It's against my religion to...

[PikesPeaked]

Faith and belief are protected characteristics. This includes lack of religion or belief.

I do not believe that people can change sex.
I do not believe that a male can be a woman, nor that a female can be a man.

I am Jewish.

Judaism forbids us from standing by when another person is at risk of harm.
Judaism forbids us from deceiving a vulnerable person.

Trans ideology harms both young people exposed to it (ROGD) and women in general.

Judaism requires us to treat others with dignity.
Judaism requires us to treat others as we would wish to be treated ourselves.

Interesting discussion. OP, as another person of faith, I agree entirely.

I think genderism is closer to gnosticism and some of the other 1st century ideologies which seperated the soul from the body. Their belief was that essentially the body was bad and the soul was good, and on death the two would be seperated at last and the soul enabled to pass on to purity. There was always that sense that the two were not linked in any way bar physical.

As a Christian I think the opposite. I don't believe in gendered souls, I think we are whole beings. But I respect the right of others to believe what they wish to believe, as long as it does not carry harm to others - and this is the crux of the matter when it comes to safeguarding and women's safe spaces, sport etc.

My beliefs have been torn apart, mocked, derided and hated on more times than I can count on here (I have the tiresome habit of posting on religion and philosophy threads), but I have no issue with such, despite the fact that my faith is entirely bound up with my identity and part of who I am. I could go running to MNHQ and talk about hate speech. There are times the mocking has gone further than my faith and become more personal, but while I think this is more out of order I still believe others have the right to express their beliefs of lack of. If it turned to violence and hate speech, as it does for many faith groups across the world, I'd have a right to go and ask for intervention. But generally the messages are about my beliefs, and so others should have the right to deride them as much as they please, and I stand by their right to do so.

So why then is conversing gently about the beliefs of this particular group known as hate speech or literal violence? Apparently people can't cope with reality being cited, it hurts their feelings. I'm sad they feel hurt, but in possessing a belief one must become robust and allow others to share their thoughts, without breaking down under words which don't attack them personally but simply state facts.

The other thing for me is that as a Christian I have a strong aversion to lying (cf 10 commandments). Therefore I would struggle if we came to a point of having to tell outright lies about biological sex in a situation like a courtroom, for fear of offending. What if this became enshrined in law - what if we weren't allowed to tell the truth, because reality has become so blurred? I don't want to give up telling the truth about observable reality.

I will use preferred pronouns out of respect for a person who experiences gender dysphoria. But I can see things going far further than this in terms of what the public are forbidden from saying and how that law is then upheld

I would struggle if we came to a point of having to tell outright lies about biological sex in a situation like a courtroom, for fear of offending.

That happened to Maria MacLachlan when she was giving her witness testimony of being attacked by a male at Speaker's Corner. She was repeatedly instructed to speak as though her attacker was a woman in court. In the summing up, her inability to consistently do so was given as a reason for not compensating her properly for the assault.

I know this is a bit of a derail - sorry, but I’m interested in this As a Christian I think the opposite. I don't believe in gendered souls, I think we are whole beings.

Can I ask you to explain what you mean by whole beings? I sort of thought most religions had that Cartesian duality approach to body and soul, with the soul being something that lives on in some form after the physical body is dead.
I’m not sure I believe in souls (I’m not a believer of any faith) but as a scientist I know we are woefully far from understanding what consciousness is. The idea of a whole being is sort of like the idea that consciousness arises as an emergent property of the complex system that is the brain - some people think that if you could model all the interactions in a brain you’d get such an emergent consciousness.

It’s not my field and a lot of it I find bewilderingly hard to think about, but I’m very interested if any of the religions think this too ...

Sorry if that’s a daft question! I don’t often get to have civilised discuss on religion and science

An interesting question.

As I understand it, Christianity believes in an eternally intertwined connection between the body and the soul. That's kind of the point of our beliefs in bodily resurrection - God created physical matter, breathed life into people and called it good. He didn't create physical reality to be discarded as a meaningless after thought. The separation of 'soul' and 'body' that we call death is not something God considers good. So we have this wacky belief that we will get our bodies back in 'the resurrection'. We don't really do the disembodied floating about on a cloud for eternity thing.
The metaphysical element as I understand it is more about having an understanding that everything will be remade in a way we can't even comprehend as we are now. The closest we get to it is concepts of multi dimensional stuff, and quantum thinking.

This is one of the reasons why I take the stand I do on trans ideology - the body is a very important part of our existence and dignity, not just a meat suit we can fiddle with to fit our delusions.

That's it exactly, Floral. Over centuries the more platonic dualistic idea of soul vs body has dominated some of Christian thought - the idea of the immortal soul leading to some nasty stuff line indulgences, and the idea of purgatory. I think the NT (and OT in fact) have a different interpretation when it comes to anthropology and the idea of a split soul and body. For eg when Paul talked of the 'psyche' soul, rather than being the idea of some inner essence completely separate from the body, it was to do with God's life breathed into the body. And the 'pneuma' was more like the part of us responding to / worshipping God - the spirit, as it were. The end game of Christianity was never actually centred around unnattaced souls floating around an inconceivable heaven, but a bodily resurrection within a new heavens and new earth, or a restoration of the earth into all it should be. So Jesus when resurrected didn't become a disembodied spirit or ghost like creature, but was in a human body, scars and all.

