Might Makes Right, Darwinism, and the Double Harm from Procreation

The argument for antinatalism is that having kids increases suffering. The world is filled with exploitation and suffering. The lion eats the antelope, humans eat meat, children are being raped, etc.

One argument given against antinatalism is that suffering is just nature, which I agree with, but this is more of an argument for antinatalism rather than against it. Suffering indeed is part of nature. Most suffering I think occurs due to exploitation. Life evolved to exploit others. When there is a mutation in a living being that increases its ability to exploit another weaker living being for personal gain, it increases the probability of survival, which means that this gene is more likely to be passed down. As such, exploitation is written in our DNA. Looking at it this way, the solution to reduce exploitation and suffering is to prevent DNA replication.

 

Is suffering objectively good or bad?

I'm not saying suffering is necessarily bad or good. I just personally dislike it. For example, if someone has a child, I would dislike it if he is raped by a paedophile, which could happen. Some people may argue that there is nothing wrong with a child suffering because he is being raped by a paedophile. That's just their preference. But because I dislike suffering, I think it's safer if living beings do not exist because existence is the catalyst for suffering.

Imagine if you have a child and he is raped and if the paedophile is an untouchable billionaire who then asks you to justify why the suffering of your child is bad. What would you say? This example illustrates how nature, Darwinism, and "might makes right" creates a world filled with suffering and exploitation. I would not want to bring a child into such a world.

I believe in cultural relativism. Morality depends on each individual and can change depending on who you ask. However, this is not an outcome I like. Think of the example I gave before. What if a very powerful politically connected billionaire rapes your child? There is nothing you can do because there is no objective morality and because "might makes right." So because "might makes right" and because there is no objective morality, any life exposed to this reality has to deal with these risks. If I don't have a child, he or she cannot be raped. He or she cannot grow up to become a rapist.

I do believe we live in a "dog eat dog" world, a hierarchy with the billionaires at the top exploiting the millionaires in the middle exploiting everyone else at the bottom. This is the nature of reality and the reality of nature.

 

The double harm from procreation

Another benefit of not having kids is that kids are expensive, which means that if you don't have kids, you become richer, which makes you more powerful, which makes you better off in a "might makes right" world. Because of the cost of having kids, you will literally become weaker by having kids because money is power. The less money you have, the more you will be exploited by those above you in the hierarchy.

When you have a child, you create yet another worker whom those at the top of the hierarchy can exploit, and because you have to pay so much money to look after your child, you yourself become less resilient to exploitation from those above you in the hierarchy, so there is a "double harm" from procreation. Your child starts from nothing and needs to work his way up the hierarchy and be exploited along the way while you drop many levels down the hierarchy because of the decrease in net worth associated with having a child.

Why bring a child into a Darwinian world?

Are All Men Pedophiles?

I remember a few weeks ago, during the evening, my father picked me up from my house and drove me to his house where I waited for a van to drive us to the country where we were going for a short trip. While waiting, Greg, a family friend, visited us, and he brought his daughter Tanya along. Tanya is probably six or seven, and she is really cute and playful. She kept playing with me, and for some reason I enjoyed playing with her quite a bit. It made me feel good to play with a little girl. There is a hesitation in me when I have this feeling because maybe it is forbidden. I don't like to entertain the thought that I may have pedophilic tendencies. I don't think I'd want to have a child, but I don't I mind playing with some of them.

I remember watching a video on YouTube by Jerry Liu where he explains that many men think they are attracted to Asian women when really they are simply attracted to neotenous (i.e. youthful) features, and this makes me wonder whether pedophilia is natural. Even if it is, that is certainly no reason to condone child abuse. It is similar to the argument meat eaters use to justify killing animals, i.e. we have been killing animals for millions of years and we crave meat. We have also been killing and raping fellow humans for millions for years, and we also crave refined sugar and maybe even pedophilia and rape.

Councils Use Google Earth to Spy on Houses

According to Eye Spy with my Google Eyes, Australian local governments are using Google Earth to see if any renovations from people comply with regulations. They also have access to satellites that are able to pick up an A4 piece of paper in our backyard.

