Because otherwise I’d have to ask the person who made that how a species with no chances of survival lasted for so many millions of years
saki
What’s hilarious about it (and why I suspect it really has to be a parody) is that if the person who wrote this was serious, I’m assuming they have to be a fundamentalist, but then wouldn’t that also make them creationists?, young-earthers?, and yet they’re admitting dinosaurs went extinct, which implies God didn’t just put the fossils in the Earth for fun or something, and they did exist more than a few thousand years ago.
Onihikage
As a former creationist, I’d like to clarify what they believe. The tl;dr version is that they believe Dinosaurs were just really giant-sized lizards that lived before the Great Flood, the great flood created all the geologic layers at the same time therefore creating fossils, and the few dinosaurs after the flood didn’t survive in great numbers due to the changed climate (something about huge forests making more oxygen and therefore allowing said giant lizards to be giant, and then the flood wiped out the forests so the oxygen levels went down).
Yeah, lots and lots of bullshit. I’m so glad I managed to heal from that self-delusion.
saki
Thank you for that. ^^ I was shaky on what they believed exactly, especially since I only recently realised there are non-young-earth creationists.
Time Sage
My personal theory (Which is totally made up as I’ve never been relgious at all) is that God was playing a spore like game but then decided the dinosaurs weren’t working and then wiped them out with a metor 😛
Disloyal Subject
@ Saki, Onihikage – remember that “creationists” is a pretty broad demographic, as are most of their subcategories. They’re not all going to believe the same things.
@ Time Sage – To quote a Bo Burnham song, You’re not my children, you’re a bad game of Sims…
timemonkey
Or maybe God just has a saved game for when he wants to play with dinosaurs and we’re just the file in slot 2?
Mindlink
Yeah, “creationist” is basically a very broad term. EVERY christian is a creationist, as are most religious people. Basically, it just means “belief that the world/universe was created by a higher power instead of just randomly occuring”. THEN you have the various groups/fundamentalists chiming in and adding stuff like (“yeah, but if the universe was created, that means EVERYTHING was hand-crafted” or “When something is created, it STAYS that way, never mind all other stuff humans created that change over time, GODs creations are permanent”. Basically just stuff they already want to believe, which they can shoo-horn into the word “creation”.
There is nothing stopping a “creationist” from being an astrophysicst, the only difference would be that a god started the whole shebang, instead of nothing. All the the other stuff has basically nothing to do with “creation” itself.
wwwhhattt
Not every christian is a creationist – even using the broadest definition. There are plenty of atheist and agnostic christians, and even among theists there are definitions of god that place in inside the universe (I can’t remember details, but process theology has a lot of stuff like that).
Just Me
I’m Christian and I am in no way, shape or form a Creationist.
I am a Scientists and I have no conflict with that and religion.
In fact, I have an opinion about Creationists that I won’t mention
here because it might make Willis upset if it causes controversy.
begbert2
I have a theory about creationists that I will mention here, because I am unconcerned with things like “consequences”:
Creationists are lizard people. They disguise themselves as humans using similar techniques as the aliens in Zak McCracken.
Roborat
wwwhhatt, I have to ask, as I cannot get my head around it, but what, exactly, is an atheist Christian? Seems to me that those would be mutually exclusive terms.
Betty Anne
@Roborat – Wikipedia breaks Christian atheism into two types (and then seems to get confused while describing them), but essentially Christian atheists don’t believe in God as an omni-everything, overseeing being, and they look to Jesus as a guide for their morals and behavior. (Aside from the God thing, this is technically what *all* Christians are supposed to be doing. Being a “Christ-ian” means to be “pertaining to Christ” or “living in Christ,” ie, following Christ as a spiritual and ethical leader.) Some schools of thought maintain that Jesus himself flat out rejected the God being worshipped by his contemporaries and felt they were being misled, that the true God remained hidden from the world. Others refer to Jesus’s referencing himself as the “Son of Man” rather than “Son of God” as downplaying the role of divinity in his life. Even for Christians who might drift away from either of those belief bases, a concept of God to respect Jesus is no more necessary than it would be to respect Buddha.
saki
I appreciate everyone trying to clear things about creationists and everything, but I’m not sure why several of you felt the need to say not all Christians are creationists? No one here even remotely implied that. ^^”
@Timemonkey & Time Sage I like your theories! XD
@begbert2 IDK Zac McCrackenm but basically… Creatinists are reptile equivalents of the Raxacoricophalapatorians in Doctor Who? 😀
@The others So, I just learned atheist Christians are a thing, and what they are, yay new knowledge! 🙂 As for the Christians can be into science thing, yes, I remember from the Ham v Nye debate how Ken Ham tried to explain that they’re not mutually exclusive, he was so desperate in trying to prove things that were kinda off-topic that he forgot what a debate is supposed to be (and maybe the format didn’t really help with that either).
