Logic & Rationality

There’s a growing campaign to get Pope Ratzo barred from the UK as an undesirable due to his opinions on homosexuals. I’d go so far as to have this nasty cult proscribed as a banned organisation under the Human Rights Act. The pope needs telling that his omniscient God is plain wrong on a whole host of issues - and has been found to be so on a number of occasions since the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.

Let’s analyse the situation. The law of the land denies anyone the right to discriminate on the basis any attribute over which an individual has no control, such as their colour, race, age, disability or gender. This seems to me to be morally incontrovertible and a universal truth in this enlightened age of ours. Given that one’s sexuality is not a choice but a given, it follows logically that discrimination on the basis of sexuality should be included in the list of forbidden discriminations. There’s no other way of looking at it other than to say discrimination on the basis of sexuality is ipso facto as irrational and morally repugnant as discrimination on the basis of colour.

Now the church believes that that homosexuality is a sin. It therefore follows a priori that the church must be morally wrong in this belief. Given we have free speech the church is nonetheless free to believe what it wills, however, it should not be allowed to act on this belief when it comes to a selection process, else it will breach both the law and rationality, and surely God is the supreme example of rationality.

Similarly it is also irrational and morally reprehensible to discriminate against women priests. If these orders to discriminate on the basis of gender or sexuality are a direct commandment from God, then this God must be guilty of irrationality. Now God is defined (by the church) as being perfect in every respect, which must include the attribute of being supremely, indeed perfectly rational. The church must therefore recognise that this divinely inspired order to discriminate is not in fact a divine order at all but the product of a misinterpretation or deliberate misrepresentation of God’s divine and perfectly rational will. To do otherwise makes God imperfect and destroys in an instant the concept of God as defined by the church itself.

The only defence against the above is to say that homosexuality is indeed a choice. If it is a choice and homosexual people can easily choose heterosexuality, then it follows that heterosexual people should find it relatively easy to choose homosexuality – a choice I can guarantee that none of my heterosexual readers would find even conceivable. Did you choose your sexuality?

To quote the Royal College of Psychiatrists: “Despite almost a century of psychoanalytic and psychological speculation, there is no substantive evidence to support the suggestion that the nature of parenting or early childhood experiences play any role in the formation of a person’s fundamental heterosexual or homosexual orientation. It would appear that sexual orientation is biological in nature, determined by a complex interplay of genetic factors and the early uterine environment. Sexual orientation is therefore not a choice.”

In conclusion, if the church is to set itself up as the upholder of morality, it is then acting hypocritically and with all the rationality of an arch bigot when it comes to sexuality and gender. The only possible way it can justify its actions is to declare, against all reason, experience and scientific evidence (but since when did reason have anything to do with religion), that homosexuality is a choice and that it can be ‘cured’. This is like shouting at the top of your voice that the earth is flat, or the universe was created 6,000 years ago. Hang on – didn’t the church at one time proclaim these incontrovertible facts?

The church will resort to reying on pure emotion rather than reasoned argument, which unfortunately is a tactic that usually wins the day due to the hoi pollio not taking at all well to thinking. This is borne out by the Amercian attitude to healthcare, people's belief in the efficacy of atioxidants and the MMR fisaco.