"Liberal agenda" in the true sense of the phrase

You are splitting hairs here. Everyone knows that liberalism as a popular movement in america has agendas just like conservatives do.

:up:

It's actually certain feminists (who tend to be overwhelmingly liberal) who reject the idea of transwomen being in their bathrooms, or getting social services as women...these women tend to be insulted as "T.E.R.F"s by trans supporters

That’s fair, but modern fourth-wave feminism tends to support transwomen. Traditional women that are of the earlier type of feminism are the one’s insulted.

 The bathroom issue is a liitle more dicey, because kicking them out of women's bathrooms means forcing them to use men's bathrooms, something people shouldnt do to each other

Why not? You are a man: you should use the men’s bathroom. You are a woman: you should use the women’s bathroom. Should we create a bathroom stall for every gender they make up? Should we have one family bathroom that everyone has to take turns using?

I dont get hostility towards putting something different on your drivers license or the drag shows: in the former, it just makes it even easier for the police to identify you 

It hinders the police in their investigations: every important trait of a person that they can generalize is tied to sex and not this ‘gender’ as a ‘personality type’. Police officers don’t care what you identify as or how you decide to dress or present yourself: they want to know when they come to scene if they are about to deal with a male or female to be able to tell how hard it will be to detain or arrest this person. Dealing physically with a male is generally wildly different than a woman.

 explicit trans labeling

I think there should be some record of people’s known mental disorders. It is useful for police to know, e.g., that this person is schizophrenic.

I wouldn’t say it needs to be a specific note on the driver’s license that they are trans or that they are mentally ill, of course; but when they look up the license it should tell them of any past history of mental illness (which I would imagine they already do).

 drag shows

I don’t think drag shows should be legal. They expose children to sexually degenerate, explicit, and dangerous content and behavior that is unhealthy for them. Likewise, I don’t think adults should have to experience that either.

Isn't this just the problem or flaw with monotheism? If everything flows from one entity, then that entity is responsible for everything. Since many events are evil, then that entity must be at least partly evil as we conceive it.

No. Evil is the privation of good; and other persons in the creation could be responsible for its introduction.

It doesn't matter that he was explicitly killing everyone in the OT

It matters because God then would be doing something evil as opposed to merely allowing the evil of someone else.

Sex - Expected social behavior based on biology. It is statistically more likely for men to be aggressive.
Gender - Expecting a man to be aggressive and thinking, "You're not a man if you're not aggressive" even though it is a statistical reality that there will always be men who are less aggressive than women on average. The expectation is not based on biological likelihood, but cultural prejudice and expectations despite biological reality.

That’s fine, but I don’t think that is how gender theory nor my theory uses the terms.

There is no biological reason for a woman to wear a dress or ribbons in their hair for example

There is. Women tend towards things that are feminine. You are viewing gender in a sense of something that is purely a social construct, which is what liberals want because they can make these exact arguments. If there is no biological underpinning for women wearing dresses, then it is irrational and prejudicial to socially condemn men that wear dresses.

I understand the idea and I cannot say you are right or wrong. Only that I do not believe in a soul, so cannot hold this view.

Fair enough.

If gender and sex are separate as defined, then there is absolutely zero rational connection between one's gender having any justification for being in cross sex spaces.

For liberalism, the argument tends to be that we should only care about gender for treating people. This is why they push for bathrooms to be segregated on the basis of gender instead of sex; allowing transgenders to put their ‘gender’ as the opposite on their driver’s licenses; allowing men to play in women’s sports; etc.

I completely agree with you that we should care about sex and not gender if we are using the term ‘gender’ to refer to something completely divorced of sex.

But does that justify control from a religious viewpoint to a secular declaration of marriage? I would argue linguistic limitations to control thoughts is wrong no matter who is in control.

I partially agree. Firstly, I think politics is an upshot of ethics; so this secular idea of making ethics a personal hobby doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think ethics and the nation are truly separable, although I agree with the original intent behind “separation of church and state”.

I agree, secondly, that we should try to be intellectually virtuous in politics; but unfortunately, pragmatically, rhetoric is really important to explaining things to the average person. Normal people don’t do philosophy like you and I where we dissect ideas and follow rationally what we believe is correct: most people just listen to political debates online or on the media that are fully of fallacious thought and convince them of one position or another. Most people are sadly moved by emotion and not reason.

