drugs if I chose not to. I have had people try to force me to take drugs & verbally abuse me for not going ahead with it. Call me a goody 2 shoes but leave me be!! . I personally just won't agree with homosexuallity, nor should I be forced to. I think when a man lays with a woman, a baby is produced.

In an overpopulated world women are free to lay with a man and produce offspring everytime no matter how poor they are.

Women are also free to do as men say under most religions.

When a man lays with a man, nothing is produced. It just doesn't sit right with me.

There are millions of men who want to make women pregnant and make lots of babies whether or not they want to marry them or support them and I am comfortable with that because women have to say yes, and they do all the time. It is a woman's right to say yes or no. That is her right.

I don't understand it either, so like you I don't like anything forced down my throat because it forces me to gag.

I don't understand it, so please . . . don't force it down my throat!

Most women don't beat up gays because they love gay men. Sadly, millions of men beat up women so much so that the world has safe houses for women all over the world.

Most women aren't comfortable with the whole thought of it, because until recently women couldn't get divorced and when women got divorced, even thought they were faithful to their husband, and washed his dirty laundry for the lifetime of the marriage, they were left only with memories of the marriage and nothing else, penniless -- but now, of course, women under the law are entitled to half the assets of the marriage, so that a old women of many children, and no pension, they are able to support themselves because the husband has to share the wealth of the marriage with the wife.


I thank you and know that you know my side and I am blessed that women have really, gained under the law since the 1970s. The world is a better place for women now and, too, gays are a better place because of changes in the law.

So I do appreciate how thankful you are about how women have gained under the law and you have a right to accept it.

Today what anyone does in their bedroom is nobody's business. Also, because women are no longer left penniless after marriage, they are often left with enough money after a divorce to buy a piano - - that wouldn't have happened if women didn't get rights under the laws. So enjoy your piano like I do and play it everyday.

Indubitably. The two extreme positions are certainly both possible, but to suggest that they are the only options represents a failure in critical thinking which is known as a false dichotomy. In fact, human truths are often found in the gray areas between extremist thinking.

As I stated earlier, I do think that Diane is doing the best that she can given her unique, personal situation and the social environment of which she is an integral part. I also offer her my well-meant compassion; a compassion which she unfortunately appears to withhold from those she deems as being irreconcilably different to her.

At the same time this matter is not simply an individual matter (what I do in my own bedroom, what you do in your own bedroom) but a social matter (how we treat each other, the respect we show for each other, the fact of our existence as the most complex social animal on the face of the earth that we are all interconnected whether we like it or not) and a political matter (do we believe in enshrining the paradigm of freedom and equal human rights and equal opportunity or should the majority be able to oppress and abuse the minority).

At the same time it is one of evolving societal values as we get further and further from our barbaric past: Does the value of "freedom of religion" become perverted into " tyranny of the opinionated" or "punishment for blasphemy against my god and beliefs"? Does it trump, for example, observation, facts and the scientific method, our continual growth in knowledge as a species going two steps forward and one step backwards in improving our insight into how the world really works and the reality-based thinking that has made our civilization possible since the Renaissance?




The evidence now emerging from neuro-scientific research appears to point unequivocally towards the finding that the early time when we choose our gender and to have brown or blue eyes and to "like men" or "like women" as Joel puts it, is while we are swimming around in the womb; in our mother's uterus.

Talk about precocious decision makers, the lot of us!

For those who find 250 posts too daunting to go wading through, I direct you to an earlier post regarding the scientific evidence for this:

Urgh...I agree with you for the most part. Yes, the dichotomy is simplified falsehood; just as "human truths", as you put it, are sometimes false. It's pretty much all that separates epistemology from logic after all. Um...the problem is, without being condescending to the majority here, I'm unsure as to how tense the grip of the general public is regarding the higher echelons of philisophical research; if you try to learn Nietzche before Plato you're going to end up with egg on and around your face. Your faith in science is nice...but, um, you must admit that *any* theory based on inference, regardless of the amount of evidence, is potentially wrong(for example: Newton-Einstein). Not that you're necessarily so in this case (though I've never before heard of "choosing" eye colour; I thought it was all to do with alleles or some other kind of fish {unless you mean to imply that chiasmata are sentient...um...if so, I'll actually get on board with your direction here }); testosterone/oestragen flushes during pregnancy are well known about and, obviously, affect the development of the brain before it has time to even think about starting a complex memory system....truths and facts though, remember, are not the same thing; music cannot be expressed precisely in words and quite the reverse...um...what I mean to say is that the mind may not be 100% corporeal (no particular glands mentioned ); science may one day find out *everything* about the brain and what does when, and that will be *fact*, but the *truth* of the matter may be that the cause of corporeal substance may, in reality (in the traditional sense) be ethereal...or not, we can *never* know
Xxx

That's actually sort of cute - I like it. Not that I had any choice but to like it...

"Doing the best one can" is a lovely positive spin on "doing the only thing one can". And that's the best I can do.

Reading your posts with all the nested parentheses and brackets feels sometimes like reading a computer program written in LISP, and no that is not meant to be a gay slur.

I used the word "choose" when what I really should have used was " ' choose ' " in an attempt to imply irony and the lack of any real choice, although I refuse to 100% rule out sentience anywhere it might possibly be found, including in small places such as chiasmata.

