What think we?

[Brandenburger Toro]

What think we?

Look, this is very simple. "Intrinsic" serves to differentiate necessary features from contingent ones, even if the contingent features are universal and ubiquitous. It isn't an intensifier, of any sort.

So, it is a contingent fact about gold that there is no lump of it anywhere more than 200 metres in diameter*. But it is a necessary fact about uranium that there is no such lump, because at much smaller dimensions than that it would reach critical mass and implode. Uranium could not be otherwise, gold could but isn't; this is an intrinsic feature of uranium, and not an intrinsic feature of gold.

Even though it's true of all gold everywhere.*

Got it?

* apart from the 200m lump of gold outside our lightcone in the shape of Sepp Blatter, obvs.

[Taylor]

What think we?

Ginger Yellow wrote:

The Times has learned that, while in Britain, he is planning to meet the revisionist historian David Irving, in order to find out how to present his views on the Holocaust without arousing controversy.

Oh my... quote of the day.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What think we?

Their email correspondence is here.

[N est à?]

What think we?

No it isn't.

[Wyatt Earp]

What think we?

Explode. Not implode. Explode.

Anyway, if the issue is what's meant by "intrinsic" I vote we skirt it by not using that word. No-one would claim, I think, that it's a necessary truth that all religion is hostile to homosexuality; indeed, it's possible to imagine a religion in which it was some sort of sacrament, and for all I know there are or have been dozens of cases of exactly that in human history. What I think people meant by "intrinsic" is that, contrary to what Toro says, religion is indeed part of the problem here. That's what the real bone of contention seems to be: is part of the problem with religious homophobia the "religious" bit?

And I think there's a case for saying "yes": a case that isn't answered by observing that the link is contingent. After all, the link between smoking and lung cancer isn't necessary either. More than that: they're not even coextensive. Yet to say "The trouble with smoking-related lung cancer is the lung cancer, not the smoking" would be true in no useful sense.

The case against (Abrahamic) religion here, to reiterate it, rests on the arbitrary nature of its norms: upon the fact that within many influential strands of those religions (even if not in Toro's "mainstream", which never seems all that main to me), an appeal to Scripture or to clerical teaching is regarded as authoritative. That means that something can be proscribed without there being any need to show that it breaches some general ethical principle (except perhaps one concocted post hoc): it can be associated with no harms, it can be wholly uncoercive and mutual, it can be demonstrably "natural" and it can still be wrong. Moreover (and I think this is central) as any evidence about harm, coercion and "naturalness" shifts, the proscription remains stable in the face of those changes.

If I'm right here, then it's no accident that there are proscriptions like the one against homosexuality to be found in the commandment-based religions, though the fact that homosexuality figures among the things that are arbitrarily proscribed may be accidental.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What think we?

Tish and fipsy.