I have listened to a Spoonman argument (on talkback radio) about this topic and many people who were for Google Earth said that the fear over privacy was caused by people being unaware of the technology. They claim that what is in our backyards as well as the look of our houses are public anyway.

Google Earth will not only catch people naked in their bathrooms through open windows but will also catch people walking into adult bookstores.

By broadcasting pictures in public and displaying it on the Internet, Google Earth has set a legal precedent that will legitimize pedophile Jack McClellan's practice of taping little girls at shopping malls and posting the videos up on the Internet for pedophiles to watch.

There are many times in public when you make a mistake. If few people are looking at you, it's not a major problem. However, if someones takes a picture of you and puts it on the Internet, you are in trouble. For example, what if you are at the beach and suddenly you accidentally let your bathers fall down so that your private parts are exposed. Then someone takes a picture and posts it up on the Internet so that your private parts are exposed for the whole world. Even if you have children your children may accidentally expose too much flesh (e.g. by taking their shirt off) and then someone like Jack McClellan may take a picture and post it up on the Internet. Since no private parts are showing the picture may not be classified as child pornography, yet your child may be traumatized by this.

Some people claim that if you ask Google to remove embarrassing pictures, they are likely to do so. This is fine, but it is the legal precedent I am concerned about. If Google is allowed to take pictures and post it up on the Internet, then what is stopping anyone from doing the same? What is stopping Jack McClellan from hunting for little girls and posting pictures online?

Caught With Child Porn? Call it "Art"

Some time ago artist Bill Henson was arrested for displaying nude pictures of 13-year-old girls during an art exhibition. No charges were laid and he was eventually released. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd criticized the painting and some artists, such as Cate Blanchett, were infuriated.

Now the issue has come up again with Art Monthly Australia releasing a magazine that has on its cover the picture of a naked 6-year-old.

Many people say that banning nude child photos and taking pictures of children at sports games is political correctness taken to the extreme. However, many people do not understand just how many people out there are pedophiles. The fact that child sexual crimes occur over and over again is evidence that sexual attraction to children is rife. There are thousands of websites on the Internet that feed this desire by providing fiction that depicts sexual acts involving children. Even just browsing through a common erotic fiction Usenet newsgroup like alt.sex.stories.moderated can yield hundreds of stories of child sexual abuse.

In addition to the high numbers of child porn fiction out there, there is also a large and growing pro-pedophile activism happening on the Internet. Many pedophiles claim that they are an oppressed people who deserve respect. Pro-pedophile groups include not only NAMBLA but also MARTIJN.

Many pedophiles get away with looking at child porn by searching for family nudist pictures that happen to have naked children in them. Likewise, many pedophiles can also get away with looking at child porn simply by looking at nude child photography, which seems to be immune to criticism because of associations with the art world.

What about parents taking pictures of their children at sports games? Unfortunately, there are pedophiles who go around taking pictures of children in public. They then document their findings on the Internet for other pedophiles to see. One such pedophile is Jack McClellan.

Austrian Dad's Treatment of Children and Parents' Rights

An Austrian dad has locked his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years. He raped her and produced seven children with her, one of whom died and was incinerated in an oven. The dungeon was soundproof and had a keyless entry system.

Many conservatives especially argue that parents have the rights and the privacy to take care of their children as they please. This is the argument behind homeschooling. Parents are also given privacy.

So you think that this Austrian dungeon case highlight how privacy and choice given to parents can be dangerous? In this case, one child attempted to escape and run away but the police caught her and returned her to her parents. They assumed that parents know what is best for their children. Austrian police did not want to let the children go to another family because they prefer the child to be with the biological father rather than an unrelated family. But this case clearly illustrates that a father doesn't necessarily care for his children.

The only solution to this problem then is more government intervention. E.g. regular checks to see if the children are okay, using sonar to find cavities in concrete, etc.