Pauline theology is very clear on the place of the body in the salvation narrative, and on the way the Christian should honour and value the body with the mind and spirit/soul, not as something to be disdained and looked forward to being without, but as intrinsically part of us as whole human beings, our glory being in our created bodies which reflect who we are along with our minds and the inner parts of us which respond to God / conscience/whatever you want to call it.

Hope that makes some kind of sense! I'm a lurker @bowlofbabelfish but I'm always in awe of your posts - I'm no scientist but you've helped me understand so much of this. Thank you

Thanks madhairday and thanks to you and floral for the explanation.

That’s interesting... I don’t believe in any kind of ressurection (although I hope I’m wrong) but for me the body is important simply because we only get one shot at things. This is it, and so it’s very important we don’t harm each other. I see death as the end, so to harm another person is terribly wrong. I also see the body as a flawed but absolutely mind blowingly incredible thing - I’m always blown away by thinking of how complex our systems are. Thing like watching an embryo divide and self pattern I find wondrous. So again for me the idea of harming that precious wondrous thing is abhorrent.

It’s interesting - we have a different way of arriving at it, but I feel our conclusions are extremely similar.

Heaven (and hell) don't really influence Jewish thinking. There is a concept of afterlife, but it's not particularly important. What matters is this world, the corporeal world, the one that we share with all of mankind and creation, the one that we are the guardians of, that we can nurture or destroy.

By our deeds we are known and remembered. We live on in the consequences of our actions.

I think you're right, bowl, and perhaps our motivations are closer than we realise :) I very much respect your reasons for valuing life and my feminist gender critical stance is from a similar place - ie I don't simply value life and the body out of duty or religion, but because I believe this life is important and should be honoured and protected simply as a human life. Very interesting to hear pikespeaked stance in terms of Judaism too as of course this is the root of my faith, and I think that mediaeval Christianity distorted the message and used heaven/hell as a bargaining chip and an oppressive tool over the masses. Delving back into very early Christianity we see communities valuing life and great programs of social outreach into some grim situations.

It's actually difficult being Christian and taking a GC position as I'm inevitably lumped in with a brand of right-wing conservative theology which is far from my own position (not on here, but if I say anything on twitter etc), and so it feels I am instantly disqualified by virtue of the fact I must be a gay- hating Trump-loving nut. But instead I take this position as the feminist I've always been (I studied feminist theology and am passionate about women in the Bible and dispelling the idea that Christianity is at its core an oppressive and patriarchal faith) and as a person who prefers to trust biological reality - and see science as no enemy to faith, but on the contrary, only as widening out the wonder of it all :)

So interesting to explore some of this. Thank you .

I agree that the transgender ideology reaches deeply into the ancient debate about the relationship between the body and the soul. Science cannot tell us how life arose from dead matter and many prominent atheists have realised this such as the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle who thought that “life” must have arrived on earth from wider space, but this does not explain where this extra-terrestrial life came from. He was the one who said that there was about as much chance of blind forces producing the complex pattern of life on earth as a wind blowing through a junkyard producing a Boeing 707.

When the psychoimmunerologist Paul Pearsall found that about ten per cent of heart transplant patients were taking on the tastes, preferences and memories of the donor he thought that we had made first contact with the soul. It appeared to him that the soul was perhaps part of the body’s cellular memory and as such not entirely tied up with the brain. But, the soul has always (including in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament) been seen to have some kind of half-life away from the body. This is why death is likened to sleep over fifty times in the Bible and why the idea of purgatory arose. The soul must be ‘somewhere’ before the final cataclysm that sees people resurrected to either one form of life or another (that is in ‘heaven or hell). Simplistic ideas of heaven do not answer either much of what is written in the Bible, or of what is being uncovered on the fringes of science.

But I agree with the other Christian posters, the soul and the body are incomplete without each other and this idea is also central to ancient Greek thought going right back to Homer. Plato’s emphasis on the soul’s escape from the body into a disembodied mental realm has struck such a chord with many people because every night we experience a partially disembodied mental and emotional life. The question remains what happens to this life when we die – does it really just dissolve into the ether, and, if it doesn’t, what happens to it?

Interesting discussion.

The notion of a person being literally separate from their body ('born in the wrong body') is much less mainstream than I expected in modern belief systems.