Think of it this way. If you needed to convince people in a public political debate of your position, you will not succeed by trying to have a robust conversation like we are doing now. You will succeed by using loose terminology, simplifying it down, and being a good debater (speaker). The consequence of using loose terminology is that you have to reject your opponents terminology instead of being charitable. I’ve learned that politics is a much muddier and bloody process than philosophy.

 I think the definition of words themselves as a means of control is wrong.

I agree in the sense that we should be aiming to provide precise definitions and get at the truth; but political debates don’t allow the time or resources to be able to have a super robust conversation like in philosophy. What I am doing here is attempting to help people by using language that helps them avoid the conflations and sophistry meant to deceive them in gender theory: I’m trying to help them but in an oversimplified way to reach the average person.

Fantastic discussion as always Bob! We may be taking different viewpoints on some of this, but I do understand where you are coming from. Your political views are your own and I am fine with whatever they are.

You too, my friend!

Banno, if you were paying attention, you would know I have noted many times in this thread that someone could make a virtual but not real distinction between sex and gender and I wouldn't have any major issues with it. The bottom-line is that gender is not a social construct.

To me they seem to be founded in bigotry, but no doubt you think I’m wrong too, so I guess we’re a microcosm of our times.

The difference between us, I would suggest, is that I don’t think you are a bigot for thinking there is a difference between gender or sex; or even holding stereotypical liberal views I reject (if you do). A bigotry charge is a serious accusation: why do you think people who disagree with your political views are all bigots? Or is just those who reject gender theory? Or perhaps my account of gender and sex?

The issue for me is that no one has the right to use another person’s body without their consent, even to preserve life. For the pregnant, this means a person is not morally obligated to sustain a fetus, regardless of whether it is considered a “person,” because a right to life does not include the right to forcibly use someone else’s body. And this principle applies universally: just as no one is required to donate a kidney or remain attached to life-support to save another, no one can be compelled to maintain a pregnancy, making abortion permissible on the basis of bodily autonomy and self-ownership.

I hear where you are coming from; but you are overlooking a consideration of how one can uphold their rights. You are not wrong that one has the right to not have their body used against their consent; but this doesn’t mean that someone can do anything they need in order to avoid their body being used against their consent. By analogy, I have a right to life: I have a right to not be directly intentionally killed when innocent. However, I do not have the right to do everything in my power to avoid getting murdered. For example, imagine someone is going to kill me but gives me the option to go murder someone else to get out of it; and let’s say I know with 100% certainty that I will get murdered if I do not commit this murder (so I can’t escape or something) and if I murder this other person then they will honor the agreement (thereby avoiding my own murder). Can I do that? No. The ends do not justify the means. What you are missing here is that a person is not permitted to violate someone else’s rights to uphold their own.

For example, if you were kidnapped by an evil scientist and this scientist surgically connected you to another innocent victim whereby you could live without being connected to the other victim but NOT vice-versa. If you were given the option to either surgically remove this other victim from you and thereby re-gain your bodily autonomy (assuming you do not consent to the situation) OR you have to continue to have your bodily resources being used to supply life to this other innocent person, is it morally perimissilbe for you to cut the cord? Of course not. You cannot violate this other person’s right to life to uphold your own rights: that’s a bad means for a good end.

Your idea that we can “cure” them seems antediluvian or Stalinist. Let’s cure gay people too, huh?

I don’t support Stalin: that’s a blatant straw man. Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues? Do you really believe that a perfectly healthy (psychologically and biologically) human that grows up on an environment perfectly conducive to human flourishing would end up with the desire to have sex with the same sex? Do you think a part of our biological programming is to insert a sex organ into an organ designed to defecate?

Do you get your moral views from a particular interpretation of Christianity?

I get it from Aristo-Thomism.

:up:

I don't know why @Banno never wants to engage. :confused:

Maleness and masculinity aren't the same and I never suggested otherwise: they are conceptually distinct. Gender and sex, under my view, are not. Being male is having a nature of the procreative type that serves the role of providing, protecting, impregnating, etc. a female: it is based off of sex. Masculinity is the traits that males naturally gravitate towards, but are not traits that only males could exhibit: same for femininity. Everyone that is male is a male fully in essence but is imperfectly one in existence.

Nature. Have you never heard of Natural Selection?

Yes I have: what’s your point?

And what do we actually mean when we say that "gender is a social construction"? Wouldn't that mean that for a person to transition between genders they would have to transition between societies (as in moving from one country to another, or from one region to another)?

Not necessarily; but I am not interested in defending gender theory. My position was against gender theory; and your role as a critic would be to defend it (unless you are agreeing with me or have an alternative theory).