Anyways. Where was I going with this? Oh right. Even creationists can be scientists. Yay? XD
wwwhhattt
@Roborat – basically what Betty Anne said. The only defining aspect of Christianity is the attempt to follow Christ*, however that gets interpreted. It’s easy enough to see belief in God as an optional extra here (even if it’s traditionally been a major part). The same goes for the Bible, incidentally.
*And there’s probably exceptions here to, somehow. Christianity’s been around too long and has spread too far to reliably fit into a single definition.
@Saki – *points finger at Mindlink like an angry 2 year old* They sed we wuz! They star’ed i’!
Mindlink
Why does the comment system here loose the “reply” button after a certain number of replies, is it to stop the threads becoming too long and unwieldy ?
In that case, let me add to the “unwieldy” part 😉
Lot’s of good answers here, but I’ll stick to my opinion that “creationism” has become a misused term, but that you can basically call yourself a creationist if you believe that the big-bang happened on purpose instead of an accident (and that there actually was a form of “existence” before that time (or even time)) Then people add all sorts of things to that, according to their own believes.
Then, on the subject of christian atheism, which also got some good answers, so I’ll be disrespectful and try to condence all of those well thought of sentences into a single sentence:
Christianity does not have to be a religion, like Buddhism, but just a philosophy based on the teachings of Christ, which, if you read the New Testament, is basically what Jesus told us to do. (Don’t worship me, follow my words, to paraphrase Jesus)
And a Christian agnostic ? Angosticism started as a “mystery cult” based in Christianity, which is way more complicated than I used to think, so I’m not even going to try condensing THAT.
saki
I really don’t know. I found it on google and wasn’t able to trace it back to its source. When putting it into google.images, you can see a lot of sites picked it up, but I can’t tell which are parody&satire sites and which aren’t.
greengeekgirl
It looks like it may have originated at Landover Baptist, which is a parody site.
I didn’t know birds in particular displayed rather high numbers of homosexuality, so I looked it up. What I found out in my quick, way-not-in-depth research, is that:
1) 1 in 4 black swan pairings are of two males
2) Some guy in 1911 documented homosexual behaviours in penguin, labeled it depraved, and “The report was considered too shocking for public release at the time, and was suppressed. The only copies that were made available privately to researchers were translated into Greek, to prevent this knowledge becoming more widely known”.
3) In 1998, the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo gave two male vultures who had built a nest together a vulture chick which they raised with care. More here
And this is just what I got from Wikipedia. I am so going to look into this more later. <3
Tom T.
A lot of birds are not outwardly dimorphic. It may be that they’re not gay but rather just can’t tell the difference among themselves.
saki
I always assumed animals who aren’t outwardly dimorphic differentiated each other through hormone emissions and smell and stuff? (I don’t understand or remember all that much about the chemical side of biology so maybe this sounds completey aberrant?)
saki
Oh and anyways, even if they do go for the same sex only because they can’t differenciate, 2) is still hilarious, and 3) is still sweet. :3
Disloyal Subject
AFAIK, most birds don’t have much in the way of a sense of smell.
saki
… Yeah I suck at biology. XD
DieKatzchen
I read somewhere that at least some birds can see in the ultraviolet range, so they looked at some birds that weren’t outwardly dimorphic with uv cameras and found that the plumage is different in uv.
saki
Oh hey yay! Man now I kinda wanna see what those UV images lookes like :3
Kryss LaBryn
“The Penguins of Madagascar” TV show addressed this, lol. I mean, er, about not being outwardly dimorphic. Not gay. Kids show and all, although Private has his moments…
saki
I do hope I’ll live to see outwardly LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream kids movies.
Lin
If you’re looking for kids TV shows, Steven Universe has this covered.
Beoluve
I must chime in here and say that the Gems are genderless, yet they choose to use feminine pronouns when referring to each other. So what we see isn’t really what it _is_, as little sense as that makes.
It still totally looks like it though.
li
Steven Universe is wonderful. It’s also only one show though, so it can’t have this “covered”. ALL kids’ shows should be as awesome as it is or even more so, with LGBTQIA and body diversity and racial diversity and also gender diversity, because no one needs these things more than kids.
saki
As much as I love it when they do this in cartoons (Korrasami <3), I want to see it in films. I feel like it might be harder to pull off in a film, or seen as harder to pull off by producers, because a film only airs once and relies a lot on what people say about it, while cartoons, having lots of episodes, can survive one episode some parents won't want their kids to see. Therefore I feel it'll be a greater achievement when it happens in a film, especially a Disney for example, because it'll mean the producers trust that the queerness won't scare away enough people to have any significant impact on their ticket and later BR/DVD sales. :3
El Chupacabre
Part of me feels like we’re unlikely to see a Trans character handled respectfully in a Disney movie. But I never thought I’d see the White House light up with rainbows, either. It would be a good day.
GlaceEx
I hope so too since I am actually working on trying to get the one I wrote out there in theaters and stuff…:)
GlaceEx
I am actually working woth someone from Disney to get it out there…:)
timemonkey
So, they’re not gay, they’re just confused?