If this is not implemented and if the conservative idea that parents are made free to do as they wish to their children, then I believe this dungeon scenario will be replicated. The demand for child sex is strong. If there is a way to supply that demand that is safe and protected by privacy and freedom laws, it will be done. Right now there may be hundreds of children locked away in underground dungeons and we may not know.

This I would argue is a case for government intervention.

Children Locked in Underground Dungeon in Austria

Link: "House of Horror" Children Never Saw Sunlight

I've heard about the news from Austria of a man named Josef Fritzl who sexually abused his daughter when she was 11. When she was 18, the girl was lured by her father into the basement. The father locked her up and kept her hidden in the basement for 24 years. During this time he continually raped her. The girl eventually bore seven children.

While all this was happening the wife and neighbors had no idea what was happening. The dungeon was soundproof and had an electronic keyless entry system.

What scares me is if this man can get away with this then anyone now can replicate what he has done. In fact, many people may have done so, and even today many children may be locked away in secret dungeons.

While I was walking around today I kept thinking that there may be a bunch of locked up children right underneath me and I wouldn't know.

This I think is the product of privacy. When men and women are free to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes, then the will practically have the freedom to produce their own children and molest them.

In this case, when the girl went missing the rapist father told everyone that she had run away. He then forced the girl to write letters begging everyone not to look for her.

When a child is missing, police should take into consideration the possibility that something like this might have happened and perform checks of the house. Sonar can be used to find cavities where dungeons may be.

Ragged Dick

Links:

Ragged Dick Audio at Librivox
Full Online Text of Ragged Dick
Ragged Dick at Amazon.com

I've just finished listening to Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger Jr. The book was written in the 19th century. It is about a young boy named Dick Hunter who shines people's shoes for a living. Through hard work, thrift, honesty, charity, and some luck, he grows up to become a respectable person. This story is the first and most popular of Alger's many rags-to-riches books. Many believe Horatio Alger's books had a profound impact on the creation of the so-called American Dream.

The story is very enjoyable to read. The characters are very lovable. The plot surprisingly contains themes that I could certainly relate to and I'm sure many people will see in certain fictitious characters some of the behaviors of their friends in the real world. So ubiquitous is the American Dream in our lives today that we can recognize its symptoms so easily in Ragged Dick.

On the downside, the ending of this story is just laughable. I won't give anything away but let's just say there is some deus ex machina.

There have also been recent (2006) revelations that Horatio Alger Jr was a homosexual pedophile (or pederast). This doesn't surprise me because some of Ragged Dick contained what I perceived as homoerotic parts. For example, once Dick Hunter shared a bed with a younger boy. Even the title "Ragged Dick" has homosexual connotations. Horatio Alger Jr was inspired to write Ragged Dick after living in New York and living with and observing young boys who worked in the streets. There is speculation that he had sex with these boys, but that has not been confirmed.

Hijacking Alice Day

Alice Day is a day made up by pedophiles. The anti-pedophiles have allegedly hijacked the day and turned it into something else. The video above is about a bunch of pedophiles. These videos from the anti-pedophiles seem very weird. What is with the stick figures?

Interview with Lindsay Ashford

Below is an interview with pro-pedophile advocate Lindsay Ashford. It is part 1 of 5. In this interview Ashford gives his views about age of consent, America, and other issues.

The Child Sex Triangle

I found the image above from pro-pedophilia site Defending the Paederotic. It suggests that "antis" or those against pedophiles are horrendous people because they do not allow children to choose whether to be sexual or asexual. The antis are as bad as the child molesters because they force asexuality on children just as the child molesters force sexuality on children. Pedophiles often like to make distinctions between child molesters and pedophiles. Pedophiles, they claim, are not as bad as child molesters because although they may have sexual attraction towards children they don't necessarily act upon those urges.

This child sex triangle reminds me very much of the Nolan Chart, which is skewed in such a way as to encourage people to become libertarian.

Under Heavy Attack, Pedologues Shuts Down

Pedologues is a podcast that promotes pedophilia. Due to intense outrage from anti-pedophile groups including those from Perverted Justice, the podcast had to be shut down because many of those who were associated with the podcasts received death threats.