And how is a social construction equitable to a personal feeling? By declaring gender as a social expectation we are defining gender as the expectations of society as a whole, not the feelings of an individual that run counter to those expectations

It’s a confusion of both. The individual sees that other people are treated differently than them based off of their nature (e.g., a man noticing a woman can wear a dress); they want to be treated that way (e.g., he wants to wear a dress); so he starts mimicking what normally would be associated with being female. Gender theory tries to rationalize this by saying that gender is just those social cues and expressions—not the expectations of society—and so someone can legitimately present themselves and thereby be that other gender (so now you are allegedly irrational for thinking the man should not be wearing dresses because he is a woman now qua gender). It’s sophistical nonsense.

The fact you will never engage with me on any topic and continue to gate-keep, superficially name-drop, and posture makes me believe, if I am being honest, that you don't have a metaphysical theory you adhere to.

I think I have built enough rapport with you for you to know that I am sincere in my efforts and I will happily and unapologetically concede any points I think are good from my opposition. You are saying, as many times before, that I am simply ignorant of some newer metaphysics that would swipe Aristotelianism off its feet and I am, as usual, asking you for what they are. You refuse to lead the horse to water, and the horse is parched....

Instead of making baseless accusations, I would challenge you to actually contend with the points I made. It is uncontroversially true in America that what I explicated is the liberal agenda (although, as I noted to @Tom Storm, some of the language they will disagree with [like calling abortion murder]).

Fair enough!

In my view the substantial form of the body, the soul, is what accounts for the nature of a human....

1) For individuals to live free of bigotry and for homosexuality and trans people to be able to live as they want.

True, but this is the underlying reason why they support some of the agendas I gave: you are just supporting my claims here. I understand some of my language they would not agree with because it begs the question (like calling abortion murder), but generally those claims do hold.

2) A woman's right to have bodily autonomy and self-determination.

Yes, at the expense of murdering a child. Having an abortion is like hiring a hit man to solve your problems. I’m tired of people acting like abortion is a niche and complicated issue: by historical standards of murder, it is murder. No one would argue that, e.g., I didn’t commit murder if I used someone against their will as a shield to jump out of a window of a burning building to successfully save myself from the excruciating suffering of burning alive...even if it was the only way for me to save myself...and yet if a woman’s life is on the line in pregnancy its fine to directly intentionally kill the innocent person in the women.

The only complex aspect of abortion is whether or not one believes personhood begins at conception—not if autonomy “trumps” the right to life.

. Trans people exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist, denying them serves no one. Why not simply accept this reality?

I am not, nor is any mainstream conservative, arguing that trans people don’t exist: that would be silly. Trans people exist as a person of the gender they have independently of which gender they want to be: they exist as mentally ill people who desperately need our help to cure them. They have really high anxiety, depression, and suicidality that is needs to be addressed. Now, a liberal might argue that pragmatically the best way to deal with those symptoms is to affirm their gender: to conform their body to their mind; for me it is to conform their mind to their body.

Minor issues, such as prisons, toilets, or sport, can be resolved and are distractions from the deeper question of identity. I'm not interested in how we choreograph prisons or sport to accommodate an evolving understanding of gender. Let's leave those to social policy processes.

For you, then, what are the ‘major issues’ related to transgenderism?

What do you have against trans people? Is it ultimately that you believe they go against God?

I have love for transgender people as all people. I want them to be able to live their best lives; but living a good life is relative to the realization of their essence in existence—not bending reality to what they desire. I think we should have government programs for studying transgenderism to cure it and they should have programs that help transgenders be cured. Admitting that affirming transgenderism is immoral does not mean that we should stigmatize it and make it completely illegal to talk about it. We need to make transgender people feel welcome and safe enough to get help; just like we do with schizophrenics.

Lmao. You always do this: you posture without actually engaging with me. If you think there is some metaphysical theory out there that is better than my own view, then I am all ears as usual. You never provide any.

To be clear, I am not interested you just name dropping a book: I want you to forward a position that you find plausible that I can discuss with you. If you aren't up for the challenge, then I don't get the point in you posturing.

1. i personally think it has to do with differences in terms of what rights people think they should have have...for example, lots of completely heterosexual liberals want people to freely practice "those deviant behaviors", but are indifferent as to whether or not they do it, it's a matter of what they should be allowed to do, rather than enforcing homosexuality...etc.

