Jesus as a man

 

Thinking about it a little bit, I can see where Christians have a sexual problem with Jesus. They can't have him marry fourteen-year-olds, like Muhammed, he just wasn't that sort of guy, nor did he live off brigandage or kill anyone, as is reported about Muhammed (contested, of course). Still, Christians do claim, since it is part of the Trinity teaching, that he was man. God became human. Otherwise, the sacrifice magic to lift the curse of Adam, as they see it, doesn't work. So he had genitals and one has to assume he was sexual. Although the question of his sexuality is, understandably, not addressed in scripture, Most Christians would be highly offended if he were anything other than heterosexual *not even asexual/ So he was celibate. Did he fantasize, or masturbate, or maybe even have secret sex with local prostitutes, which would explain his tolerance in spite of the spirit of the times? Of course, he was tolerant in general so that proves nothing. The only thing Jesus explicitly condemns is divorce and marital infidelity, and he is definite about that.

You’re hitting a really interesting tension that Christianity has never fully resolved: the intersection of Jesus’ full humanity and his radical celibacy. The doctrine of the Incarnation does say he was fully human, and yes, that includes having a physical body, including sexual organs. But historically and theologically, almost all Christian traditions assume—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—that he was celibate. That’s not just prudishness; celibacy is framed as a spiritual choice, part of his mission.

The kinds of questions you raise—fantasies, masturbation, secret sexual activity—aren’t addressed in scripture at all. They fall into speculation, because the Gospels are entirely silent about his inner sexual life. Early Christians often treated sexual desire as a morally dangerous thing; so imagining Jesus as someone who experienced it would have been uncomfortable or even heretical for them. That’s partly why the idea of asexuality or complete sublimation of sexual desire became implicit in the tradition.

Christian discomfort with Jesus’ sexuality, particularly in contrast with figures like Muhammed, comes from both this celibacy and the broader theology: he had to embody humanity fully without participating in “normal” sexual life, or it might detract from his role as the perfect, sinless sacrificial human. So yes, there’s a kind of tension there: he was human, yet somehow transcended human sexual drives—or at least, the tradition depicts it that way.

If you like, we could unpack the psychology of this tension: why Christians might insist on heterosexuality for Jesus, why celibacy is seen as holy, and what that tells us about broader Christian attitudes toward sex and morality. It’s actually pretty fascinating.

I repeat: he explicitly condemns divorce and indirectly condemns marital infidelity by condemning even thinking about it. That is the only deviation he pays any attention to.

You’re pointing to something that many biblical scholars have also noticed. In the teachings attributed to Jesus Christ, sexual morality is treated in a rather indirect way compared with other ethical themes. The passages most clearly connected with marriage do indeed emphasize the seriousness of divorce and the importance of fidelity, sometimes extending the concern to intention as well as action.

It’s probably more accurate to say that the emphasis is not on cataloguing sexual behaviors but on protecting the moral and social meaning of marriage. In the cultural context of first-century Judea, divorce was relatively easy for men to initiate, leaving women vulnerable, so the strong condemnation of casual divorce may have had a social justice component as well as a moral one.

You are also right that the texts are largely silent about private sexual life. That silence has allowed later traditions to project their own assumptions—some portraying him as completely beyond sexual desire, others as simply celibate by vocation.

One interesting philosophical point is that his ethical teaching often focuses more on inner disposition than on external rule-following. So the mention of looking with intent in the heart is part of a broader pattern, not necessarily a unique focus on sexual sin.

If you’re looking at this from a comparative religion or ethical theory angle, there’s a surprisingly rich discussion about why some traditions treat sexual behavior as a central marker of moral order while others don’t.

If we see marriage as a social rather than sexual matter, then it can be said the Jesus is silent about sex.

Exactly—that’s a very clean way to put it. In the Gospels, Jesus speaks almost entirely in terms of the social and covenantal dimensions of marriage: the bond between spouses, its indissolubility, and the responsibilities it entails. He doesn’t explicitly address sexual acts, desires, or orientation. So if you frame marriage as primarily a social, legal, and relational institution rather than a sexual one, then his teachings really are “silent” on sex itself.

What he does do, though, is indirectly elevate intention and inner disposition—like in the “lustful look” saying—so the moral concern is about respect, fidelity, and the integrity of relationships rather than sexual activity per se. Seen this way, celibacy isn’t primarily a sexual choice but a social and spiritual one: a way of participating fully in his mission without entering the social institution of marriage.

It’s a subtle distinction that Christianity has often glossed over in later discussions about sexual morality. It’s more about the meaning of relationships than the mechanics of sex.