Lucina
The black swans, at least, seem to go counter to that, as one of the observed behaviors in male-male relationships is to steal eggs/nests from females, or even bring a female into the mix to lay eggs for them, so they seem to be perfectly aware of their inability to breed.
Like, really? In what fucking way is it more “logical” or “obvious” to believe animals are having sex with each other and indeed sometimes forming lifelong bonds by mistake instead of just admitting that the heteronormativity we’ve been projecting into other species is bullshit?
What reason do we even have for saying birds are “unusually” not-straight? None. We can’t even accurately measure our own species’ sexuality breakdown (it’s by survey, so you’ll need to reconfigure society into one where people aren’t raised with virulent heterosexism to the point of believing themselves straight when they aren’t?), and we sure as hell haven’t studied animals of any OTHER species frequently enough. We also tend to sex animals based on their visual behavior, when it isn’t practical to tag them, so a lot of past animal studies have just been assuming male/female couplings. This is even true with animals that have “obvious” dimorphism, as female lions with manes and male lions without both exist.
(Only rarely, you say? But again, WE DO NOT KNOW THAT. Our methods for studying animals are shit. The only result from an animal study that shouldn’t immediately be treated with interested skepticism is one that shocked the person studying, because at least then you know their expectations didn’t get projected onto what they found, or something with decent methodology where the animals were tagged.)
One thing I feel I need to comment on what you said: “believing oneself to be straight when they really aren’t.” I’ve heard that line before, and it’s always struck me as very hypocritical. Aren’t we supposed to be accepting of what others believe is their sexuality as the truth? If we assume that other people are wrong about their own sexuality and just haven’t come to terms with it, isn’t that the same thing as saying to someone who is gay that it’s just a phase?
The way I see it, if someone believes themselves to be a certain orientation, then by definition, that’s what they are. It doesn’t matter what a person’s genetic predisposition is, what matters is their self-identity.
Drakey
It was poorly worded, but they were essentially correct. I’m way the hell up there on the Kinsey scale, but still able to feel attraction to women. until I was 18, I genuinely believed myself to be straight, but have since come to recognize my behaviors and perceptions from my adolescence as homosexual. I lacked the context, the willingness, and, importantly, the belief to have declared myself anything but straight. As far as I was concerned, being gay was something that happened to other people, not me. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t gay (which, due to how rarely I feel attraction to women, is more often how I identify than bisexual, which I have used in the past as an identifier as well), it just means I lacked the capacity to acknowledge or even really recognize it.
Um, no? I was talking only about people who are actively unaware of or in denial of their sexuality when surveyed, not straight people who I’m just randomly assuming aren’t straight.
Heteronormativity is a very powerful force, friend, and where it and stigma against LGBA sexualities exist these two powers combine to do serious damage to people’s ability to self-report their sexuality.
Your comparison is ridiculously flawed because there is no systemic, external pressure on people to be sexually queer. So no, it’s pretty much nothing like you assuming a non-straight person is “just confused”.
Ok, so from now on I’m referring to the penguin thing as the Secret Gay Penguin Conspiracy of 1911.
saki
OMG YES. XD
Mindlink
I’ve also read that birds not only have x&y chromosomes, but also z, meaning they can have a lot more gender configurations than us humans.
AeolianPlankton
Pretty close, but no cigar! Birds actually have Z and W chromosomes instead of X and Y chromosomes. It’s essentially the mammalian system in reverse – males are homogametic (ZZ) while females are heterogametic (ZW), so it is the egg that determines sex, not the sperm. I don’t think we have any idea what sex determination systems dinosaurs used, but I really, really hope was wacky. Or even lots of wacky systems! Dinosauria was a large enough group that different species probably had completely different sex determining mechanisms. Platypus, anyone?
Also, I hate to bring this up again, but gender ≠ sex
Don’t use this to say a trans woman is female in gender but male in sex. Okay? Don’t do it. Sex is as much a social construct as gender — especially with the existence of intersex people, and almost NO ONE has actually been genotyped so it’s just inaccurate to claim we are assigning gender based on chromosomes.
Practically speaking, a trans woman does not have male sex organs. She has female sex organs, because she’s female and they belong to her.
Period.
(This gender/sex divide was popular among the trans community for a while as a stepping stone to being legitimized, but it’s falling out of favor because it’s fundamentally misgendering and transphobic. It’s also intersex-exclusionary, and not very nonbinary friendly.)
AeolianPlankton
Hi Li,
The comment wasn’t actually made in relation to trans people, but to the fact that when discussing sex determining mechanisms, it is sex, not gender, that is being discussed. Since most animals lack culture (with some possible exception, such as ourselves), they cannot meaningfully have a gender, since it is a social construct. Since the original comment was about birds (not people), it seemed a reasonable distinction.
Please understand I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything about trans people, or the labels we use for human gender. As a biologist, I do understand that neither sex nor gender are binary, and that both are, to a greater or lesser extent, social constructs. I would argue that sex is so to a lesser extent (since, biologically speaking, you can describe sex at multiple levels – chromosomal, hormonal, primary sexual characteristics, etc., though these may not match), but that is for another conversation. I’m aware that we don’t assign sex based on chromosomes, and I would argue against it if it were proposed.