Yes: this fits their liberal agenda of providing people with maximal choices to choose from and autonomy: the selling point of liberalism is that ethics is supposed to be divorced from politics. My point was that there are liberal agendas: you are shifting the goal-post.

2. transgenderism in a legal framework, no unified agreement...not something i hear a lot of liberals advocating besides transexuals and their supporters

What do you mean by transgenderism being a legal framework? It’s a ideological view that one can convert to a different gender.

Liberals are advocating for “transgender rights”, drag shows, etc. in America rit large: this is not a niche position that liberals support people having affirming gender care and being able to transition.

3. the "no enforcible immigration policies" is an extreme left-wing or anarchist point of view, it's not the kind of thing advocated by your typical liberal. Biden and Obama both intensely enforced immigration policy, the severe drop in mexican immigration we see now started at the end of the Biden administration...

That’s true; but right now we see people actively supporting illegal immigrants, even to the point of helping them evade ICE, and condemning mass deportations. Liberals don’t really support deportations in practice.

4. That's a fairly loaded way to discuss abortion, it's a purely moral framing as opposed to a consequentialist or ecnomic/social way of looking at the problem.

Consequentialism is a family of normative ethical theories; and morality is the only way to properly evaluate abortion. Economic and social aspects of the discussion only supplement the position one holds relative to ethics.

These are all differences in how people think policies should be shaped, none of them are really "agendas" unless you apply the same logic in reverse (i.e., opposition to gay marriage is a "conservative agenda"), it's a basic part of representative democracies for differences in opinion to exist.

An agenda is “the underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group”. Unless you think that liberalism doesn’t by-at-large forward those positions, then I don’t know why you think it isn’t an agenda. Likewise, I agree that conservatives have agendas: I have agendas. Everyone has an agenda.

:up:

But since I am a male, and a man, and have procreated as proof, I declare that long hair and flowers are male traits and symbols, and whatever behaviour I demonstrate is by definition masculine behaviour

As a side note, I commend and congratulate you on having a kid (or kids): having kids is a wonderful and challenging thing.

Your argument is not valid, though ):

You are arguing that “if a father exhibits a trait, then it must be masculine”; but this divorces masculinity from the nature of man and swaps it for whatever subjectively any given father does. As a clear demonstration of this absurdity, it leads to obvious contradictions: if father A plays chess, then chess is masculine; and if father B is against playing chess, then chess is not masculine. Now in the event that A and B are fathers it follows that playing chess is both masculine and not masculine.

the old testament was likely part of some ruling class's doctrine on why they are superior; one part of the old testament that supports this is how Lot's daughters got him drunk in a cave and had sex with him to continue the bloodline of their family. It's a blatant appeal to lineage.

The old testament is an attempt at giving a narration of what they believed was Divine Revelation by God (even if it wasn’t); and recording lineages was an aspect of giving a historical account of what was happening.

I think it has to be a combination of my theory on it being used as part of a social control scheme and number 2#.

The idea that the Biblical scriptures were a product of insanity or elitism seems implausible given that they were recording as different times and over a long period of time. It was and still is a generation-by-generation effort. You would have to believe that these were historically unfolding for the purpose of aristocracy…

 If you have observed children, you'll see that they have spontaneous imaginations: when humanity was early, they just didn't have access to the type of accumulated knowledge we have today, so they stayed more childlike in terms of belief and explanation.

To some extent this is true, but this begs the question by assuming that the Bible doesn’t have truth in it.

Interesting. I just don't understand how that ontologically would work; other than if there is some atemporal connection we have to each other.

But no one is divorcing them, just distinguishing. But still, we hippy males like to wear flowers in our long feminine hair too

The fact that you called it feminine concedes that you do think gender is tied to biology….

Can you come up with examples of liberal agendas? There are liberals, there are agendas, but "liberal agenda" paints a unified conspiracy when political agendas always have to do with money and power.

Liberalism in America tends to want the social and legal acceptance of:

1. Sexually deviant, homosexual, and transgender behaviors and practices;
2. The treatment of people relative to what they want to be as opposed to what they are (e.g., gender affirmation, putting the preferred gender on driver’s licenses, allowing men to enter female bathrooms, allowing men to play in female sports, etc.);
3. No enforceable immigration policies;
4. Murdering of children in the womb;
Etc.

I appreciate your response!