What happened later is complicated by a mix of tradition and individual personalities and broader cultural attitudes. I think it behooves us to realize that Jesus, the founder, neither endorsed nor condemned, and he was the only one seen as divine.

Absolutely—that’s the key insight. The later Christian emphasis on sexual morality and celibacy isn’t a direct reflection of Jesus’ own words but a combination of the interpretations of early followers, the institutional priorities of the Church, and prevailing cultural attitudes about sex, gender, and holiness.

Jesus himself, in the sources we have, doesn’t endorse or condemn sexual activity beyond the social context of marriage. The fact that he alone is treated as divine in Christian theology creates a unique situation: everything else—rules about sex, marriage, and morality—comes from human intermediaries, who inevitably mix their personalities, cultural assumptions, and doctrinal agendas. Recognizing that helps explain the sometimes rigid or contradictory sexual ethics we see later, and it underscores that the founder’s own stance was remarkably neutral, focused on relationship integrity and broader ethical principles rather than private sexual behavior.

It’s a reminder that the human overlay can be massive compared to the founder’s actual teachings.

US political tactics and British lords

 

It seems we have a new political tactic in the US Congress whereby people leaving manage to effectively appoint their successor. Since generally no one in the particular party of the Congressperson in question will run against the incumbent, the incumbent doesn't announce retirement until filing deadline has passed, while the person he or she wants to succeed file moments before the deadline, seeing to it that no one else can jump in.

Yes, what you describe is a real tactic, and political reporters sometimes call it a “late-withdrawal” or “deadline switcheroo.” The mechanics are essentially exactly as you described.

Here’s how it typically works.

A sitting member of Congress files for reelection as if they intend to run. Potential challengers from the same party assume the incumbent will be on the ballot, and because incumbents almost always win their primaries, serious competitors generally don’t file. Incumbency in U.S. congressional races is extremely powerful—reelection rates for House members have long been above 90%.

Then, shortly before or even minutes before the filing deadline, the incumbent announces retirement or withdraws. At that moment a preferred successor—who has been prepared in advance—files just before the deadline. Because the deadline has passed, no other candidates from that party can enter the race.

The result is that the outgoing politician has effectively cleared the field for their chosen successor, who may now face little or no competition in the party primary.

Political analysts often describe it bluntly as an incumbent “handpicking a successor.” Variants of the maneuver have existed for decades, though some states have changed their election laws specifically to block it—for example by reopening filing periods if an incumbent withdraws or by forcing incumbents to declare earlier.

Two points make the tactic especially potent in U.S. politics:

First, primary elections are usually the real contest. In many districts the general election is safe for one party, so whoever wins the primary is almost guaranteed the seat.

Second, party norms discourage challenging incumbents, so the political “market” of candidates never forms if the seat appears occupied.

So your observation is accurate: the tactic can function as a kind of informal appointment power, even though legally the seat is still filled through an election.

One interesting constitutional angle: the U.S. system strongly protects ballot access rules as matters of state election law, not congressional procedure. That means Congress itself usually cannot stop the tactic; it has to be addressed by state legislatures changing filing-deadline rules.

Your description also touches on something older in American politics: the tension between formal democratic procedures and informal party control. Machines in the 19th and early 20th centuries did similar things, though by different methods.

If you're interested, there’s a deeper question behind this: whether the modern American primary system actually weakens party discipline so much that politicians invent tricks like this to regain control. That’s a debate political scientists have been having for decades.

Something similar, although probably not deliberate, happened with the Democrats in the last presidential election. Biden held on and had control of almost all the delegates, then at the last minute withdraws and his delegates choose the Vice President. That put a black woman, Kamala Harris, who would never have won the primaries, in as the nominee. I think this is one of the reasons Trump won; a lot of Americans felt the nominee should go through the primary process. Here the case may be a little different, as I think Biden intended to see it through, but then realized he was not healthy enough.

What you’re describing about the 2024 Democratic situation is broadly how many observers interpreted the mechanics, though there are a few structural details worth keeping straight.

When a presidential candidate runs in the primaries in the United States, the delegates they win are pledged to that candidate at the party convention. In 2024 those delegates were pledged to Joe Biden because he ran largely unopposed in the Democratic primaries.

If the candidate withdraws before the convention, those pledged delegates are generally released. They then become free to vote for someone else at the convention. The party rules do not require a new nationwide primary in that situation.

So procedurally, if Biden stepped aside late, the delegates—many of whom were politically aligned with him—would be the ones choosing the nominee. In practice that makes the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, a very natural focal point because:

• She is already on the ticket.

• She has national campaign infrastructure.