I would go to the barricades to defend the right of people to be identified with their own gender – a trans woman is a woman, and so her body is a woman’s body, and is frankly, none of my business. But if you’ll excuse the glibness, people are people, and platypi are platypi (or possibly platypusses)
li
It was intended as more of a PSA than a direct response to YOU, sorry that got lost. :\
I think rather than saying that animals cannot possibly have a concept of gender, it’s more accurate to say that we don’t and right now can’t know what they think about gender, or indeed sex. Just because we can’t communicate with them doesn’t mean they don’t communicate with each other, you know? And it’s rather self-aggrandizing to assume that humans are the only animal with any kind of social constructs.
Mindlink
Biology is biology, social constructs are social constructs, and transgendered actually HAVE different chromosomes than their assigned to birth sex, so it isn’t transphobic in any way.
And sex, like gender, is nowhere near binary. Biologicaly speaking, even humans have up to 20 different sexes. No, we don’t go around chromosome-testing every human that is born, that is usually only done in the cases where their sex is not apparent at the time of birth, or as a part of research/studies in gender and sex.
Of course, all of this is kind of new to me, as in my language, even in the scientific community, we only have ONE word for both “sex” and “gender”, they are both called “kjønn” (which is ALSO the same word for “genitals”, but usually only the female genitals (which makes it even stranger to hold serious gender-debates in Norwegian (lately, in those debates, we tend to simply use the English terms instead, which in turn confuses people without Extensive English comprehension)
Kimbo G Pataki
I am confused. What makes one “female” and the other “male” if not the same vs different chromosomes? The females have the babies? But what about the male seahorses? :S #KnowsNothingAboutScience
drs
No, AIUI they have W & Z chromosomes, which are like XY but reverse, e.g. the female is WZ.
Roborat
Homosexuality has been observed in virtually every species of mammals, and in many bird species as well. Not too sure about reptiles.
Certain whiptail lizards (Cnemidophorus uniparens, frex) are known to engage in f/f mating behaviours. There are no males in these species and they reproduce parthenogenetically, which (can be) triggered by the mating behaviour.
Please, Dina can’t know. Sexuality doesn’t fossilize. Even if we found two fossils in passionate lovemaking, we know so little of how to sex dinosaurs the heteronormative tendencies of science would assume one to be male and the other female.
Now, she could speculate, as some scientists do, that some dinosaurs probably showed a degree of homosexual behavior, due to its prevalence in their closest living relatives, but she probably would not be so bold as to say she KNOWS their sexuality.
Disloyal Subject
Perhaps she is so stealthy that she has crept back through time itself to observe.
saki
If she had, she would have stayed.
Disloyal Subject
They didn’t have coco puffs back there. She has to return from time to time and refuel.
saki
Yep. 🙂
timemonkey
No, because she enjoys not dieing horribly. Just because she likes dinosaurs doesn’t make her stupid.
saki
Depending on how she traveled back in time, she could use that means to escape dangerous situations. And we’ve established she’s very stealthy. As far as food goes, she could 1) find the edible things of that era (although, considering evolution and all, would humans be able to digest plants from that far before they existed?) or 2) travel back and forth to get food from our time. She’s smart. She could manage. :3
timemonkey
Dina likes dinosaurs because they’re extinct, they’re fixed in time so she can learn about them and they’ll never change. Interacting with them would be just as difficult for her as interacting with humans.
saki
She likes dinosaurs because, unlike people, they don’t constantly change since they are extinct. IRRC, the main problem was that social rules and that stuff constantly change, which she has trouble with. If she were to live in the times of dinosaurs, the only change she’d be witnessing was baby dinos growing up and probably mabye also weather conditions altering the landscapes (such as a forest burning down). I think she could handle that okay. The way I see it, the thrill of being able to observe real-life dinosaurs, and possibly interact with the herbivorous species, and form non-conversation-forcing, non-throwing-unreadable-social-cues-at-her, etc, bonds would widely overweigh anything else. :3
305 thoughts on “Unsure”
Jen Aside
Dina, you’re no fun =(
well ok SOME fun but not at the moment
[I mean come on, who isn’t curious about dinosaur sexuality??]
Lucina
Fun fact: the relative regularity of homosexual behavior in birds means it’s plausible that dinosaurs also frequently had homosexual relations.
We need more gay palaeoart.
Bagge
Come on, deviant art. We are counting on you
Tacos
Pretty sure I’ve seen that already on some R34 site.
saki
IDK about deviantArt, but as far as gems of Christian fundie propaganda (or parodies of it) go… https://whatqueerreading.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/gay-dino.jpg?w=450&h=363
Tacos
I- Please tell me that that was some parody?
Mada
I…I hope it is.
