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Originally Posted by martinguerre
See...ths funny thing is i'm the only one in this thread that i know to be queer. But as i'm also Christian, i get supurbly tired of the "blame it on God" stuff that gets thrown around.
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I ALWAYS put God and His followers in different catagories. God is responible or love and virtue and freedom and forgiveness. His followers are responsible for the crusades. His followers are responsible for virtually every religious war in the last 1000 years. His followers are often bigoted and try to interpret God's will to their own ends. It is important to remember that God is infalable, and man is falable. When I was the Abrahamic religions, I speak of those who claim they represent God, but who in reality use God as a tool for gaining power and control over people. God gave us hope, Pat Robertson gave us hatered.
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Originally Posted by martinguerre
Will, i don't know what to say to you, other than your reading of Roman culture is seriously flawed. Stoic ethics states that being penetrated is serious problem for a man...and so too is the desire for lots to sex. They are feminizing influences that reduce one's ability to control the body.
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Was what I wrote incorrect? Was anything that I wrote actually incorrect? Do you know how widespread Stocim was? Do you know that Stoicm, founded by Zeno of Citium, by trying to piggy back the philosophy on some of Plato's views, and that it was widely considered to be naturalist, and thus less civilized by most Greeks? Do you know about the Cynics, the root of Stocim? Did you know that the Cynics were essentially puritans (suppression of desires and restriction of wants)? Did you know that after what we now call hristianity took up roots in Rome, that the Stoics were among the first to convert? In other words, despite the roots of Stocim not being Abrahamic, their decendants, and thus any current influence, is Abrahamic.
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Originally Posted by martinguerre
To a Stoic (THE dominant discourse of upper class Roman society in the Imperial period) the problem of life is desire and fragility. You can be hurt, and you can want for what you don't have...and that is a problem. To be perfect is to be noblely above the harm of the world and desire for things in it. The perfect being is:
Masculine, firm, cool, unaffected, governed by proper spirit (pnuema) and impervious.
Imperfect beings desire sex, are warm, quick tempered, feminine, fragile, and responsive to stimuli.
There are no strict dichotomies, but continums. Education, training, rhetoric, everything is a practice for the high status male to control and discipline body and mind in to perfection.
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I know what Stoicm is.
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Originally Posted by martinguerre
Paul picks up on a lot of this rhetoric, and changes it in some interesting ways. Control of the body is huge for Romans...that's why crucifixtion is so shaming. But to Paul, it's a place to show the ultimate impermeability of God's power. That's quite a reversal. But in some places, notably in gender and sex...Paul takes on those ethics without substatial revision.
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Like I said, Christianity was a singularly grand influence on those who were once Stoic. Paul adapted the words of Christ in order to make them more generally acceptable by the society that was already immerced in Stocim. Let me put it this way. Who are the direct descendants of Stoists? Romans, Spaniards, French, Greek...pretty much everyone around the Mediterranean Sea. What religion are they now? Almost entirely Christian, Muslim, and Jewish; all religions that ar Abrahamic, and all religions that came to their understanding of homosexuality independantly of Stoicm. I am suggesting that Stoicm has little or no influence on the current state of homosexuality in the US, and thus is irrelevant to the question "has anyone pimpointed a time when homosexuality became taboo?" If we want to go purely chronilogically, instead of by current influence, we can give Judism credit (Judism predates Stocim by hundreds of years).