Epigenetics can be a bit mind-blowing. Yes, it is somewhat disconcerting to realize that some of our most fundamental aspects of sexuality, personal identity, temperament and personality characteristics might have to do with whether or not our grandmother was under some kind of stress in her life and whether or not our mother had hot flashes or listened to a lot of Tchakovsky while were in the womb. If I were a pregnant woman in this day and age I would be absolutely terrified of the profound responsibility one has during those 9 months and how seemingly tiny things of no import you do or don't do can completely change the buns in the oven.

Most of us don't have any explicit, conscious memories before approximately the age of 2-3, but that doesn't mean that our subconscious mind doesn't have them. However, current research indicates that after your first month after birth you can't change your sexual orientation any more than you can change your gender or your eye colo(u)r.

There is a saying that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A corollary to that may be that "everything we don't yet understand (and may never come to understand) about the human brain can be conveniently labelled 'ethereal'" (which also has very Victorian British "let's pull some teeth and hold a seance!" connotations).

Of course you and Kurt Goedel are right about any formal system being per definition incomplete and unprovable as being correct. However, my faith in science is born of experience, practicality and convenience. Science has worked very well for the world and works very well for me, within the relevant range of what we ask from it. Compared to superstition, magical thinking, false beliefs and blind faith in myths, it is positively fantastic, for example when building bridges or healing sick people.

Our qualia regarding music may be as impossible to put into words or as inadequate as the flowery descriptions of the taste of wine or our experience of " blue-ness". However, during the past 20 years there have been enormous advances in our understanding of listening grammar and exactly how the elements of e.g. melodic contour, cadence, anticipation, prediction, surprise, etc. interact with our dopamine reward system. Just as there are scientists that create artificially flavored junk food loaded with fat, sugar, salt and irresistible melanges of manipulative, space-age flavouring-agents that turn people into defenseless, consuming zombies snarfing down entire boxes of crap in one sitting, there are also scientists that create pop songs or jingles that are maximized to burrow themselves into our brains like so many mind worms from some sci-fi B-film. In this case, what your subjective experience is of the music is subordinate to the control it has over you. This is certainly what the ancients understood well when they warned society of the dangerous influence on man's character and on society as a whole of the wrong kind of music. This is also why we neglect classical music at risk of our own peril.

This has been an interesting thread to read. Aside from the inevitable but thankfully small number of bigoted/immature responses, many of the contributions have been thoughtful and perspicacious, particularly those from theJourney.

The discussion puts me in mind of a similar one I saw on a forum for Doctor Who, analysing why there is a noticable disproportionate amount of gay fans of the show. Apart from the campness of the programme in the old days (before it was resurrected in recent years), one of the prevailing theories was that the nature of the Doctor as an alien outsider, a lonely figure, makes him an appealing character to that particular demographic. This ties in with one suggestion from earlier about great artists being outside society, looking in, and the potential increased sensitivity and perspective that comes with that.

I suspect that this does indeed play a role in the number of prominent gay pianists. I also suspect that, while this number is probably indeed disproportionate, our perception of this is (as has also been suggested in the thread) slightly exaggerated because it's easier for pianists to be open about their sexuality than for people in other prominent professions, say sportsmen/women for example. Perhaps also there's a degree of confirmation bias, in that we expect there to be more gay pianists and thus notice when they are more than we do the opposite.

Nonetheless, certain life experiences are conducive to certain personalities and dispositions, and I think it does follow that we might see a large number of gay musicians. It does not logically follow, of course, that being gay makes one an inherently better artist/musician than being straight. Merely that the challenges faced by growing up gay might mean a statistically higher number of such people ending up with artistic dispositions.

Epigenetics just leads you to saying "because The Big Bang, so there" I have a big problem with science and technology in general; the people using it can't hack it. I mean, um, there are those who become obsessed with it (which is semi-acceptable), those who through the ridiculous sterilisation of their homes raise their spawn in clinical environments, giving them barely any immune resistance at all (which is flat out unfortunate), um, there's the dependance some form with devices and social software and all the while the cough of the book is getting weaker by the day...I don't know...um, science has helped create a lot, but...I fear it's almost stripping us of our humanity (which I know is a ludicrous and self-evidently false statement, but you get the point ). Music as an art is one of the few hopes I have of people retaining some kind of purpose in life, some form of feeling (put in the most dramatic way possible), but the impression I get from those around is that music as an art form is dying; music as a pleasant noise is ever on the rise (though this is nothing new, of course). I fear (getting a little more on topic ) that if we could pinpoint the exact parts of the brain that make someone homosexual...well, um, isn't that just fuel for homophobics to say "look, we were right all along, they *are* different, ewww!"? I think....um...schools should have a lesson along the lines of "just plain good manners and decorum"; we've come a long way but I think social evolution needs to take place in a major way before technological. I mean, um, we can put people on the moon yet there's still harsh intolerance out there regarding things that, millenia ago, were considered not only fine but virtuous even! I don't know...doesn't that seem silly?

It seems very silly. Mainly because it's not really clear what the mascaraed arse you are on about.

He also said never give your wife the credit card.

Oh dear god, that Diane woman is still here? Everyone, ignore her - it's pointless to argue with someone who has such an unusually distorted view of reality. You have to laugh at people like that. It's an example of how north america needs to maybe redesign their education system and rethink some of the insipid values they "shove down people's throats", to put it eloquently.

Ugh.

Waffles! Tasty waffles with lots of sirup.

someone has hacked my account and is posting in my name.

Seriously?