Because otherwise I’d have to ask the person who made that how a species with no chances of survival lasted for so many millions of years
saki
What’s hilarious about it (and why I suspect it really has to be a parody) is that if the person who wrote this was serious, I’m assuming they have to be a fundamentalist, but then wouldn’t that also make them creationists?, young-earthers?, and yet they’re admitting dinosaurs went extinct, which implies God didn’t just put the fossils in the Earth for fun or something, and they did exist more than a few thousand years ago.
Onihikage
As a former creationist, I’d like to clarify what they believe. The tl;dr version is that they believe Dinosaurs were just really giant-sized lizards that lived before the Great Flood, the great flood created all the geologic layers at the same time therefore creating fossils, and the few dinosaurs after the flood didn’t survive in great numbers due to the changed climate (something about huge forests making more oxygen and therefore allowing said giant lizards to be giant, and then the flood wiped out the forests so the oxygen levels went down).
Yeah, lots and lots of bullshit. I’m so glad I managed to heal from that self-delusion.
saki
Thank you for that. ^^ I was shaky on what they believed exactly, especially since I only recently realised there are non-young-earth creationists.
Time Sage
My personal theory (Which is totally made up as I’ve never been relgious at all) is that God was playing a spore like game but then decided the dinosaurs weren’t working and then wiped them out with a metor 😛
Disloyal Subject
@ Saki, Onihikage – remember that “creationists” is a pretty broad demographic, as are most of their subcategories. They’re not all going to believe the same things.
@ Time Sage – To quote a Bo Burnham song, You’re not my children, you’re a bad game of Sims…
timemonkey
Or maybe God just has a saved game for when he wants to play with dinosaurs and we’re just the file in slot 2?
Mindlink
Yeah, “creationist” is basically a very broad term. EVERY christian is a creationist, as are most religious people. Basically, it just means “belief that the world/universe was created by a higher power instead of just randomly occuring”. THEN you have the various groups/fundamentalists chiming in and adding stuff like (“yeah, but if the universe was created, that means EVERYTHING was hand-crafted” or “When something is created, it STAYS that way, never mind all other stuff humans created that change over time, GODs creations are permanent”. Basically just stuff they already want to believe, which they can shoo-horn into the word “creation”.
There is nothing stopping a “creationist” from being an astrophysicst, the only difference would be that a god started the whole shebang, instead of nothing. All the the other stuff has basically nothing to do with “creation” itself.
wwwhhattt
Not every christian is a creationist – even using the broadest definition. There are plenty of atheist and agnostic christians, and even among theists there are definitions of god that place in inside the universe (I can’t remember details, but process theology has a lot of stuff like that).
Just Me
I’m Christian and I am in no way, shape or form a Creationist.
I am a Scientists and I have no conflict with that and religion.
In fact, I have an opinion about Creationists that I won’t mention
here because it might make Willis upset if it causes controversy.
begbert2
I have a theory about creationists that I will mention here, because I am unconcerned with things like “consequences”:
Creationists are lizard people. They disguise themselves as humans using similar techniques as the aliens in Zak McCracken.
Roborat
wwwhhatt, I have to ask, as I cannot get my head around it, but what, exactly, is an atheist Christian? Seems to me that those would be mutually exclusive terms.
Betty Anne
@Roborat – Wikipedia breaks Christian atheism into two types (and then seems to get confused while describing them), but essentially Christian atheists don’t believe in God as an omni-everything, overseeing being, and they look to Jesus as a guide for their morals and behavior. (Aside from the God thing, this is technically what *all* Christians are supposed to be doing. Being a “Christ-ian” means to be “pertaining to Christ” or “living in Christ,” ie, following Christ as a spiritual and ethical leader.) Some schools of thought maintain that Jesus himself flat out rejected the God being worshipped by his contemporaries and felt they were being misled, that the true God remained hidden from the world. Others refer to Jesus’s referencing himself as the “Son of Man” rather than “Son of God” as downplaying the role of divinity in his life. Even for Christians who might drift away from either of those belief bases, a concept of God to respect Jesus is no more necessary than it would be to respect Buddha.
saki
I appreciate everyone trying to clear things about creationists and everything, but I’m not sure why several of you felt the need to say not all Christians are creationists? No one here even remotely implied that. ^^”
@Timemonkey & Time Sage I like your theories! XD
@begbert2 IDK Zac McCrackenm but basically… Creatinists are reptile equivalents of the Raxacoricophalapatorians in Doctor Who? 😀
@The others So, I just learned atheist Christians are a thing, and what they are, yay new knowledge! 🙂 As for the Christians can be into science thing, yes, I remember from the Ham v Nye debate how Ken Ham tried to explain that they’re not mutually exclusive, he was so desperate in trying to prove things that were kinda off-topic that he forgot what a debate is supposed to be (and maybe the format didn’t really help with that either).
Anyways. Where was I going with this? Oh right. Even creationists can be scientists. Yay? XD
wwwhhattt
@Roborat – basically what Betty Anne said. The only defining aspect of Christianity is the attempt to follow Christ*, however that gets interpreted. It’s easy enough to see belief in God as an optional extra here (even if it’s traditionally been a major part). The same goes for the Bible, incidentally.
