Having your first sexual experience doesn’t mean you are going to proceed
towards being promiscuous. It is your choice to have as many or as few
sexual partners in your life (even none if you want). You have lots of “firsts”
in your life, like the first time you drove a car, rode in an airplane, competed
in a sporting event, played your first computer game, etc. Your first time
having sex is just one first out of many. Atheists don’t need to worry about
it. I always remember a play I saw once, where a young girl whose mind is
filled with dreams of romantic exuberance, of cascades of rose petals, of the
“earth moving,” is asking her mom about her mother’s first sexual
experience in one of those touching mother-daughter scenes. “Well,” said
the mother, “it was sort of like riding a bicycle…but without the seat.”
5. Homosexuality is a Variant, Like Having Sour Cream or Butter or
Both on Your Baked Potato
A lot of religions don’t like homosexuals. The Koran doesn’t like effeminate
men (Sahih Bukhari 7:72:774)—maybe that’s another reason for beards to
be so popular?—and the Torah doesn’t like masculine women or effeminate
men (Deuteronomy 22:5). The holy books don’t talk about transgender
people, again because God seemed to have missed this point about future
medical developments when gazing into the future. But the Hebrew Torah
does talk about the exclusion of castrated men from the community
(Deuteronomy 23:1) and from access to the temple (Leviticus 21:16-24).
Men with breast implants are apparently ok for both…
Hebrews and Muslims (in the Hadith, but not in the Koran) both prescribe
death as the penalty for homosexual men (it’s questionable whether the
verses are supposed to apply to women too). It’s sort of odd that the
principal source in the Koran about this prohibition is in reference to a
Hebrew myth about Lot and Sodom. In the Torah, it’s made clear in a
number of places, with the most often quoted being Leviticus 20:13.
However, I do ascribe to the interpretation of 1 and 2 Samuel that David
(YHWH’s favorite son) is described as having a less-than-fully-platonic
relationship with Jonathan (1 Samuel 18-23, and 2 Samuel 1:26)—but then
David gets away with murder multiple times, plus adultery, lying, being a
traitor, etc. Quite a role model for a religion’s founding hero.
Most interpretations of Hinduism do not have any prohibition on
homosexuality, and neither do most Buddhist teachings. But in neither is it
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