According to the Pedologues site,

I have just received word from the hosts of The Sibling Rivalry Podcast that they have been receiving harassing and threatening phone calls to their homes by someone who calls himself "Mikel Bruce" due to their having interviewed me on their show.

At this time, I believe it would be morally irresponsible for me to continue fighting this when innocent bystanders are beginning to be affected. This constant stream of blind hate, cyberstalking, and libel tactics from those at Perverted Justice against uninvolved Libsynners is, in my opinion, reprehensible. Nevermind how wrong people might consider me or what I believe in, a solid line is crossed when this form of criminal act is laid upon the rest of the public. No matter how those on the sidelines might feel about me closing shop, I think it is my personal responsibility to respond to this abhorent action duly. I am clearly dealing with people who have no scruples or honor.

Over at Independent Media Centre there is a piece called One Leader of the Pedophile Movement, Four Companies that Support Him. This piece makes the claim that there are four companies that are supporting pedophiles: Wikipedia/Wikimedia, Libsyn.org, CafePress, and Blogspot/Google. The piece even has contact details for people if they want to complain about the Pedologues podcast on Libsyn.org.

A Boywiki.org (now gone) article on Pedologues gives us an idea of how ferocious the attack on the guys at LibSyn.org was:

Perverted Justice ... urged people to harass and spam customers of Liberated Syndication which hosted Pedologues.

Thousands of unsolicited emails hammered the various unknowing podcast hosts, who then lodged complaints to Liberated Syndication's owners about the harassment. Most podcasters were apathetic, stating that although Pedologues' content might be socially offensive, as long as its participants were not advocating illegal activity, that it had a right to exist. A handful of podcasts including Stacy Harp's "Active Christian Media" left the host in protest of a pedophile podcast existing.

Rookiee was contacted by Dave Chekan, Liberated Syndication's founder, asking him what was going on. Rookiee informed Chekan of the current situation and agreed to an internal investigation and review of his podcast. Chekan agreed that what was occurring was not appropriate, and that he was not about to pull the plug on the podcast simply because of cyberbullying. Rookiee volunteered to halt production of his podcast until he manually transcribed all 30 of his episodes for Liberated Syndication's lawyers to review.

Subsequent to the Perverted Justice Opinion piece, hackers from Alt.Hackers.Malicious (AHM), who were withholding action upon Rookiee, set off to unmask Revolyob. Also, Perverted Justice threatened the Wikimedia foundation to remove Rookiee's Wikipedia user profile or face public humiliation. Rookiee's YouTube, Xanga, and other online accounts at very commonplace websites were removed.

Other podcasters were intrigued at the situation posed to them by Pedologues. The hosts of the Sibling Rivalry podcast offered to interview Rookiee on their podcast to discuss the First Amendment issue. After a less than satisfactory experience, they posted a severely truncated version of the interview in the form of four short sound bites. After posting it, the hosts began receiving threatening phone calls from Velocity from Alt.Hackers.Malicious who posed himself under the name "Mikel Bruce."

Rookiee pulled the plug on Pedologues subsequent to these harassment, citing: "it would be morally irresponsible for me to continue fighting this when innocent bystanders are beginning to be affected."

Protesting Against International Boylove Day

Link: Protest International Boylove Day

According to Absolute Zero, 23 June 2007 is International Boylove Day, a day invented by pedophiles to celebrate sexual relationships between adults and little boys. Think NAMBLA. On this day, pedophiles light a blue candle in public. The anti-pedophiles want to oppose this by burning white candles instead.

Wagner Boycotts Google

Thomas Wagner sent an email to Google asking them to take down Lindsay Ashford's pro-pedophilia website. As of 19/8/2007, the site in question, puellula.com is "on sabbatical." (Update 15/6/08: Puellula.com is no more.)

The reply Wagner received from Google was not to his liking, so he now urges everyone to boycott Google and instead use PeaKaBoo.Net, a family-friend search engine that bans all adult sites, hate sites, etc.