*And there’s probably exceptions here to, somehow. Christianity’s been around too long and has spread too far to reliably fit into a single definition.
@Saki – *points finger at Mindlink like an angry 2 year old* They sed we wuz! They star’ed i’!
Mindlink
Why does the comment system here loose the “reply” button after a certain number of replies, is it to stop the threads becoming too long and unwieldy ?
In that case, let me add to the “unwieldy” part 😉
Lot’s of good answers here, but I’ll stick to my opinion that “creationism” has become a misused term, but that you can basically call yourself a creationist if you believe that the big-bang happened on purpose instead of an accident (and that there actually was a form of “existence” before that time (or even time)) Then people add all sorts of things to that, according to their own believes.
Then, on the subject of christian atheism, which also got some good answers, so I’ll be disrespectful and try to condence all of those well thought of sentences into a single sentence:
Christianity does not have to be a religion, like Buddhism, but just a philosophy based on the teachings of Christ, which, if you read the New Testament, is basically what Jesus told us to do. (Don’t worship me, follow my words, to paraphrase Jesus)
And a Christian agnostic ? Angosticism started as a “mystery cult” based in Christianity, which is way more complicated than I used to think, so I’m not even going to try condensing THAT.
saki
I really don’t know. I found it on google and wasn’t able to trace it back to its source. When putting it into google.images, you can see a lot of sites picked it up, but I can’t tell which are parody&satire sites and which aren’t.
greengeekgirl
It looks like it may have originated at Landover Baptist, which is a parody site.
Stewart
Surely the “life of satanism” thing marks it as parody, if nothing else does?
Lucina
That’s an old favorite of mine. I laugh every time.
saki
I didn’t know birds in particular displayed rather high numbers of homosexuality, so I looked it up. What I found out in my quick, way-not-in-depth research, is that:
1) 1 in 4 black swan pairings are of two males
2) Some guy in 1911 documented homosexual behaviours in penguin, labeled it depraved, and “The report was considered too shocking for public release at the time, and was suppressed. The only copies that were made available privately to researchers were translated into Greek, to prevent this knowledge becoming more widely known”.
3) In 1998, the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo gave two male vultures who had built a nest together a vulture chick which they raised with care. More here
And this is just what I got from Wikipedia. I am so going to look into this more later. <3
Tom T.
A lot of birds are not outwardly dimorphic. It may be that they’re not gay but rather just can’t tell the difference among themselves.
saki
I always assumed animals who aren’t outwardly dimorphic differentiated each other through hormone emissions and smell and stuff? (I don’t understand or remember all that much about the chemical side of biology so maybe this sounds completey aberrant?)
saki
Oh and anyways, even if they do go for the same sex only because they can’t differenciate, 2) is still hilarious, and 3) is still sweet. :3
Disloyal Subject
AFAIK, most birds don’t have much in the way of a sense of smell.
saki
… Yeah I suck at biology. XD
DieKatzchen
I read somewhere that at least some birds can see in the ultraviolet range, so they looked at some birds that weren’t outwardly dimorphic with uv cameras and found that the plumage is different in uv.
saki
Oh hey yay! Man now I kinda wanna see what those UV images lookes like :3
Kryss LaBryn
“The Penguins of Madagascar” TV show addressed this, lol. I mean, er, about not being outwardly dimorphic. Not gay. Kids show and all, although Private has his moments…
saki
I do hope I’ll live to see outwardly LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream kids movies.
Lin
If you’re looking for kids TV shows, Steven Universe has this covered.
Beoluve
I must chime in here and say that the Gems are genderless, yet they choose to use feminine pronouns when referring to each other. So what we see isn’t really what it _is_, as little sense as that makes.
It still totally looks like it though.
li
Steven Universe is wonderful. It’s also only one show though, so it can’t have this “covered”. ALL kids’ shows should be as awesome as it is or even more so, with LGBTQIA and body diversity and racial diversity and also gender diversity, because no one needs these things more than kids.
saki
As much as I love it when they do this in cartoons (Korrasami <3), I want to see it in films. I feel like it might be harder to pull off in a film, or seen as harder to pull off by producers, because a film only airs once and relies a lot on what people say about it, while cartoons, having lots of episodes, can survive one episode some parents won't want their kids to see. Therefore I feel it'll be a greater achievement when it happens in a film, especially a Disney for example, because it'll mean the producers trust that the queerness won't scare away enough people to have any significant impact on their ticket and later BR/DVD sales. :3
El Chupacabre
Part of me feels like we’re unlikely to see a Trans character handled respectfully in a Disney movie. But I never thought I’d see the White House light up with rainbows, either. It would be a good day.
GlaceEx
I hope so too since I am actually working on trying to get the one I wrote out there in theaters and stuff…:)
GlaceEx
I am actually working woth someone from Disney to get it out there…:)
timemonkey
So, they’re not gay, they’re just confused?