I think, and correct me if I am misunderstanding, you are viewing gender and sex as distinct; whereas my model here admits of no such distinction. Granted, I think semantically someone could cut it up differently where gender and sex are virtually (conceptually) but not really distinct and I may have no major quibbles with it. I am purposefully retaining an equality between sex and gender to avoid ideological and political confusions and agendas.

 its not a gender expectation that you see most men being taller than women, that's a biological expectation

Under my view, since gender and sex are the same, it is a gender expectation that men tend to be taller than women. This view is making a metaphysical distinction between the form (act) and the matter (potency) of a human being; where the form is the actualizing principle, the simple unity, the soul, which informs the body of what it is supposed to be (relative to the essence or quiddity of a human being). The soul, this form of the body, is innately gendered: there are two types of human souls—male and female.

I think under your view, and correct me if I am wrong, human beings are just a collection of organic parts; and so sex is purely the collection of organs and organic parts functioning together to provide some specific procreative role (e.g., maleness or femaleness). At this point, if we stipulate gender is equal to sex then you end up with essentially my view with respect to everything that truly matters for the political side of things; but under your view I would imagine gender is not identical to sex. Gender, as far as I cant tell in your view, is the social expectations of a person with a particular sex—is that right? If so, then this is the meat of our disagreement; because I would say that, if I were to conceptually distinguish gender and sex, gender is the social expression of sex. This is important because an expectation is not necessarily the upshot of biology. I think true gender, if they be conceptually separable, is always properly connected back to biology; otherwise, like I noted before, it explodes into triviality, prejudice, and irrationality.

 if someone always expected every man to be taller than women or they aren't 'a real man'.

This is a real problem for the kind of metaphysical account of the body that I expounded for your view (which I do not profess is accurate of your position of course per se); but not a problem for mine. Why? Because in your view ‘sex’ is just a collection of parts operating towards some procreative role and, consequently, there is no embodied essence of being a male or female; as each person is male or female only insofar as they sufficiently have enough of those parts and organic functions to count as one or the other. Technically, under this view, if you swap out enough sex-related parts of a human then you could achieve a sex change.

Under my view, on the contrary, human beings have a real essence embodied in themselves. This ‘code of what it is to be a human male or female’ is not identical to DNA: it is really there in their soul, which is the form, the simple ‘I’, the unity, which guides their biological development. This means that each human has the full essence of being a human male or female since conception but developmental factors can thwart their essence being realized properly in time. A woman would is infertile, e.g., is still a woman because she has a human female soul: the essence is there—not merely an abstraction of a collection of body parts making her sufficiently female (e.g,. DNA, fertility, sex organs, etc.). Even if a woman were inhumanly materially changed to lack the vast majority of stereotypical organic traits of femaleness she would still be a female under this view because her soul is female and to truly transition sexes would require killing her and creating a new human of the opposite sex (because her soul is what in virtue of which she is alive).

A real man, then, is not one that is necessarily taller than a woman—because the biological process can be inhibited or altered in ways where a woman could be tall for a woman or vice-versa—but a human substance that has a male soul.

Words change meaning all the time

Your statement here and thereafter are very true; however, semantics do matter in colloquial and political settings. I am merely noting a political stand that we need to conserve the meanings of the words to avoid liberal ideology where men go into women’s bathrooms or participate in female sports. Of course, I recognize that one could make an apolitical (virtual) distinction between sex and gender and note that sex is what really matters: I don’t have major issues with that.

So, what ended up happening? We added an adjective to marriage to clarify what type of marriage it is.

This is exactly my point. Semantics in colloquial speech are tools, nay weapons, for pushing agendas. You control what the average person believes by controlling the linguistics they have at their disposal. For people like me who want to conserve the meaning of marriage and do not support gay marriage, it naturally seems like a rhetorical attack to try to morph the term ‘marriage’ to include other types. Of course, if someone agrees with the political agenda of giving people a wide range of marriage types, then by all means they should morph the terms.

 But it was never intended to be an honest switch. It was intended to hide the use of trans sexual and expand the legal and civil rights of cross sex identity to those who could not afford it or were willing to go through the surgery

Agreed. This is why I have chosen to explain the gender vs. sex distinction differently than conceptually separating them to avoid the liberal agenda of making them really distinct (viz., purely a social construct). If they are purely a social construct, then we need to completely restructure our society to be hyper-libertarian.

There was a psychologist named Leon Festinger who came up with a theory of cognitive dissonance.

This is very interesting, and I could see this happening with all sides of debates. Thanks for sharing!

although I would personally avoid the term 'iiberal' because I most people will equate that as a political issue instead of the philosophical classification you are using. This is an underlying attempt by a small faction to persuade society to accept them through deceptive and conflationary language.