• She is acceptable to most factions of the party.

• Party leaders tend to rally around the most obvious consensus candidate to avoid a chaotic convention.

That does produce the perception you’re pointing to: voters participated in primaries, but the final nominee was effectively determined after the primary process ended. Even though it followed party rules, it can feel to many voters like the decision moved from the electorate to party insiders.

And perception matters in politics. Critics argued that the Democratic nominee should ideally have been tested in competitive primaries. Supporters countered that extraordinary circumstances—specifically concerns about Biden’s age and health—forced a late decision.

You also touched on an important nuance: it’s not clear the situation was planned. Many analysts believe Biden genuinely intended to run until concerns about his fitness became politically unavoidable late in the cycle. That’s very different from the deliberate “deadline maneuver” you described in congressional races.

Historically, though, this kind of late substitution is not unprecedented. Party conventions used to choose nominees routinely before the modern primary system took shape in the 1970s. In that earlier era, party elites essentially decided the nominee after bargaining among delegates.

Your intuition about voter reaction is widely shared among political scientists: modern voters have come to expect a visible primary contest as a legitimacy test. When the process deviates from that—even if legally proper—it can create a sense that the choice was made by insiders rather than voters.

And that raises a deeper question about the U.S. system: primaries were originally introduced to reduce party control, but when something unusual happens late in the cycle, the system has very few mechanisms to return the choice directly to voters.

Most of the time locally, and nationally, elections are generally decided within five or so percent in the US. It is almost evenly divided between the parties. That creates a situation where loss of a significant part of one party's normal followers losese the election; here this was young minority males. Not most but 5 - 10 percent. This was to my mind almost certainly a sexist vote.

Your basic structural point about American elections is quite accurate. Modern U.S. national elections are often decided by very small shifts in the electorate. A change of only a few percentage points in key groups or states can flip the outcome.

For example, in recent presidential elections involving Donald Trump—such as 2016 and 2024—the decisive margins in several swing states were only a few percentage points or less. In a polarized electorate where the two parties are roughly balanced nationwide, a 3–5% shift in a specific demographic group can easily determine the result.

So the political arithmetic you’re describing is exactly what campaign strategists watch. If a party normally receives, say, 90% of the vote from a demographic group and that drops to 80–85%, the net change can be large enough to swing a state.

Regarding the specific question you raise—young minority men and the candidacy of Kamala Harris—analysts have proposed several explanations for shifts in that voting bloc. Sexism is one possibility and some scholars do argue it plays a role in attitudes toward female candidates. Political science research has repeatedly found that gender bias can affect perceptions of leadership and competence, especially among some male voters.

At the same time, analysts usually caution that electoral shifts almost never have a single cause. Studies of young male voters in recent U.S. elections point to several overlapping factors:

Some younger men—across racial groups—have shown growing dissatisfaction with economic prospects and institutions, which can translate into protest voting or lower turnout.

There has also been a noticeable gender gap among younger voters, with young women trending more Democratic and young men somewhat less so in several Western democracies, not just the U.S.

Campaign messaging, economic concerns, immigration debates, and social-media political ecosystems also appear to have influenced young male voters.

Because these factors overlap, it’s difficult to isolate exactly how much of any shift was due specifically to sexism versus broader political or economic dissatisfaction.

Your underlying observation, though, is an important one: in a highly polarized two-party system, even modest changes in loyalty within a normally reliable voting group can be decisive. Campaigns therefore spend enormous effort trying either to prevent such defections or to encourage them in the opposing party’s coalition.

In other words, the election outcome often hinges not on persuading the entire country but on small movements among a few strategically important groups.

Parliamentary systems have often elected women to the leadership, but it has not happened in the States. Indeed, women have been nominated only twice, both by Democratic women in special situations.

Your observation is broadly correct. The United States has never elected a woman president, whereas many parliamentary democracies have had female heads of government for decades.

In the U.S., only two women have been nominated for president by a major party. The first was Hillary Clinton, nominated by the Democratic Party (United States) in 2016. The second was Kamala Harris in the unusual circumstances surrounding the 2024 race that we were discussing.

In contrast, parliamentary systems have elected quite a number of women as prime ministers or equivalent leaders—people like Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Angela Merkel in Germany, and Indira Gandhi in India, among many others.

Political scientists often point to structural reasons for this difference rather than assuming it is purely cultural.

First, in a parliamentary system the leader is chosen inside the legislature by the governing party or coalition, not by a nationwide direct election. That means the decisive electorate might be a few hundred members of parliament rather than tens of millions of voters. Party elites sometimes prove more willing than the mass electorate to select a candidate who breaks historical patterns.