Lucina
The black swans, at least, seem to go counter to that, as one of the observed behaviors in male-male relationships is to steal eggs/nests from females, or even bring a female into the mix to lay eggs for them, so they seem to be perfectly aware of their inability to breed.
Li
That “explanation” is so tiresomely common.
Like, really? In what fucking way is it more “logical” or “obvious” to believe animals are having sex with each other and indeed sometimes forming lifelong bonds by mistake instead of just admitting that the heteronormativity we’ve been projecting into other species is bullshit?
What reason do we even have for saying birds are “unusually” not-straight? None. We can’t even accurately measure our own species’ sexuality breakdown (it’s by survey, so you’ll need to reconfigure society into one where people aren’t raised with virulent heterosexism to the point of believing themselves straight when they aren’t?), and we sure as hell haven’t studied animals of any OTHER species frequently enough. We also tend to sex animals based on their visual behavior, when it isn’t practical to tag them, so a lot of past animal studies have just been assuming male/female couplings. This is even true with animals that have “obvious” dimorphism, as female lions with manes and male lions without both exist.
(Only rarely, you say? But again, WE DO NOT KNOW THAT. Our methods for studying animals are shit. The only result from an animal study that shouldn’t immediately be treated with interested skepticism is one that shocked the person studying, because at least then you know their expectations didn’t get projected onto what they found, or something with decent methodology where the animals were tagged.)
Bagge
Absolutely!
Today’s reading material: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211246.Biological_Exuberance
li
I need to read that book. c:
Jen Aside
BEST TITLE =D
lightsabermario
One thing I feel I need to comment on what you said: “believing oneself to be straight when they really aren’t.” I’ve heard that line before, and it’s always struck me as very hypocritical. Aren’t we supposed to be accepting of what others believe is their sexuality as the truth? If we assume that other people are wrong about their own sexuality and just haven’t come to terms with it, isn’t that the same thing as saying to someone who is gay that it’s just a phase?
The way I see it, if someone believes themselves to be a certain orientation, then by definition, that’s what they are. It doesn’t matter what a person’s genetic predisposition is, what matters is their self-identity.
Drakey
It was poorly worded, but they were essentially correct. I’m way the hell up there on the Kinsey scale, but still able to feel attraction to women. until I was 18, I genuinely believed myself to be straight, but have since come to recognize my behaviors and perceptions from my adolescence as homosexual. I lacked the context, the willingness, and, importantly, the belief to have declared myself anything but straight. As far as I was concerned, being gay was something that happened to other people, not me. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t gay (which, due to how rarely I feel attraction to women, is more often how I identify than bisexual, which I have used in the past as an identifier as well), it just means I lacked the capacity to acknowledge or even really recognize it.
Li
Um, no? I was talking only about people who are actively unaware of or in denial of their sexuality when surveyed, not straight people who I’m just randomly assuming aren’t straight.
Heteronormativity is a very powerful force, friend, and where it and stigma against LGBA sexualities exist these two powers combine to do serious damage to people’s ability to self-report their sexuality.
Your comparison is ridiculously flawed because there is no systemic, external pressure on people to be sexually queer. So no, it’s pretty much nothing like you assuming a non-straight person is “just confused”.
MichaelHaneline
Ok, so from now on I’m referring to the penguin thing as the Secret Gay Penguin Conspiracy of 1911.
saki
OMG YES. XD
Mindlink
I’ve also read that birds not only have x&y chromosomes, but also z, meaning they can have a lot more gender configurations than us humans.
AeolianPlankton
Pretty close, but no cigar! Birds actually have Z and W chromosomes instead of X and Y chromosomes. It’s essentially the mammalian system in reverse – males are homogametic (ZZ) while females are heterogametic (ZW), so it is the egg that determines sex, not the sperm. I don’t think we have any idea what sex determination systems dinosaurs used, but I really, really hope was wacky. Or even lots of wacky systems! Dinosauria was a large enough group that different species probably had completely different sex determining mechanisms. Platypus, anyone?
Also, I hate to bring this up again, but gender ≠ sex
Li
“But gender != sex”
Don’t use this to say a trans woman is female in gender but male in sex. Okay? Don’t do it. Sex is as much a social construct as gender — especially with the existence of intersex people, and almost NO ONE has actually been genotyped so it’s just inaccurate to claim we are assigning gender based on chromosomes.
Practically speaking, a trans woman does not have male sex organs. She has female sex organs, because she’s female and they belong to her.
Period.
(This gender/sex divide was popular among the trans community for a while as a stepping stone to being legitimized, but it’s falling out of favor because it’s fundamentally misgendering and transphobic. It’s also intersex-exclusionary, and not very nonbinary friendly.)
AeolianPlankton
Hi Li,
The comment wasn’t actually made in relation to trans people, but to the fact that when discussing sex determining mechanisms, it is sex, not gender, that is being discussed. Since most animals lack culture (with some possible exception, such as ourselves), they cannot meaningfully have a gender, since it is a social construct. Since the original comment was about birds (not people), it seemed a reasonable distinction.
