http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/harris06/harris06_index.html

Its burried in the document, do a search for 93 and it’ll take you right to the relevent quote. You also might do a google search for:
Atheist, academy 93
or some such thing and it should give you several sources.

Yes, I agree – to a degree. I would argue that if they did this fully and ocmpletely they wouldn’t be religious at all. 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not believe in god.

True, Karen Booth and her associates at Exodus reject tbe scientific method, distorting fact to suit their political echo-chamber of un-Christian ex-gay myths.

But there are plenty of people of various faiths who accept material and logical fact as a starting point and who adjust their religious beliefs to conform to reality.

I agree that respect must be earned. Karen, so long as you:

– ostracize sexually honest Christians from your organization’s member churches,

– promote half-truths to deceive people into accepting Freudian heresies and anti-historical reinterpretations of the Bible,

– excuse and justify the harm done to former ex-gays and to families and churches by your intentionally schismatic tactics, and

– reject the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of individual and religious freedom,

So long as you do all that, you won’t find much respect for you among mainstream Americans. And you will find no respect at all among mental-health professionals who must repair the damage that you do to people and families.

I don’t think I demonstrated my dishonesty in the statement you referenced, which was from an interview several years ago. I demonstrated my lack of knowledge (or failure of expression) at that time.

I’m fully aware that there is a difference between personally experiencing same-sex attraction or desire, acknowledging a homosexual orientation, and self-identifying as gay or lesbian.

I attended one of Dr. Mark Yarhouse’s presentations where he shared the statistical figures for studies of men and women who self-reported in the above categories, and the numbers were fewer for each subsequent group – attraction vs. orientation vs. identity. (Don’t ask me for the exact figures; I don’t have them at my fingertips. You can contact Dr. Yarhouse through the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity if you want to verify my comments.)

Again, members or attendees or leaders of United Methodist churches don’t have to lie about either their identity OR their orientation. They have to agree to refrain from same-sex intimate behavior. That’s exactly the opposite of conflation in my mind.

In most regards, we’re all talking past each other, and Dr. Yarhouse has some wise teaching about that as well. He posits that what is operating is two very different and mostly incompatible worldviews – what he calls the “discovery” and “integration” models.

The discovery model says a homosexual person is (for lack of a better term) “made or created that way.” Whether through genes or biological influence or environmental factors, he/she progressively discovers his/her feelings and sexual orientation, with the preferred (or sole) act of integrity being to embrace a gay or lesbian identity. (I’ve heard Wayne Besen make virtually the same case many, many times.)

The integration model says a person experiences same-sex attraction, recognizes they are authentic feelings, not typically chosen, but nonetheless then does choose how to act on or integrate those feelings into his/her life. Most ex-gays/post-gays obviously embrace this worldview. I do too because I think the various studies, people’s experiences, and traditional Christian faith affirm it.