Second, parliamentary leadership contests are much shorter and less personalized. The party brand dominates the election, while the prime minister is somewhat secondary. In the U.S., by contrast, presidential campaigns revolve intensely around the individual candidate’s image and personal characteristics.

Third, the U.S. presidency is often culturally framed as a singular national executive with military command authority. Some scholars think that symbolism—commander-in-chief, nuclear authority, etc.—may activate traditional ideas about leadership that can disadvantage female candidates.

Your additional point is also interesting: both Democratic nominations occurred in somewhat non-routine political contexts. Clinton’s nomination followed a long period of Democratic establishment support and a fractured Republican field in 2016, while Harris’s situation emerged from a late-cycle change. Neither arose from a normal open primary field in which multiple female candidates competed over many cycles until one broke through.

One irony is that the U.S. actually elects women to many other major offices—senators, governors, cabinet officials, and the vice presidency—yet the presidency itself remains an exception.

The deeper puzzle, which political scientists still debate, is whether that barrier reflects institutional features of the American presidential system, lingering voter attitudes about gender and leadership, or simply historical inertia that has not yet been broken.

Clinton was the wife of a former President.

Yes, and that point has often been noted. Hillary Clinton entered national politics first as First Lady to Bill Clinton, and her later career—U.S. senator from New York, Secretary of State, and finally the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016—grew partly out of that earlier visibility and political network.

That pattern actually fits a very common historical route for women entering top political leadership. In many countries the first prominent female leaders emerged through political families, especially as wives or daughters of powerful men. A classic example is Indira Gandhi, who was the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Another is Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, daughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Political scientists sometimes call this the “dynastic gateway.” In societies where voters or party elites are uncertain about female leadership, a family connection can provide legitimacy and name recognition that lowers the barrier to entry.

In Clinton’s case, though, it’s also worth remembering that she built a substantial independent career after the White House years—winning statewide elections and serving in cabinet-level office. By the time she ran for president, she had accumulated far more formal political experience than many male presidential candidates.

Still, your observation captures something real about the symbolic side of it. Because her initial national prominence came through her marriage to a former president, some voters likely perceived her candidacy as part of a continuing political dynasty, rather than simply the rise of an independent female leader.

That perception—fair or not—probably interacted with the broader issues we were discussing: partisan polarization, attitudes toward gender and leadership, and the very narrow margins that often decide U.S. elections.

I see the UK Parliament has voted to make the House of Lords elective. Could you explain a couple things: first how this is possible in a Conservative led parliament, second what next will happen before this actually is put in place.

The first thing to say is that you may be seeing a headline that slightly overstates what actually happened. As of now, the UK Parliament has not actually decided to replace the House of Lords with a fully elected chamber. What has been moving through Parliament recently is a much narrower reform bill dealing with hereditary peers.

Let me separate the issues, because the British constitution makes this sort of reform confusing.

1. Why could such a vote happen under a Conservative-led Parliament?

In the UK system, Parliament is sovereign: any government with a majority in the House of Commons can change the structure of Parliament itself by ordinary legislation. No constitutional amendment procedure is required.

But two other political facts matter:

First, House of Lords reform has cross-party support in principle, even if parties disagree about the details. The chamber still contains appointed life peers under the Life Peerages Act 1958 and until recently retained 92 hereditary peers as a compromise from the House of Lords Act 1999. Almost every party has at times proposed reducing or changing this system.

Second, many votes about constitutional reform are free votes or partial cross-party coalitions. MPs sometimes vote according to personal constitutional views rather than strict party discipline. So even a Conservative-led government could see a reform measure pass if opposition parties support it and some Conservatives vote with them.

However, a fully elected Lords is historically controversial because many politicians fear it would challenge the authority of the House of Commons.

2. What is actually happening now

The concrete reform currently moving through Parliament is the bill to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the Lords. That is a modest continuation of the 1999 reform that already removed most hereditary seats.

This bill is currently in the stage British journalists call “ping-pong.” The Commons and Lords send amendments back and forth until they agree on the final wording.

If agreement is reached, the bill then receives Royal Assent from the monarch and becomes law.

3. If Parliament really wanted an elected Lords

That would require much larger legislation, and several big decisions would have to be made:

• How members would be elected (national lists, regions, proportional representation, etc.)

• How many members there would be

• How long their terms would last

• Most importantly: what powers the new chamber would have

That last point is the reason reform has stalled for decades. If the upper chamber were elected, it might claim equal democratic legitimacy with the Commons, which could create deadlock between the two houses.

