Msikilize na huyu nae;
"Why are there so many gay atheists? Does one tendency help cause the other? Or is it perhaps that being gay or atheist is not enough of a reason to visit my site or send me email but being both is?
Of the people I interact with most on my site the majority are heterosexual male. But I am not quite sure if the next biggest group is women or gay men, it is a close run thing. This proportion is very much higher than it "should be" the proportion of gay men out there in the population as a whole is much smaller than this.
Why this is I do not know. It could be an artefact of memory, I simply forget more of the people who are straight and dull but I remember every one who is gay, no matter how otherwise unremarkable they are, it is a possibility but I think it is unlikely. I think it is a real effect. Another possibility is that the number of gay atheists is normal but they are unnaturally vociferous, or more likely to find a reason to e-mail me. This possibility is probably capable of explaining a part of the gay overrepresentation but not all of it.
I think that the evidence points to an affinity between homosexuality and atheism. But I am less clear about how this could be, the direction of any causation.
I struggle to find any reason to believe atheism would make a person more likely to be homosexual, but perhaps it would help a person be more comfortable with bisexuality. If a person sees homosexual behaviour as sinful it would be comparatively simple to stifle a slight tendency in that direction but a major degree of homosexuality would demand a more extreme rationalization. Homosexuality among Christians has had a powerful effect, forcing many men to focus on their work or art to an extreme degree or it has emerged in the form of abusive relationships with children or abuse (including self harm) of the most physical kind. I can't help thinking that many mad monks were closeted in their cloisters because of what they perceived of as sinful desires.
The repression of sexual desires is a powerful force, it can be a profound influence on people and their lives. Much of the power of the Catholic Church is due to this effect. Chastity is seen as a virtue and therefore the suppression of sexual urges becomes an act of worship. Celibacy and the suppression of all sexual urges is a major reason to account for the power of monks, nuns and their organizations. The other reason that celibacy has been so useful to the Church has been the lack of inheritance of wealth and position through the Church, with the obvious exception of the Borgia family. Marriage keeps it in the family, celibacy keeps property in the Church.
Once you take away, or more accurately, pervert, the sexual instinct you create a monster, far more capable of wicked acts and self-sacrifice. Monasteries and Nunneries are machines to create monsters to do the work of the Church.
In the modern world people grow up into their sexuality and their religious beliefs at the same time. There is no reason to believe that most gay people are not resolved to their sexuality, and fixed within it, by the time of puberty. If there is a degree of causation between homosexuality and atheism I expect it to be far more likely that the sexuality predisposes towards the rejection of religion.
Religion is usually inherited. Comparatively few people change religions and few diverge from the religions of their parents. I have heard some people try to explain religions with a genetic explanation but this I find less convincing than the idea than the position of Uranus would affect my moods. Religions spread memetically, and for most people they share the religions of their parents for the same reasons as they share the same gut bacteria, the environment they grow up in is full of that infectious agent, it is all around them and it is well adapted to flourish within its host before the host is born. However that religion is well adapted to infect heterosexual brains, that is where it has developed, those are the environments to which it has become adapted. An old religion that finds itself in a homosexual brain is less well adapted to make a home there. There is a much stronger chance that it will be rejected. Homosexuality is an abnormal condition, abnormal in the sense of less common. The ideas and concepts of religions are well shaped to key into the human brain, if the brain is shaped differently the fit will be less comfortable.
Nobody can be gay, Christian and blasé about it. It is not possible. Many gay Christians can square the circle but not without some rather elaborate bits of doublethink and mental gymnastics. In contrast many heterosexual people simply absorb their religion as they absorb their language, painlessly, by osmosis, never once engaging their conscious rational mental processes. I think it is very likely that many homosexual people become atheists because their sexuality forces them to take more responsibility for their own religious beliefs. Naturally the more people confront the rationality of belief the more people see how deeply irrational most religions are.
Does that crisis of religion versus sexuality create a whole class of spiritual gay atheists? I suspect it does. People who would otherwise be perfectly happy in mainstream religion find that their sexuality puts them beyond the pale and so they embrace atheism but they are much more filled with spirituality than most mainstream atheists. Is this the reason for the formation of some atheist sects? People with a natural affinity to spirituality find themselves outside the mainstream but with a thirst for the spiritual. This could be an explanation for some of the popularity of the pseudo-religions such as humanism and Satanism, perhaps?