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| The Religious Objection |
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| Global Warning | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | |
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Springfield, VA, USA. Picture the following, not uncommon exchange:
I have known this guy since we were five years old...we were best friends and we see each other every now and then...so, I emailed him to tell him about my transition and this is what he said,
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the objections and outright condemnations of the various denominations and religions let me crystallize their positions (Please note that these positions do not represent all religions nor are they meant to be the position of one particular religion (Jerry Falwell can rest easy, I’m not talking about him). Basically the religious objections are:
Let’s talk about rebellion and God. If you accept the scientific evidence that transsexuality is a natural occurrence established in the early stages of fetal development, then when a person accepts that they are transsexual, they are submitting to the will of God. To argue otherwise (and not ignore the research) is to argue that God made a person transsexual so as to test their faith, just as He made others to catch polio, or cancer, or Alzheimer’s to test their faith. Just as God gives infants birth defects to test the faith of their parents.
The religious argument then shifts to one of “God allows sickness and birth defects, he does not cause them.” If a person born transsexual points out that God allows medical science to treat sickness and birth defects, the response is something along the lines of “Well Transsexuality is different.”
Because it is a sin.
It always comes back to sin which we will discuss later.
That God does not make mistakes assumes a personal God actively involved in the day to day existence of all seven billion people on the earth (and the billions of people before them). If that is your god, then He does make mistakes. Look around.
That God makes mistakes.
But if you assume that God exists above Nature and that He established the physical rules that govern the universe but is not involved in day to day operations – that God is not responsible for the variations, the errors in chemistry and fetal development, the mass murderers and the rest.
That God does not make mistakes. They are the natural result of the physical laws that govern the universe He created.
A birth defect is not a mistake – it’s an infrequent, natural occurrence during fetal development. Since most societies agree that birth defects are not God’s intentional mistake, we make every effort to treat and correct them.
Sickness is not a mistake – viruses, bacteria, and physical aging are an intricate part of all life in the universe. God’s Will does not prevent us from treating them.
Transsexuality is a birth defect, less obvious than a cleft lip, but one than can be treated and corrected. Nature’s original intention was that I be born female but something within my fetal development went astray and I was born with a female brain inhabiting an outwardly male body.
Transsexuality exists within all species. In humans, science and medicine have developed methods to treat a person born transsexual, to correct the birth defect rather than condemn the person to a life of quiet desperation. As with any other birth defect, God’s Will does not prevent us from treating transsexuality.
At the end of the day, however, all religions objections to transsexuality devolve into one basic assumption: transsexuality is a sin and the person born transsexual commits a grievous sin if they try to correct their birth condition.
The post operative person born transsexual is a sinner, condemned to hell unless they repent.
Possibly by reversing the operation, I guess.
Again this argument assumes the existence of an interactive God who is personally involved in the day to day life of every human – the God whose intention when created me transsexual was to torment me by giving me a brain of one gender and the body of another. If this is God, then He enjoys tearing the wings off flies and watching them squirm.
But if He is the God who allows us to correct birth defects and cure sickness, then He would have no objection to me correcting Nature’s mistakes. If He is this God, the God of Love, a person born transsexual is not sinner and those who say otherwise are distorting his word for their own human objectives.
We are not obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. Religion teaches us how we go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
The world still moves.
Transsexuality exists by the will of God. In his wisdom, He would not forbid us to make gentle the life of the world He created.
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