Have you seen Ian's post #136 above?
Yes, that's why I made the comments about god genes and similar faux data. I'm going on what gay people tell me, which is incidents in their life triggered something in them which oriented them subsequently. Were they fully formed homosexuals from the cradle, or have the potential for SSA aligned by life experiences? That's different from inter-sexuals who are raised in one gender but identify with another, Lady Colin Campbell for example.
Drug addicts are naïve to the dangers of narcotics, or too psychologically weak to resist them. I wouldn't describe either as evil, though both may dispose people to evil influences like robbery and violence. The law doesn't excuse someone on a crystal meth binge who murders the proprietor of a convenience store, and neither would I.
Remember this is only one small area of the board in which people who agree on the absurdity of metaphysical materialism, debate other things. Most casual onlookers are repelled by Skeptiko as anti-evolutionary, anti-scientific, anti-progressive, God-bothering nonsense without ever mentioning a deity. We shouldn't cater for sceptics, of anything.
Speaking for my own experience, I can't remember any gay person having told me that. I come across a fair amount of people's life stories in my work, and it's usually similar to heterosexuals - attraction to one sex that made itself felt at various ages (childhood to adolescence), with the difference that for gay people there was a cultural barrier to confront.
I have to echo that. Worked at a LGBT vacation resort for years. Never had anyone tell me that a life incident somehow affected their feelings about attraction. Quite the opposite.
Yeah. Not so sure about that. Can you point to some sources where gay men say "My mother made me a homosexual?"
No. I mean if you genuinely want to know and don't know how to Google, you'll forgive me, but it seems like one of those forum errands people send each other on when they don't like what something someone says. I'm insisting the phrase had become archetypal enough to devolve into toilet wall humour. "My mother made me a homosexual" - "if I give her the wool will she make me one?", etc. Add the older sibling evidence and the anecdotes people take seriously hereabouts, and you're really going to have to check it out yourself.
And that's basically a bullshit answer one gives when they can't back up something that is complete bullocks. I'm asking you to point to an actual memior, documentary or even perhaps a study that backs up what you are claiming. Believe me, googling "my mom made me gay" returns absolutely nothing of value.
Bullshit or not my Google threw up pages of discussion on the issue of overbearing mothers, detached, hostile fathers, homosexuality and poor parent child relationships and debates from all sides. So to claim I just pulled it out my arse is not very smart. If I pick one you'll play the pseudosceptic and say that's not evidence, it's anecdote, so you'll have to go fishing yourself.
Willing to settle in the middle ground.
I am surprised you aren't more interested in non-material explanations for people's sexuality. I remember the moment when I first began to understand sexuality. I was in Church, looking at the choir girls, and instead of seeing simply girls, they suddenly seemed breathtakingly beautiful! It certainly didn't feel as though I became heterosexual for any rational reason at all, nor did I feel I had any choice in the matter! The whole process could have been better described as a revelation!
I'm prepared to bet I have more gay friends and acquaintances than anyone on this forum who isn't themselves gay, based on the areas I've worked in. So the claim I'm divorced from "queer" reality doesn't wash. Without getting into unfalsifiable cause and effect chains, I do think a lot of homosexual men (I have many fewer lesbian associates) have a range of environmental/social profiles that suggest same sex attraction is not exclusively biological. I think people latch on to biology because it de-problematizes the issue of same sex attraction, and places it as the same level as skin pigmentation and eye colour. Nor do I believe gayness is wholly experiential, I think straight people can be exposed to homosexuality without having any attraction to it. Some actively gay men are only attracted to straight men, who they identify with completely, and fail to see why they don't see the attraction. They clearly don't think homosexuality as a closed biological arena but an experiential one. Without labouring the point, I think there's a lot more going on with gayness than nature or nurture alone.
Put it this way, if Nature reported research that suggested people who believe in life after death were suffering vitamin D deficiency, would you consider it the last word on the subject? I don't think so. Most regulars here probably accept some form of Idealism or panpsychism as the way reality functions, a continued "dialogue" between transcendent reality and matter. So why when it comes to homosexuality do we assume it's an exclusively biological impulse awaiting the arrival of a complete genome, or a chemical imbalance looking for a "cure"? For political reasons, I suspect. We've moved as a society from homosexuals being depicted as predatory perverts to a suffering sainthood, and I think both are misplaced.
