It's not so very long since gay men were criminals in parts of the US.

It's not altogether clear to me that LGBT people - even white ones - ought always to be on the side of law enforcement against those whom the law deems to be criminals.

This is bullshit. The images and the story are over a year old. Which may be why the person who posted this story here didn't feel the need to link to an actual news story about it.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/images-church-attack-nigeria-date-2022-not-2023-violence-2023-12-29/

@lololulu19 But those are the wrong questions. The primary role of face-masks is not to prevent the wearer from getting infected, but rather to reduce the chances of them transmitting the virus to others if they are infected. And the role of vaccines is not primarily to prevent infection with the omicron variant, but rather to reduce the severity of infections by boosting T-cell immunity. Vaccination won't necessarily stop you from getting infected, but it will hopefully prevent you from becoming seriously ill.

As a simple Google image search could tell you, that image dates from November 2019. Try again.

https://twitter.com/nicolasturgeon/status/1197880442634096640?lang=en

Recently, a thread was removed from a post because it had become the focus of "political" comments to do with a major geopolitical conflict. The moderator who removed the posts did so on the grounds that "this is a positive community."

That's a questionable claim to start with, but if there is a policy against 'political' comments it seems to be very selectively applied. Perhaps this is because all comments here are really "political" - this is, whether we like it or not, a political site. Porn is always political, and gay porn is doubly political.

I can see the point of discouraging disruptive or bad-tempered comments (I think the thread concerned was neither of these things). But insisting on a blanket rejection of 'political' comments would actually result in the removal of a very significant proportion of the comments on this site.

At the very least, much more clarity is needed about what is and is not acceptable.

It's not so very long since gay men were criminals in parts of the US.

It's not altogether clear to me that LGBT people - even white ones - ought always to be on the side of law enforcement against those whom the law deems to be criminals.

You're being more than a little disingenuous about what happened here.

The meeting was not simply "a Jewish group" - it was a pro-Israel rally linked to right-wing political movements in Israel, and featuring former IDF soldiers speaking against the BDS movement.

The meeting attracted a counter-demonstration from critics of Israel and supporters of BDS.  Press reports suggest that the protest was mostly peaceful, and nobody was punished.

The only remotely surprising thing about any of this was that the University was seemingly unprepared for such a confrontation.

The National Post writes:

"Video posted to social media of the protest showed little outright violence, but many people jostling in an unruly crowd overseen by police, and loud chanting of “Viva viva Palestina,” “Occupation is a crime,” “viva intifada (uprising)” and “One two three four occupation no more five six seven eight Israel is an apartheid state.”

Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook told the Canadian Press there was a physical altercation involving several people, and one person suffered minor injuries.

There were no arrests although some people were removed by police.

The event was disrupted by the protest but managed to continue, aided by police barring the doors and eventually escorting attendees out. "

https://nationalpost.com/news/york-university-launches-review-after-event-with-ex-israeli-soldiers-met-with-massive-protest

First, I don't think any sort of knowledge is "objective" in the sense you seem to have in mind. Knowledge in fact seems to me to be subjective by its very nature - in the sense that knowledge cannot exist without somebody to know it (that is, a subject). This goes for scientific knowledge too, which is certainly verifiable, but only on its own terms (you might say that scientific truth is true, but only scientifically true!). It is not disparaging science in any way to say that it is not 'true' in the sense that (most) religious truth-claims are claimed to be true. And I find it a little worrying that many people who want to do away with religion propose to put science in its place. There may be systems of thought that can provide for us some or many of the things that 'religion' does, but I think it is putting far too much faith in science to expect it to assume that burden. In the same way, I don't really see how it can be true that religion "hampers scientific knowledge" (or if it does, it seems to be failing dismally). I don't think religion and scientific knowledge have much to do with each other at all.

You are quite right, however, to say that many features of modern religions are offensive to "common sense" - and this strikes me as one of their great advantages. Perhaps because I'm instinctively suspicious of "common sense" (or "popular wisdom"), I think texts and traditions that interrogate the consensus of the current moment are extremely valuable. The very fact that Christianity and Islam both challenge so many of the unquestioned assumptions of our liberal, secular and capitalist culture seems to me to be one of the things that makes them very powerful and often very unpopular: even where their demands seem bizarre or silly, they remind us that there are alternatives to the dominant moral and political discourses, and that things haven't always been the way they are. They question our historical narrative of moral and epistemological 'progress.'  And they hold out the possibility of a radically different system of value and of regime of truth.