My philosophy here is politically motivated, just to clarify. I am collapsing the two conceptually to avoid people confusing them as really (as opposed to virtually) distinct; while retaining the obvious differences between the expressions of sex (what they would call gender) and sex itself (what they would call sex).

I don’t think the idea that gender is purely a social construct is niche in liberalism: they tend to push agendas that affirm that gender expectations are irrational, immoral, and hateful because they are not anchored in sex. After all, if women wearing dresses is purely a social construct, then how could someone be justified in viewing a man wearing a dress as wrong? Gender theory is an attempt at ad hoc rationalizing radical freedom to push people into feeling bad for having expectations of gender roles and identities.

Because if we are to use this definition of gender is written, the obvious conclusion is: "If gender is purely cultural, then you do not have a viable reason to be in cross sex spaces. Gender and sex are different."

True, but liberals tend to view gender as what matters for public spaces—not sex. They see sex as this irrelevant nature between someone legs that should not dictate how their life should go.

Cardinal Sarah put it the best: “gender ideology is a luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God”.

When we say "healthy" this should only mean biological

I was referring to biology there insofar as the human develops properly in accord with their nature ingrained in their soul.

Gender as a cultural construct can never be objective

Gender is the procreative type ingrained in the nature of a substance: it is not a cultural construct. What we know of and can expect out of the tendencies and expressions of different genders is culturally and individually determined, like all knowledge, but should be the upshot or expression of something objective—it should be grounded in facts about gender (sex).

This is fitting, as I am a merely a feeble peasant...

Agreed. I view gender as socially enforced/acceptable prejudice and sexism.

To a certain extent I could see that when it comes to the more loosely associated aspects of gender to sex (like hair style); but a lot of it seems to be legitimate to me (such as feminine vs. masculine traits and behaviors).

In post-modern society we are very inclined to treat people as if by being a person they are the exact same as every other person; but a “person” is an abstraction: not a kind of substance. Having personhood is an aspect of certain natures—not a nature itself. Although men and women have the same moral worth, they are not equal in nature. They have different roles (teleological) in the human species: they are the yin and yang that solidify the survival and harmony of the species. To discriminate based off of sex just means to differentiate—to treat differently—based off of sex; and this is not per se wrong. You get a woman flowers when you wouldn’t have if they were a man; you draft men and not women for wars; etc.

I mentioned to another poster here that the game is to get you to say a trans person is the other sex without having you think you're saying a trans person is the other sex

Exactly! Or it is a convoluted game of noting the superficial point that there are an indefinite amount of personalities that someone would express.

But how would that ontology work? How would we all be ontologically tied together when we don't even exist in the same time?

Thus you have a theism on *your* terms, *not* on God's terms

Natural theology is the application of reason, and Her Principles, to the natural world God created to determine God’s existence and nature. There’s nothing about this that is personal or subjective.

Our reason is an image of the Divine Reason; which gives it its legitimacy.

Divine revelation, even if accepted merely as a concept, is necessary in order to overcome "natural theology". Because "natural theology" is self-centred with God merely as an object in it.

Natural theology is an attempt of determining God’s existence and His nature: it is not self-centered at all; other than being the attempt at acquiring truth, which is equally true of anything Divinely Revealed being accepted by people.

You're evaluating God on *your* terms, not on God's terms.

That is begging the question: you are assuming it is Divinely Revealed. I was using my analysis to determine if it is Divinely Revealed in the first place.

Any attempt of verifying the OT legitimacy will fall prey to your critique. E.g., well you method of verifying the OT’s historicity to verify that it is Divinely Revealed is “a bottom-up”, self-centered, and “on-your-own-terms” attempt; so it is illegitimate.

 I have no issue with new terms or approaches, but are the statements involved in these approaches valid?

I don’t think it succeeds, because they don’t really divorce male and female as sex from as gender. They still refer to, e.g., female qua gender as what socially we expect normally out of female qua sex; so they are still viewing it through the prism of “what should we expect this being of this nature to behave and represent?”.

Let’s say it is purely social though and that what we expect a sex to behave like is purely based off of unrelated factors to their nature. Then the view does succeed in divorcing them, but now it falls into superficiality. If gender is just some particular trope of expression that any person could decide to exhibit, then it is just a personal personality that someone is deciding to become; and then this would be utterly meaningless for important aspects of how we treat people of different natures. For example, is it meaningful to divy up bathrooms based off of purely subjective personality types? Not at all. We separate the bathrooms based off of natures to properly respect their dignities. Divvying up the bathrooms on personalities would be like having a chess player fanatic bathroom only, a gamers only bathroom, the ping-pong addicts bathroom; etc. This isn’t a meaningful differentiator for driver licenses, prisons, bathrooms, etc.

