I understand it. I really do.

If you ask a religious person about their beliefs, you might get back an unequivocal answer. Something that is directly from their religious text is essentially unquestioned if not unquestionable.

This post is going to use Christianity and homosexuality as its religion and topic, but the ideas translate, albeit often with less immediate social fervor, to many other religion/topic pairings. (Islam/hijab, Buddhism/vegetarianism, etc.) This particular topic is one I feel strongly about.

Because, you see, when atheists talk to strong Christians about homosexuality, it sometimes feels like this:

Agnes: Wait, so what’s wrong with…

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This is a long post, not because there’s a lot to say about stereotypes (though there is), but because I’m going to try to make you better at thinking, and better at thinking about thinking. In order to do that, I’m going to walk you through several scenarios with thought-puzzle questions in them, and even stop and give you a test in the middle, and you should really not try to guess where I’m going with it all because the thought-puzzles will work better if you’re not trying to connect everything with what you think you know about stereotypes, even if I agree.

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Asked for a form, got “color”. Replied, “Not a form!”. Asked someone else, got “villanelle”. So here is a villanelle about color.

A color between red and green.
What word should we use to call
Perhaps a color never seen?

For decades it has always been
Red, green, blue — that’s all
No color between red and green.

But what could one more receptor mean?
Would other colors start to pall
Against a color never seen?

Now think of vision no less keen
but in one way destined to crawl
No difference between red and green.

How does this fact…

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