These things are not separate things from the good (or bad) outcomes of religious faith; you can't just keep the love and charity and lose the pilgrimage and sacraments. Nor do I think that religions contain a generic and universal set of positive qualities that could simply be transferred without loss to humanism or rationalism (admitting that those quasi-religious traditions are  not without their own particular virtues). Whatever is good in Christianity belongs properly to Christianity, and while you might well think that the 'religious' virtues of humanism are superior, they are not identical or interchangeable.

@frontmen:

A think it CAN be generalized in terms of believing something there is no evidence for. People are being encouraged not to think for themselves and not to solve their own problems (mostly goes to christians). Furthermore, in some cases it gives excuses to do what you wanted to do anyway and making others believe you're doing the right thing.

Any PROs that religion might have, like the feeling of unity, charity, finding peace in troubling times… None of that is exclusive to religion and is, in my opinion, severly outweighed by critical thinking, free of any dogma.

But, of course, 'religious' people (and I think the word 'religion' is so problematic that I'm going to put it in scare-quotes) do indeed think there is evidence for their religion. This is precisely the point at issue. It is merely not the sort of evidence that atheists will accept.

Undoubtedly you are right that "sometimes" religion gives people excuses to do what they want to do anyway. But it is hardly unique in that regard: people do not have any difficulty, to my mind, in finding pretexts for doing things they really want to do. Religion can be useful for this, but it is not essential. And I would say 'religion' is rather better and more remarkable for sometimes making people do things they really do not want to do.

Of course, my list of 'pros' for religion would be rather different from yours. I would be prepared to admit that many of the things you list can come from other things - such as moral philosophies, political principles and so forth. But then, those things can often begin to look like 'dogmas'. And if they are not 'dogmas' - that is, firmly held beliefs - then they are very unreliable guides to moral action. And so the line between 'religious' and 'non-religious' belief-systems often looks extremely fuzzy. Perhaps in part because there is, to my knowledge, absolutely no commonly-agreed definition of just what a 'religion' is.

But I am not going to argue that 'religion'  (as commonly understood) is better at producing charity, unity, etc. than any other system. I'm merely questioning the assumption that if 'religion' was whipped away from the scene, the same qualities could be inculcated just as effectively by means of - say - utilitarianism or virtue ethics, without any of the risks that religion poses. I challenge the assumption merely that religion has no pros to speak of, or that its pros are clearly and evidently outweighed by cons. Both these claims strike me as rather difficult to argue even to a modest standard of proof.

Firstly, how on earth do you prove that someone is gay? It seems like the kind of allegation that anybody could launch against anybody, and which is very hard either to demonstrate or dispel. Anyone could start a rumour about anyone. These kind of tactics have very little credibility.

Secondly, what is actually achieved by this? How does it help anyone that a few priests are supposedly 'outed'? Does it improve perceptions of LGBT people? Does it build bridges with the Catholic Church? I suspect not. It just makes the activists involved look petty and spiteful, and probably entrenches anti-gay prejudice.

Finally, why is there an expectation that all gay people have to hold and express certain views?  Why is there an expectation that you're somehow a traitor or a hypocrite if you don't support gay marriage, or if you don't completely support secularism? I don't support gay marriage. I'm not a huge fan of secularism. Does that mean I'm a legitimate target for these people? That seems like the gay community turning on its own and enforcing its own hardline brand of dogmatism. And why is not openly discussing your sexual orientation equated with being "in the closet?" This kind of language and behaviour strikes me as very ugly.

I'm not sure how helpful I think it is to generalise in sweeping terms about "religion" - a term that encompases a huge swathe of human social, cultural and political life. Even generalising about specific religious traditions is hazardous (and I wouldn't recommend it, at least in the case of the larger and older traditions).

If you shared more about your experience it might be possible to consider more deeply the particular aspects of religious traditions that could be considered negative or positive.  And, for that matter, about the various ideological and philosophical systems that might replace them (none of which, in my view, are without their own considerable drawbacks).