On 7/20/06, Jim Guinee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In other words, let's not examine confounding variables because it might destroy your ill-founded premise?
In your eagerness to insult, you have ignored my point. I already gave a solid reason for my comment, and rather than addressing it, you chose to invent dishonesty on my part. I suggest that next time you take a step back from the computer and think before you send. You're not helping your case with this kind of comment, and of course it can't help but affect our estimates of your character.
3. Frequency of attendance at religious services is associated with frequency of divorce and/or separation: How often do you go to church (all statistics are rounded)?
(snip)
"2-3 times a month" - 11% "Nearly every week" - 11% "Weekly" - 12% "Several times weekly" - 12%
As I wrote, "there don't seem to be any wonderful protections against divorce inherent in religious practices". Here we can see that in fact my claim is correct, unless you consider a 10-12% divorce rate to be "low". I repeat my earlier comments (below), which I stand by (because they're correct), and which you have so far failed to address. I'll resummarize the point, since that seems to have been lost in the noise here: Restricting sex to marriage would only be a positive thing if there were some way to guarantee that everyone could have a good marriage. There doesn't seem to be any such guarantee, not even among the groups most fervently in favor of such a restriction. In the absence of such a guarantee, the restrictions will inevitably tend to make sex more of a commodity, and therefore are a bad thing. Paul Smith On 7/19/06, Jim Guinee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My earlier point was not to debate the morality of sex outside of marriage as much as the social problems that would diminish greatly if sex was indeed confined to marriage. It seems that when you argue "Wouldn't it be great if we could...?" someone immediately steps in with "Yeah, like that's going to work!"
Well, that's in part because we don't all agree that "it would be great if we could...". In this case, if you mean "wouldn't it be great if all sex were good frequent sex within stable, happy, loving marriages that never fall apart, and if everyone were able to find such a marriage", then, well, sure, I guess (though I would not expect everyone to even agree with that, and wouldn't blame people who didn't). But if that's what you mean, you're asking for a number of miracles, and if your plan to make it happen is to start by working to restrict sex to marriage and pray for those miracles to happen, then here in the real world, it would most definitely not "be great". In fact you're a lot more likely to get more commodization (is that a word? Making it into a commodity?) of sex and of women, "honor killings" (and now forced "honor suicides"), children sold/taken as brides, etc. Sure, you can legislate against some of that, but the overall commodization of sex is an inevitable product of attempts to restrict sex to the marriage contract (and yes, the Pope has that exactly backwards in his pronouncement of a few months ago. He is simply wrong). If you think you have a more concrete plan to make those miracles occur then I'm sure that the rest of us would love to hear it. Keep in mind that the divorce rate is high among the fundamentalist religious groups most devoted to this model for sex and marriage, so if there is a plan there, it sure doesn't seem to be working. And I don't see anyone addressing the other miracles at all. I think this is clearly just a lot of wishful thinking - "let's restrict sex to marriage, and if that doesn't work for some people, we'll just blame it all on them". That wouldn't "be great" at all in my book. The arguments against sex outside of marriage mentioned earlier - sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies - can be directly addressed. It WOULD be great if we did that, rather than wasting all of this effort trying to get everyone to chase the same pipe dream without considering the consequences. Paul Smith --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
