Don't even get me started on the "went home to Heaven" part, either.
I don't understand what's wrong with that. Whatever personal disagreement the parents had, however misguided, I'm sure they still were doing what they thought was in their child's best interest and that such a line was expressed as a hope that their child might find happiness in the afterlife.
So what gender are hermaphroditic people?
I believe that's generally something that the parents decide at birth, as it's such a rare phenomenon.
Gender is not binary, it is a spectrum - it is a social construct.
It is a social construct, I agree with that.
I don't think calling it a "spectrum" is the right way to go about it, though. Keep in mind what gender is: it's a loose set of personality and behavioral traits we expect from people that was originally based on their biological sex. Setting it up as a spectrum oversimplifies that and leads to some bad assumptions. First, that the two "ends" are in opposition to each other and are mutually exclusive. Second, that these two ends are indeed ends at all and not just a loosely defined group of these traits that describe some combination of biological behavior and societal expectation.
If we broke it down enough, we could come up with a long, long list of all of the traits associated with "male" and "female." With that list, we could take a look at someone and find that maybe they correlate to one or both of these, or maybe that they correlate to neither. It's just a set of personality traits. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive and they're certainly not the only personality traits that exist.
I think my conception of gender is more a set of two unrelated scales, either one of which can be more or less full. I think that's a better analogy than a spectrum. And regardless, there's then the third scale which is literally "every other possible behavioral trait" that eclipses both of them because gender is just a small, small part of human behavior. It traditionally existed to (1) make identifying a potential mate easier, to (2) make social interaction easier by letting us make basic assumptions about behavior, and to (3) define useful societal roles for people to further the goals of civilization. And while these are all still useful to varying degrees, I think our ability to define ourselves in our own way outweighs all of them. And I really think our obsession with the idea of gender is misplaced and there's so much more to human behavior than that. I find it worrisome that people are so obsessed with the idea in the first place.
The fact that the very religion that goes on and on about equality, respect and tolerance goes and persecutes those who don't feel that they, themselves are what they really want to be and want to become someone else as so to fulfill their objective and achieve happiness, is just very, very grim irony and hipocrisy.
The religion doesn't do that,
some of the people who claim to follow it do. That's an important distinction.
In short, Religion causes most of this worlds problems.
The problems you're speaking of are not caused by religion, they're caused by
some of the people who claim to follow a religion. And saying that
all of the world's problems are caused by these people is a vast exaggeration.
Even though most religions teach peace, tolerance and other decent values, religious people are constantly at war. Even on their own soil, people are persecuting their brethren.
I think South Park did it best with their two-parter "Go God Go." If you really think the world would be better off with no religion, you're deluded. The problem isn't that people are religious, it's that people don't think for themselves and are quick to generalize people, judge other people based on those generalizations, and then condemn those people based on their faulty judgment.