Please understand I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything about trans people, or the labels we use for human gender. As a biologist, I do understand that neither sex nor gender are binary, and that both are, to a greater or lesser extent, social constructs. I would argue that sex is so to a lesser extent (since, biologically speaking, you can describe sex at multiple levels – chromosomal, hormonal, primary sexual characteristics, etc., though these may not match), but that is for another conversation. I’m aware that we don’t assign sex based on chromosomes, and I would argue against it if it were proposed.
I would go to the barricades to defend the right of people to be identified with their own gender – a trans woman is a woman, and so her body is a woman’s body, and is frankly, none of my business. But if you’ll excuse the glibness, people are people, and platypi are platypi (or possibly platypusses)
li
It was intended as more of a PSA than a direct response to YOU, sorry that got lost. :\
I think rather than saying that animals cannot possibly have a concept of gender, it’s more accurate to say that we don’t and right now can’t know what they think about gender, or indeed sex. Just because we can’t communicate with them doesn’t mean they don’t communicate with each other, you know? And it’s rather self-aggrandizing to assume that humans are the only animal with any kind of social constructs.
Mindlink
Biology is biology, social constructs are social constructs, and transgendered actually HAVE different chromosomes than their assigned to birth sex, so it isn’t transphobic in any way.
And sex, like gender, is nowhere near binary. Biologicaly speaking, even humans have up to 20 different sexes. No, we don’t go around chromosome-testing every human that is born, that is usually only done in the cases where their sex is not apparent at the time of birth, or as a part of research/studies in gender and sex.
Of course, all of this is kind of new to me, as in my language, even in the scientific community, we only have ONE word for both “sex” and “gender”, they are both called “kjønn” (which is ALSO the same word for “genitals”, but usually only the female genitals (which makes it even stranger to hold serious gender-debates in Norwegian (lately, in those debates, we tend to simply use the English terms instead, which in turn confuses people without Extensive English comprehension)
Kimbo G Pataki
I am confused. What makes one “female” and the other “male” if not the same vs different chromosomes? The females have the babies? But what about the male seahorses? :S #KnowsNothingAboutScience
drs
No, AIUI they have W & Z chromosomes, which are like XY but reverse, e.g. the female is WZ.
Roborat
Homosexuality has been observed in virtually every species of mammals, and in many bird species as well. Not too sure about reptiles.
Kamino Neko
Certain whiptail lizards (Cnemidophorus uniparens, frex) are known to engage in f/f mating behaviours. There are no males in these species and they reproduce parthenogenetically, which (can be) triggered by the mating behaviour.
Lucina
I only realized after making this comment that I should have said “gayleoart” and now i’m ashamed at missing such a perfect pun.
Barf Ninjason
The Owl of Minerva flies only at night.
Deanatay
And owls are descended from dinosaurs!
AeolianPlankton
Yet many grey lords go sadly to the masterless men?
mister gray
actually dina already knows thus unless you are interested in dinosaurs she will not reveal the sexuality of dinosaurs 🙂
Lucina
Please, Dina can’t know. Sexuality doesn’t fossilize. Even if we found two fossils in passionate lovemaking, we know so little of how to sex dinosaurs the heteronormative tendencies of science would assume one to be male and the other female.
Now, she could speculate, as some scientists do, that some dinosaurs probably showed a degree of homosexual behavior, due to its prevalence in their closest living relatives, but she probably would not be so bold as to say she KNOWS their sexuality.
Disloyal Subject
Perhaps she is so stealthy that she has crept back through time itself to observe.
saki
If she had, she would have stayed.
Disloyal Subject
They didn’t have coco puffs back there. She has to return from time to time and refuel.
saki
Yep. 🙂
timemonkey
No, because she enjoys not dieing horribly. Just because she likes dinosaurs doesn’t make her stupid.
saki
Depending on how she traveled back in time, she could use that means to escape dangerous situations. And we’ve established she’s very stealthy. As far as food goes, she could 1) find the edible things of that era (although, considering evolution and all, would humans be able to digest plants from that far before they existed?) or 2) travel back and forth to get food from our time. She’s smart. She could manage. :3
timemonkey
Dina likes dinosaurs because they’re extinct, they’re fixed in time so she can learn about them and they’ll never change. Interacting with them would be just as difficult for her as interacting with humans.
saki
She likes dinosaurs because, unlike people, they don’t constantly change since they are extinct. IRRC, the main problem was that social rules and that stuff constantly change, which she has trouble with. If she were to live in the times of dinosaurs, the only change she’d be witnessing was baby dinos growing up and probably mabye also weather conditions altering the landscapes (such as a forest burning down). I think she could handle that okay. The way I see it, the thrill of being able to observe real-life dinosaurs, and possibly interact with the herbivorous species, and form non-conversation-forcing, non-throwing-unreadable-social-cues-at-her, etc, bonds would widely overweigh anything else. :3