The only problem with this family-friendly search engine is that it practically contains nothing. For example, suppose I wanted to research about Mormonism. A google search of "Mormonism" gives 1,920,000 results. A Peakaboo search for "Mormonism" gives only 1 result, which turns out to be a site that has nothing to do with Mormonism.

I don't think this boycott is going to work.

Review of Hand of God

Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/handofgod/view/

Hand of God is a Frontline documentary about a priest who sexually abuses a young boy after the boy confesses to him that he has been masturbating and therefore sinning. You can watch the entire documentary online by clicking on the link above.

It is surprising why priests, ministers, or pastors would have sex with young boys. After all, aren't they the one who preach about the sinfulness of homosexuality, underage sex, and sex outside of marriage? One of my friends believes that religious people are more likely to have paraphilias because they spend their whole lives repressing their sexual desires. Remember just because there is much media exposure about molester priests and ministers, it doesn't mean that a priest or a minister is more likely to be a child molester. It could just be that the media is far more likely to report cases of child molestation if the perpetrators are priests or pastors.

Legal Pedophile Jack McClellan

There is a legal pedophile in America named Jack McClellan. He admits to everyone that he is a pedophile in that he has a sexual attraction to little girls as young as 3, yet he has committed no crime. He only thinks about child sex but never acts upon it. However, the government has forbidden him from being near children.



Watching some of the videos of him speaking, Jack seems like a shy and harmless guy, seemingly far less harmful than Lindsay Ashford, a highly literate and polished pedophile activist who many believe is very dangerous.

Parents who want to protect their children may want to know what Jack and Ashley look like. Follow the links and you will find out. Parents may also want to install content filters that filter out harmful sites on the web so that children can surf the web without finding nasty surprises. I recommend the free software K9 Web Protection.

A highly detailed site about Jack McClellan can be found at Corporate Sex Offenders.

Should Existing Child Porn be Legalized?

There is evidence that Internet porn reduces rape. According to Lansburg, "A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth." Lansburg even claims that the release of violent movies reduces violence and crime.

The hypothesis for this result is that the availability of pornography allows sexually aroused people to satiate their desires indoors in front of a computer. If the pornography were not available, the individual would have to look for an alternative outlet for his sexual desires, and these alternative outlets may involve the rape of innocent women. Likewise, there are those who have a desire for violence, and violent movies may satiate that desire indoor in front of a television screen. The violent individual then doesn't need to express his anger and violence in public. While this hypothesis sounds plausible, it is important to keep in mind that the study gives a statistical correlation and other hypotheses can be used to explain the positive correlation.

Child porn is banned presumably because its creation involves the abuse of a child. Legalizing child porn may stimulate its production, which leads to more child abuse.

Suppose the government banned the production of further child porn to prevent any further child abuse yet kept a national database of child pornography that already exists. This national database of child porn is freely available to the public so that members of the population with pedophilic tendencies can satiate their desires in private without actually harming any children.

Because no new child porn is produced, no child is abused. Because pedophiles consume existing child porn, this will perhaps decrease child molestation in a way analogous to the decrease in rape and crime following the release of porn and violent movies.

What is required for this argument to be sound is evidence that availability of child porn results in less child molestation. Some will argue this is not the case, that child porn actually encourages pedophiles to act on their instincts. However, if the government takes the policy philosophy that they should ban anything that can encourage someone to do something illegal, then shouldn't violent movies also be banned because they can encourage people to murder?

One problem with this is that victims in legal child porn may not consent to the release of videos of them in public. A victim of child abuse may suffer greatly if videos and images of the sexual abuse were made public. To protect these people, the government would have to obtain consent from victims. The victims will be reminded that the child porn will be made legal because of the belief that legalization will reduce further child abuse. In an act of altruism to future generations, the victims of child abuse may consent to the videos being available to the public. In the event that no child abuse victims consent, the government may have to turn to virtual child porn.