Because of that risk, British governments have repeatedly opted for incremental reforms instead of a single sweeping transformation.

So the short answer is: what you likely saw reported as “making the Lords elective” is probably part of the long-running reform debate, but the legislation actually advancing right now is much narrower—removing the hereditary element and gradually reshaping the chamber rather than replacing it outright.

If you like constitutional puzzles (and given your interest in political structure, I suspect you might), the House of Lords is one of the strangest institutions in modern democracies: it is simultaneously unelected, powerful enough to delay laws, but constitutionally subordinate to the Commons. That balance is why reform has been attempted for more than a century without anyone quite finishing the job.

Ok, that makes more sense. Reminds me of the scene in "Yes Minister" where a cabinet minister, drunk on Christmas Eve, has an accident causing significant damage. That he will have to resign is asserted and the comment made, "He was drunk as a lord so they will make one of him."

Yes—that line is perfectly in the spirit of Yes Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister. The show had a wonderful ability to compress centuries of British constitutional absurdity into one neat joke.

The quip works because of the peculiar nature of the modern House of Lords. Today most members are life peers, appointed rather than elected, usually on the advice of the prime minister. Formally the monarch creates the peerage, but politically it is the government of the day deciding who gets in.

So the joke is poking fun at a real phenomenon: politicians sometimes leave the House of Commons only to reappear in the Lords. A retired cabinet minister, senior civil servant, party donor, or political adviser can be given a life peerage and continue participating in legislation—just without facing voters again.

The phrase “drunk as a lord,” of course, is an old English idiom, probably dating back to the period when aristocrats really were the dominant social class and were stereotyped as heavy drinkers. The writers of Yes Minister—especially Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn—loved those kinds of linguistic echoes.

What makes the joke especially sharp is that it highlights a deeper constitutional quirk: the Lords is partly a retirement home for political insiders. Many peers are distinguished public figures, scholars, or judges, but quite a few are also former politicians who have simply moved to the upper chamber after their electoral careers end.

That mixture—experts, political veterans, hereditary remnants, and occasional party loyalists—is exactly why reform of the Lords has been debated for over a century but never quite resolved.

And Yes Minister understood that perfectly. Its central premise was that the British constitution works not because it is logically designed, but because everyone involved understands the unwritten games.

Faith, belief and opinion

 

Religion is often dumb, but people are not, even religious ones. I like to make a distinction between belief, which is things you accept on faith, and which you got via indoctrination, usually as a child, where doubt makes one uncomfortable, and opinion, which is an intellectual view based on evidence and mindful consideration, which you doubt all the time. Religious people generally don't like to doubt. They want the world and its answers handed to them. The religious memes encourage this by making faith a virtue and doubt a source of guilt and fear, when the reality is that doubt should be the virtue and faith should be disregarded entirely. A side issue here is that faith in general, as is obvious in the news, does a great deal of harm. It is like people don't like Congress, but they like their particular Representative, so bad government goes on and on. There clearly are good things religions do, and possibly it is essential for some people's well-being. Most of these good things wouldn't be done anyway, but I see no harm in cooperating with local religions when they are demonstrably doing good things. I would define myself as skeptical, which leads to atheism, but there is no need for cynicism.

You’re expressing a fairly common but carefully considered skeptical humanism. The distinction you draw between belief and opinion is interesting because it maps loosely onto how psychologists think about cognition. Beliefs formed early in life tend to be emotionally anchored and resistant to revision, not necessarily because people are irrational but because changing them can feel like losing part of one’s social and personal identity. That’s why doubt is often uncomfortable rather than naturally valued.

I would push back slightly on the idea that faith is universally harmful or that religious people simply “want answers handed to them.” Many people use faith not as a substitute for thinking but as a framework for living with uncertainty. Human life has a persistent background level of ambiguity about meaning, death, and purpose, and some individuals find that purely evidence-based reasoning doesn’t fully address those existential pressures.

Your comparison to political loyalty is perceptive. Social systems often form around in-group reinforcement, whether in politics, religion, or even intellectual communities. People tend to defend their particular group’s version of truth while criticizing the broader category.

The practical stance you suggest—cooperating with religious institutions when they are doing demonstrably good work—seems sensible. Historically, many communities have relied on religious organizations for charity, education, and social cohesion. One need not accept theological claims to recognize that such institutions can produce positive social effects.

Finally, skepticism as a personal orientation is compatible with intellectual humility. Skepticism is not the same as cynicism; skepticism keeps questions alive, while cynicism assumes the answers are already bad. That middle path—neither credulous nor dismissive—has a long philosophical pedigree and tends to age well.

Is this conversation helpful so far?