This is why, going back to my point about the political tension, the important aspect of gender theory is not itself but, rather, what it is being developed for: it is being used to peddle treating people in the sense of gender as if it is in the sense of sex. Neo-liberals want to be able to present themselves as if they are the opposite sex so that they now get treated as if they are one; and they came up with gender theory to try and justify it. The common view on gender theory isn’t merely that “gender” is analogous to social personality types and expressions: it’s the attempt of subverting normal gender (sex) roles for personality traits and social expressions. E.g., I am now a woman because I present myself as one, so now you should treat me as if I really am a woman (in terms of how we would treat one that is biologically a woman); and is the real meat of the disagreement.

If a person could truly change sexes, then this wouldn’t be a political issue; but it not is the case that they can’t but also for conservatives it doesn’t help that they normally hold that the soul has a gender (sex) which cannot be changed without killing the person.

100% Part of the approach here is to demonstrate the poor grammar involved in this attempt. If someone actually felt that gender was completely divorced from sex, I would likely see an argument somewhere saying, "You're right, we need to be more specific," or trying to justify the grammer. The only reply I've seen so far is, "Well people talk this way now, and we shouldn't debate what words should mean."

Fair enough. If I were playing devil’s advocate, I would say that gender is purely social; and sex is biological. How we decided to treat people based off of sex is truly social. So if you are treating a biological woman in X manner it would not be related to the woman’s biology or nature; if that is true, then if someone who isn’t a biological woman presents the same social cues that you use to determine how to treat a biological woman, then you would rationally need to treat the non-biological woman the same way.

My thought is that there must be some ontological reality binding humans one to another, i.e. that we are not merely individuals. Hence God, in creating humans, did not create a set of individuals, but actually also created a whole, and there is a concern for the whole qua whole (which does not deny a concern for the parts). If one buys into the Western notion of individualism too deeply, then traditional Christian doctrines such as Original Sin make little sense.

I am inclined to agree, except wouldn’t it be juridical and not ontologically?

What implication did I make where the consequent is illegitimate connected to the antecedent?

Long time no see, Philosophim! I hope you are doing well.

Gender - A cultural expectation of non-biological behavior in regards to an individual's sex

I know you are stipulating this definition for the sake of the OP, but it is worth mentioning that this precludes the main usage of the word throughout history. Gender has always been the upshot of biology (nature). With gender theory, we see a new development of trying to cleanly separate the two so that people that claim to be a woman or man without committing themselves to the absurdity of claiming to be biologically one when they are not.

If by ‘woman’ and ‘man’ you are referring to merely a set of social cues and behaviors that at person gives off that are typically associated with the given sex (of man or woman), then why semantically refer to these ‘genders’ as men and women? It seems like a blatant equivocation that muddies the waters—don’t you think?

I mean, if it really is the case that being a ‘man by gender’ is completely separable from being a ‘man by sex’ and this is a new distinction one is making (that has very little historical precedent), then why not call it ‘being a loto’ or some other word that isn’t deeply entrenched in biology?

I think that is what the ‘is a transwoman a woman’ political debate comes down to: conservatives do not want to reuse the biologically entrenched words to refer to something totally different, whereas liberals want to use it so they can piggy-back off of the various ways we deal with sex in terms of gender instead (like bathroom assignments).

CC: @Janus, @Colo Millz

It may help your conversation to note that virtual properties/distinctions are different than real properties/distinctions; and, for Scotists, there may be a third 'formal distinction'.

Triangularity and trilaterality are conceptually (virtually) distinct; but are not really distinct.

I want to show you that the "God of philosophers" (which is, basically, what you're arguing for) is impotent and inconsequential.

The concept of God argued in the OP is the classical theistic version of God; which is the metaphysical basis for the major “theims” in the West, such as Aristotle’s, Plato’s, Aquinas’, etc.

It provides, in-itself, a sufficient theory of ethics and an understanding of reality to live a good life. I don’t think one needs divine revelation for this (for the most part).

Do you pray to him?
Do you thank him for everything in your life?
Have you joined a community of people who also believe in the God you believe in?
Do you ask this God to destroy your enemies?
Do you destroy your enemies in the name of this God?