Another problem that someone has notified me of is that the existence and availability of child porn will create demand for more child porn. Even if there is a national database of public child porn, an individual may not want to watch the same videos over and over again. They demand new child porn, which will create supply, which will result in more children being abused. This argument does not apply to virtual child porn or child porn fiction because the creation of these do not involve the abuse of any actual child. If one piece of child porn fiction results in an increased supply of child porn fiction, the creation of child porn fiction comes not from actual abuse of children but from the imagination of child abuse by the writer. It could be argued, however, that even virtual child porn and child porn fiction can induce greater demand for actual videos depicting child abuse or even actual physical contact when children. But then again just about anything can induce demand for child sex, including child photography for clothing catalogs, nudism photography, etc, and banning anything that a politician believes might induce greater demand for child porn may pose a threat to freedom of expression.

It's a slippery slope when we are talking about taking away freedom of expression. Suppose child porn promotes child molestation. Therefore, we ban child porn. Yet even adult porn can promote child porn, which in turn promotes child molestation, and so through a longer chain of cause and effect adult porn causes child molestation. Totalitarianism is limited only by the creativity of a dictator to manufacture statistics proving causation in all the nodes in the chain of cause and effect that leads to child molestation.

Further Reading:

California Court Bans Self-Proclaimed Pedophile From Any Contact With Children Within State (Fox News)


Image from Flickr by wayfaring stranger, posted under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Lewis Carroll's Nude Child Photography

Lewis Carrol is the author of Alice in Wonderland, and many believe he is a pedophile because of his nude images of young female children.

Many well-known writers are suspected of being pedophiles, such as James Barrie the writer of Peter Pan. Interestingly, Michael Jackson, another suspected pedophile, commonly refers to himself as a modern-day Peter Pan. He didn't call his residence the Neverland Ranch for nothing.

Talk of pedophilia today is very politically incorrect, but in the Internet era you can find ideologies that support just about anything from bestiality to pedophilia. Some argue that pedophilia is natural and normal and that children are naturally sexual beings. Of course most people do not agree with this.

Protecting Freedom by Destroying Freedom

Inspired by Maddy McCann's kidnapping, Alan Burkhart wrote a piece in the National Ledger detailing many atrocities done to children. He then suggests some solutions to the problem:

Draconian enforcement of drug and immigration laws is desperately needed. Tons of illegal drugs and thousands of sexual predators cross our border with Mexico each year. Research by "Americans for Legal Immigration" shows that as many as 240,000 illegal alien sex offenders currently reside in the USA. Could your gardener be one of them?

[...]

Most importantly, Americans must return to the moral and societal norms of past decades. Our proud nation survived a brutal civil war and broke the chains of slavery. We fought and won two major wars against totalitarianism and later broke the back of the Soviet Union. But in our quest to become the freest nation on Earth, we have also freed those among us who would do harm to some of our nation's most vulnerable citizens, and we have lost the sense of personal responsibility that governs the actions of otherwise good people. It is not a loss of freedom or civil rights to penalize irresponsible behavior. It is not "cruel and unusual" to lock sex offenders and drug dealers away for the rest of their lives. By keeping repeat offenders in prison, we are protecting the rights of those who might otherwise perish in the dead of night while their families try in vain to find them.

We are constantly told by our so-called leaders that we must be tolerant and understanding of those who behave or believe differently from the rest of us. To a point, I agree. But when our young people become targets of opportunity, the line must be drawn.

Tolerance is a two-edged sword. The more tolerant we become, the more we will be expected to tolerate in the future. I don't know about you, but I'm done with being tolerant. I want my country back.

To Alan Burkhart,

Your article Madeleine McCann Mystery Highlights Modern Day Barbarism was very well written. All those cases of children being abused is sad, but your solutions seem very lacking. First of all you say that immigration needs to be tightened, e.g. the US-Mexico border. Automatically you suggest that American children are more important than Mexican children because, if sexual predators can't move from Mexico to America then they will stay and abuse children in Mexico. This would only be preferable if Mexican children are worth less than American children. Secondly, this solution suggests that Mexicans are more likely to harm children than Americans are. It is certainly possible that a Mexican migrant crossing the border may be a child molestor, but it is also possible that a baby born in the US will grow up to be a child molestor as well. So why stop at banning immigration, why not ban childbirth altogether?

