8 Comments

1. 

   acilius

    /  June 29, 2009

   What a strange world we live in. What do you bet that ten years from now, that kid will be paying good money to someone who will help him put that memory into another context? Whether he shells out the bucks to a therapist or to an S/M dominator, I don’t know.

2. 

   cymast

    /  June 29, 2009

   It’s bizarre how many Christian denominations are fixated on homosexuality. I wonder if there are any religions whose members practice casting out heterosexual demons.

   “Be gone straight demon! In the name of Jesus I cast out the heterosexuality!”

3. 

   acilius

    /  June 29, 2009

   Yes, of all the things to fixate on, that so many would choose homosexuality. Or more precisely, their own hostility toward/ fear of homosexuality. Even if it never led them to hurt anyone, how much of their own emotional/ mental energy they must be wasting on that fixation.

4. 

   cymast

    /  June 29, 2009

   You don’t really see the same wild-eyed Christian fervor against war, pedophilia, and misogyny. And those are *real* sins.

5. 

   cymast

    /  June 29, 2009

   I’ve long known there is a correlation between repressed homosexuality and Christianity (yes, I know Christianity is a big word) but perhaps there is a causation as well? A societal influence of “guilt and redemption”? It could start with the Jesus myth having a Jungian sexual influence on people. The male disciples following a male charismatic spiritual leader, the crucifixion, the blood- they could be sexual symbols. And it could work both ways- being a Christian could strengthen any homosexual tendencies, and being a homosexual could draw you to Christianity.

6. 

   acilius

    /  June 29, 2009

   Well, I suppose you’d have to compare behavior among people who are expected to identify as Christian with the behavior of people who are expected to identify with other religions. So you might look at, let’s say, Koreans born into Buddhist families. Among those Korean Buddhists, are repressed homosexuals more likely to convert to Christianity than are others? If so, then you might have found evidence to use in defending an argument that Christianity is a symbolic language that encodes something essentially homosexual.

   Of course, even if you did conduct such a study and you did produce such a finding, you’d still have to rule out other explanations. So maybe their repressed homosexuality implies alienation from their families, which would make it difficult for them to be good Buddhists. So they might turn to Christianity because it welcomes individual converts, not because of anything essentially homosexual about Christianity.

   Or maybe there is no such thing as the “essentially homosexual.” Maybe sexual identities are social constructs and our ideas about essence are just labels we impose on those constructs. If so, it might be impossible to conduct a cross-cultural analysis of the behavior of repressed homosexuals, because “repressed homosexual” might be a category specific to one cultural environment.

   Anyway, it seems like you’ve come up with an extremely difficult hypothesis to test.

7. 

   cymast

    /  June 29, 2009

   “you’ve come up with an extremely difficult hypothesis to test”

   I agree! That’s why nobody’s testing it.

   But I disagree with your idea about sexual identities being social constructs. I don’t know how it could be a social construct across the board.

8. 

   acilius

    /  June 29, 2009

   Oh, that isn’t my idea. I don’t know whether sexual identies are social constructs or not. I’m perfectly willing to believe that an essentialist idea might be true.