If you're interested in digging deeper, this article is a good place to start - a long read, but very comprehensive: ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/mind-spirit-soul-and-body/

Basically, when the Bible refers to the 'psyche' the 'flesh' and the 'pneuma' none of these terms describe in any sense a 'part' of the person, but actually each one is a descriptor of the whole of the person - so the flesh is the whole, the pneuma or spirit is the whole, the psyche or soul is the whole, the mind is the whole. The Bible contains no theology of seperating these elements out, and the gospel is one of the redemption of the whole person in body, mind, spirit, etc, not a saving of a disembodied soul to float around on a cloud for eternity. As part of that the narrative is one of redemption of creation which is now broken but will one day be made whole and perfect. So the dualistic anthropology of body and soul as split makes no sense in that light, and so 'born in the wrong body' is simply not compatible with Judeo-Christian doctrine.

Think how annoyed atheists would (rightly) be and even lots of religious people would be (i.e. those who believe in freely choosing faith) if there was a God Recognition Act which said that anybody who said they experienced God must be treated as a prophet and anything they said about that experience must be true...

Well yes, precisely, RedRosa. And furthermore if then everyone was required to worship this god and anyone who didn't should be prosecuted. Shades of the book of Daniel and the king who ordered anyone who wouldn't bow at his golden statue to be thrown into a furnace...

And furthermore if then everyone was required to worship this god and anyone who didn't should be prosecuted.

Genderism is a belief system, and the compelled speech and compelled belief are in direct opposition to a secular society and freedom of speech and thought

I am mainly a reform Jew but very disappointed in how Reform Judaism has bowed completely to the trans cult and thrown out unilaterally all the laws which protect women. I am a trans widow and would prefer to go to at least a conservative synagogue but of course my partner doesn't want to because they are "less accepting". One of the most hurtful things to me is the Sabbath, where I never feel I get the respect I am due - he would be offended over being left out.
Judaism has huge bodies of literature over the rights of women and the place of women and men. There has been some twaddle lately about how "Judaism says there are 6 genders in the Talmud" and it does not, the Talmud in some ancient text simply talks about several intersex conditions they recognized to exist, and which roles such people should fulfill in society, because they are a two gender religion. They do not traditionally allow people to be trans just because they "feel like it".

@53rdway - "I think when you describe it as a religion that gets heard as an insult - "oh you're saying it's the same as believing in sky fairies and woo!""

You do realize there are many people who actually say this? I have had an atheist friend I have known for years accuse me of being literally mentally ill for trying to explain a religious belief to him.

Oh nm my last post, I think I misread, early here and haven't had coffee and trying to read and post quickly before trans hubby gets up so I don't have my own blasphemy trial. Haha o.o

"I think genderism is closer to gnosticism and some of the other 1st century ideologies which seperated the soul from the body."

Makes sense, he flirted with gnostic beliefs for a long time, doesn't believe them now I think so much but it probably fed into the trans decision somehow.

The Jewish view of the soul is that we are all born 'neutral', with infinite capacity. This is nothing to do with sex or with gender stereotypes. It is all to do with good and evil. We are completely innocent and ignorant at birth.

Our natures, our souls, reflect the duality of our bodies in that we have the capacity to choose to do good or to do evil. Unlike the fixed female/male binary of our bodies, however, the duality of our souls is not fixed, because our souls have freedom of choice.

The inclination towards evil is called Yetzer HaRah. It is not of itself evil - feelings are not evil, deeds are. Allowing the Yetzer HaRah complete freedom leads to evil acts. Controlling and directing it leads to creativity. So even the inclination towards evil can be positive.

"I do things differently" is controlling the Yetzer HaRah.
"I do things differently and you must change to accept that I am in charge of how things are done" is allowing the Yetzer HaRah complete freedom.

very disappointed in how Reform Judaism has bowed completely to the trans cult and thrown out unilaterally all the laws which protect women

Even Reform don't accept anyone as a Jew who rocks up and says "I'm a Jew because I say I am". So why do they accept anyone as a woman who says "I'm a woman because I say I am"?

Not all rabbis have drunk the KoolAid, but some are treading a very careful line.

Very interesting - I am woefully uninformed about so much of religion, and it’s interesting to be able to talk about this in a civil context.

How ‘on the radar’ of your religions is this? Is it something that’s spoken about, or a concern? I would imagine there’s considerable pressure to be seen to be ok with a lot of stuff.

I find it really depressing that lots of people I know who are progressive Christians and totally fine with accepting homosexuality, but also really unthinking about Genderism. I also know Christians who are critical of the Transgender push for all sorts of good reasons, but they are very lukewarm to outright homophobic about gay people.

Christians who are fine with gay people and critical of gender nonsense are few and far between ime. I know about 5 people I can sure of.

Judaism forbids us from standing by when another person is at risk of harm.
Judaism forbids us from deceiving a vulnerable person.

Except when cutting bits off babies' genitals though right?

I refer you to my post of Saturday at 19:34.

Personally I think circumcision is one of those practices that need to be re-evaluated and changed.

One of the most hurtful things to me is the Sabbath, where I never feel I get the respect I am due - he would be offended over being left out.

I'm not Jewish but even I can see how wounding this would be for you.