I hate fundies, by Metamatician.

How can you take all the complex emotions a person can feel for various other people in the world, everyone you know falling on your scale somewhere between love and hate, and fit it into the traditional model of relationships that stem primarily from Western monotheistic beliefs? I'm not going to go into my personal feelings about monogamy, marriage, free-love, or whatever, but the fact is, all variations on the theme really do exist, as do homosexual and bi-sexual lifestyles and almost everything else you can think of.

Once again it's backwards religions that attempt to force everyone into the same mold. For the most part diversity is making strides against this old-fashioned idea, but not nearly fast enough for some unfortunate people or in some particular areas. To me, if you love someone and they love you back, and you are both adults and consent to have a relationship, then that's all that matters. And if adults want to do other things with their lives like take drugs or live in communes or swing or whatever, that should be their right as well. What grounds does a government have to make laws as to what's moral or not?

Practical laws to keep people from harming one another are a different matter, but the law should keep its nose out of people's personal lives and bodies. Someday people will look back on some of the current prejudices and legislature as being as ridiculous as buying and selling human beings to use as slaves. Hopefully organized religion and intolerant beliefs of all kinds will vanish slowly over time, but I'm not as optimistic about this as I might have been if I'd lived at some point from the dawn of the Age of Reason up the mid 20th century or so.

Back then, the world still had lots of problems, but the problems of ignorance and dogma were steadily lessening in most places in the world as science and technology advanced. Unfortunately in our current climate of scientific indeterminacy (quantum uncertainty, complexity, chaos, emergence, blurring distinction between what's alive and what isn't), renewed religious fundamentalism, and technology that is poisoning our planet and making dubious "contributions" to the lives and culture of its people, we seem to have slid backwards from this noble pursuit back into some murky reactionary phase.

Is this merely an adjustment period after which an advance toward reason and peaceful enlightenment will resume, or a true shift in the wind? It's too early to tell, but again, I'm not optimistic. Science has simply gotten too specialized and difficult for most people to understand, reason has been dealt blows from the collape of Newton's clockwork universe and from sociological models embracing cultural relevancy (no objective mores, rights, truths), and it's hard to see the whole planet ever coming together into the kind of peaceful, seamless constituancy often found in science fiction novels.

But who knows, maybe further breakthroughs are ahead which will reverse the direction toward unification once again.