I believe religion is about human ethics which make us better than animals.
For example human feels a shame of doing things which animals can usually do.
My goal from this thread and the poll is to see the relationship between ones ethics and religion.
Please choose according to your inner feeling and with sincerity.
I find a lot of the poll options to be irrelevant to ethics, and it seems to me that more often than not, tying sexuality and especially one's sexual orientation to questions of ethics is based on ad hoc arguments to justify one's already held beliefs, some variation of a supposed answer to the
Euthyphro dilemma, or a blend of both that usually involves circular logic (e.g., simultaneously making the statements "It is unethical to do X because God forbade it" and "God forbade X because it is unethical").
• I don't think one's sexual orientation and preferences per se make them less ethical. In my opinion, the main part about any person's sexuality that is related to ethics is whether or not the people with whom they have sex or engage in any kind of sexual activity are adults who have provided informed consent. As long as all involved parties aren't harming anyone or forcing them to engage in any activity against his/her will, then I think whatever they decide to do with each other is up to them and isn't something that reflects negatively on their ethics at all.
• I believe prostitution can carry a lot of risks for the person who works in it as well as the person who seeks prostitutes' services, but with proper protection and safety measures, those risks can be reduced at least to an extent. I certainly don't think it's a positive reflection of a society's state of affairs when some people are forced to work as prostitutes to cover their basic needs, so in such a society, it seems to me that the ethical thing to do would be to try to reform that society's state of affairs so that people wouldn't have to accept jobs they find demeaning and would otherwise never do out of their own choice.
If a person can freely choose between different jobs, takes proper safety measures, and realizes what risks working as a prostitute entails but chooses to work as one anyway, then I don't think they should be forced not to do so. That would be a free, informed choice, and I don't see any reason to strip away the right of people to make free decisions concerning their lives for themselves.
• In my view, having sound ethics doesn't mean one has to be religious, which is why I think the poll is flawed because it is based on a faulty premise (that is, the implication that lack of belief automatically makes one's ethics questionable or unreliable). I would even argue that a person's religious beliefs can actually be an indication that they
don't have sound ethics in some cases.
For one example, some people's religious beliefs seem to inspire them to be misogynistic, and they can also inspire them to show contempt for people merely based on their sexual orientation. Another example is intolerance to people who hold different beliefs and/or people who lack belief in any religion. So it seems to me that the argument that people can only be ethical if they're religious is, again, based on circular logic: "Sound ethics are dictated by religion; therefore, only religious people can have sound ethics. Because those ethics are sound, religion dictated them."
• The options in the poll seem to be influenced by a particular set of beliefs, which is not shared by all religions. There are religious people who don't view homosexuality as unethical or undesirable in any way, and there are also religious people who believe that there's nothing wrong with prostitution as long as the person working in it isn't coerced or exploited into accepting to work in it.
Overall, I think that a lot of the questions you asked are slanted toward a particular type of dogma, and some of them (especially the ones about sexual orientation) don't even have anything to do with ethics or lack thereof, in my view. It seems to me that questions about issues that actually have any significance when it comes to their effect on other people's lives would be more relevant to ethics than most of the ones you asked here.