This is a derailment, though. Personally, I am a Christian now; but none of the above is required in order to live a sufficiently good life. Natural theology is sufficient.

The aspect of theism that is the most important is not worship: it is ethics, which governs politics, economics, and practical life.

What is the relevance of this God of yours in your life, other than that it's a concept connecting some metaphysical dots?

Metaphysics is not some abstraction that is meaningless for practical life: it informs it by giving a clearer understanding of the nature’s of things. Understanding the nature’s of things helps with understanding what is objectively good and bad; and this informs what is right and wrong.

What is good for you? What is good for society? How should I treat my neighbor? What should I do with my life? All of these are informed by ethics.

What exactly do you understand? Wherefrom did you get what you understand?

That is an unfeasible question to answer briefly: you are asking essentially for the entire historical development of my consciousness.

Without revelation, or at least the notion of revelation, one is dealing merely with the artifacts of one's own mind.

I would say one can know God through natural theology. For more on the arguments I would give, please see the link in the OP. I outline it in detail there.

I didn't create God, baker. You are confusing coming to understand something with creating something.

:up: I'll take a look.

I apologize for the incredibly belated response!

The problem with the analogy is that Original Sin doesn't merely deprive you of a gratuitous gift; it actually harms you. You come to harm (or come to be compromised) through no fault of your own, and because of someone else's poor decision.

I see what you are saying. The question arises: if God is not deploying a concept of group guilt, then why wouldn’t God simply restore that grace for those generations that came after (since they were individually innocent)?

This makes me hypothesize that it may have been impossible for God to do so because it would violate His nature OR that group guilt is not immoral. I lean towards the former.

My thought would be that God begins creation with a pure act of which He knows its full causality; i.e., if He chooses to create world A then causally all of this stuff in set sA will happen and if He chooses to create world B then causally … etc. If there is a best possible world, which is perfectly aligned with God’s nature (which would be causally harmonious and non-parasitically causally ordered), then a Great Fall would entail the necessary annihilation of that world and its re-creation; because the causality would always be altered indefinitely from the “sin spillage”. This restoration would be impossible through repairing it (that is, through preserving some of the world in restoring it back) because the very fabric of causality would be polluted (e.g., the molecular level would be poisoned). If this is true, then God could only restore the grace of those born after the Great Fall by an act of annihilation; and annihilation is an act of willing the bad of something (by willing its non-existence, which is bad for that thing since the more being it has—the more its essence is realized in existence—the better it is). God cannot will the bad of anything directly because His creation powers can only will a thing in accord with is form (perfectly) because He has perfect knowledge; and to will the bad of something is to will a depravity in its form. Consequently, once God wills something to be He cannot rescind it. Therefore, under this view, God would have to let natural death do its thing, for those who can die, as opposed to doing it Himself.

Of course, the highlight here is the hard pill to swallow that God can’t rescind existence from things (which would be by way of no longer willing their existence [actively]). However, God could annihilate particular things through other things (e.g., having fire burn a man); because He, in those instances, is simultaneously willing the good of both by willing their existence in perfect correspondence with their forms (e.g., the fire’s form and the man’s form) and allowing their interaction to dictate the outcome (e.g., the man burns alive). Annihilating an entire totality of creation, though, would require willing the bad of it in a direct way; and this is impossible for God to do.

What do you think?

How is the idea of a non-person deity consistent with the historical use of the term God?

Doesn't it seem to radically redefine what one means by God to refer to a being that is not a person? What kind of definition is Spinoza using (to decipher if his Substance is meaningfully identifiable as God or a god)?

I am a free agent Bob, so I have freedom of indifference and freedom of excellence.

You would be a free agent in the sense of freedom for excellence if you cultivated the virtues, you have sufficient knowledge of what is good, and your environment is conducive to your flourishing as a human.

Are you saying that God does not have freedom of indifference and therefore cannot sin?

Freedom of indifference and freedom for excellence are incompatible theories. The former holds that freedom fundamentally consists in being able to choose from contraries; whereas the latter holds that freedom fundamentally consists in having a state of being that is conducive to flourishing.

If one accepts freedom for excellence, then God is and is the only possibly perfectly free being because He is has perfect knowledge of what is good, is unimpeded by anything external to Him, and has the power to actualize what He wills; whereas if one accepts freedom of indifference, then God is and is the only possibly perfectly unfree being because He cannot will what is bad (or, depending on the view, He may not be able to do otherwise whatsoever).