You also say that America must return to the moral and societal norms of the past. You say, "Our proud nation survived a brutal civil war and broke the chains of slavery. We fought and won two major wars against totalitarianism and later broke the back of the Soviet Union." In other words, this country emerged as a force against dictatorship to preserve freedom. Child molestation and pedophilia occur because of too much freedom. In most countries, stories involving children being raped is illegal, but in America it is protected by the constitution. Pedophiles are allowed to organize, spread their views, and do anything they please so long as they don't actually have sex with children. All this is protected by the Supreme Court.

You want a society of morality and social norms, but in order to enforce and maintain morality and social norms you need force, you need totalitarianism. You needs cameras monitoring children 24 hours a day. Yet this is exactly the things that America was formed to prevent. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Sexual Nationalism and Pedophile Nationalism

One of the arguments for nationalism is that if you allow different groups to live together then conflict will erupt. For example, Jews and Muslims living in the Middle East just don't seem to get along. The answer, according to nationalists is to divide people up so they can live among their "own people." Jews live among Jews and Muslims live among Muslims.

Every day I hear about homophobia. Most people in the world are religious and most people tend to follow an Abrahamic religion, i.e. Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. The Abrahamic religions all seem to denounce homosexuality. Throughout history this has been the case. Sometimes I wonder why so many Christians hate homosexuals because it seems to go against the teachings of Christ of the New Testament who taught about love and tolerance, etc. But anyway, because of the influence of the Abrahamic religion, it is probably not surprising that many people are homophobic.

If Jews and Muslims can't get along and the answer is to separate them into their own nations, then why don't we apply the same concept to the conflict between homosexuals and heterosexuals? If homosexuals and heterosexuals cannot get along then why not just create a separate nation for homosexuals? Maybe slowly change an existing nation (e.g. America) into one that is fully tolerant of homosexuals or establish a country where homosexuality is actively practiced and is declared as the state sexual orientation.

There are many pedophile activists around and many pro-pedophile organizations like NAMBLA. Pedophile activism has created a lot of controversy, as you can imagine. There are websites like Perverted Justice that tries to bait pedophiles and shame them using public humiliation. Another site that I think is strong on child protection is Warriors for Innocence. These people claim that they are the "only thing that stands between evil and the innocent." Pedophiles can be divided into two groups: those who are attracted to little boys and those who are attracted to little girls. The former are labelled boylovers, and there is a wiki available called BoyWiki that, according to the site, is designed to "record and preserve our own history, culture, and heritage." This sort of language is very similar to the language of other nationalists.

Given that there seems to be so much conflict between pro-pedophiles and anti-pedophiles, why not just allow pedophiles to have their own country where they can do whatever they want? This may not work because, for most people, even just the thought that a child in another country is abused causes discomfort. However, even a Muslim who believes that some child in Israel is reading the Torah instead of the Koran might be uncomfortable as well, so if nationalism applies to religion then why shouldn't it apply to sexual orientation?

Update 3/7/2007:
What I would like to know is how pedophile nationalism fits into Christian morality. The bible says that followers must submit themselves to the authorities. Romans 13 says, "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong." In other words, do what the government does. However, what if the government in power is corrupt. Does a Christian have to submit to the power of a dictatorship? No, because there are exceptions to this rule of following the government. Acts 5:29 says, "We must obey God rather than men." Therefore, if any country were formed that supports pedophilia and child molestation, Christian citizens can refuse to submit to it if pedophilia is forbidden by God. But is it? Does the bible condemn pedophilia? According to Positive Liberty, the bible does not actually condemn pedophilia. However, even though the bible doesn't explicitly condemn pedophilia, it does condemn fornication and sins of the flesh, which would include pedophilia.

Update 3/12/07:
Note that this entry is not pro-pedophilia. It is an exercise in reductio ad absurdum that highlights how silly nationalism is.

Image: Girl is Alice Liddell, photograph by Lewis Carroll