I suspect that this isn’t going to have very much effect, since people opposing homosexuality are likely to do so out of a instinctive revulsion and rationalize the reasons afterwards. (Note that there are both religious and atheist homophobes, and both religious and atheist people who have no problem with it.) On the other hand, it might convince a few rare individuals… and if you can prevent even a couple of homophobes from hurting other people, that is definitely something to applaud.
I don’t think that the point is to convert the homophobic, but rather to make it easier to refute them, and thus make it harder for them to convert tolerant but apathetic christians to their side.
I suspect that this isn’t going to have very much effect, since people opposing homosexuality are likely to do so out of a instinctive revulsion and rationalize the reasons afterwards. (Note that there are both religious and atheist homophobes, and both religious and atheist people who have no problem with it.)
Obviously it’s not foolproof, but I’ve seen many cases of people almost automatically becoming more tolerant of homosexuality (and becoming more moral in general) after they lost their faith. (This blog post is one very well-stated example. Warmed my heart.) Admittedly, it can work the other way too: I personally know a few ex-Mormons who left the church after (and, certainly, at least partly due to) their becoming more accepting of homosexuality. But don’t discount the first case. There may be some natural revulsion to homosexuality, but when one lives in a society that increasingly has a revulsion to that revulsion, maintaining it requires that one have something very emotionally significant for it to feed on. Religion and homophobia may not cause each other, but they have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship.
I’d like to see some studies on that, though. We could find people who were raised religious (or became religious) but later became non-religious, and ask them their positions on various social/moral issues before and after their deconversion. In instances where their views changed, we could ask whether (in their estimation) it was more of a cause or more an effect of their deconversion.
I suspect that this isn’t going to have very much effect, since people opposing homosexuality are likely to do so out of a instinctive revulsion and rationalize the reasons afterwards. (Note that there are both religious and atheist homophobes, and both religious and atheist people who have no problem with it.) On the other hand, it might convince a few rare individuals… and if you can prevent even a couple of homophobes from hurting other people, that is definitely something to applaud.
I don’t think that the point is to convert the homophobic, but rather to make it easier to refute them, and thus make it harder for them to convert tolerant but apathetic christians to their side.
Obviously it’s not foolproof, but I’ve seen many cases of people almost automatically becoming more tolerant of homosexuality (and becoming more moral in general) after they lost their faith. (This blog post is one very well-stated example. Warmed my heart.) Admittedly, it can work the other way too: I personally know a few ex-Mormons who left the church after (and, certainly, at least partly due to) their becoming more accepting of homosexuality. But don’t discount the first case. There may be some natural revulsion to homosexuality, but when one lives in a society that increasingly has a revulsion to that revulsion, maintaining it requires that one have something very emotionally significant for it to feed on. Religion and homophobia may not cause each other, but they have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship.
I’d like to see some studies on that, though. We could find people who were raised religious (or became religious) but later became non-religious, and ask them their positions on various social/moral issues before and after their deconversion. In instances where their views changed, we could ask whether (in their estimation) it was more of a cause or more an effect of their deconversion.