But the most effective weapon against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's position.
I know nothing about religion, but I know plenty about AIDS, population, effective disease prevention strategies and so on, and this is incorrect. I agree that education and promoting responsible sexual behavior have an important role to play, but policies that do not make effective use of condoms will condemn millions of people to gruesome death for no reason, and leave millions of orphans who will starve. Most of the women with AIDS in Africa are faithful to their husbands, but husbands in Africa have *never* in faithful to wives. They never have been in recorded history, and they will not start now.
Whatever good the Pope may have done, it was outweighed by his opposition to contraception and the use of condoms.
Overpopulation is the worst crisis of the 21st century. Because the world is overpopulated (or to put it another way, because our food-production technology is so destructive and inefficient), the world's resources and land are being ravaged and two billion people live on the edge of starvation, in unthinkable misery. *THAT* is a morality problem. What people do with their sex organs is mostly their own business. (The only sexual behavior that bothers me is pedophilia, and the only major organization guilty of countenancing it on a large scale is the Catholic Church, as it happens. The Pope looked the other way for a long time.)
If cold fusion can be perfected and agriculture eliminated then the world will support a higher human population without damage to the ecosystem. In that case, contraception will be a little less important for a few decades. But in the long term it is essential. We cannot sustain exponential growth.
Population will never come under control until effective contraception, education for women, child care and old-age pensions are put in place. Mumbo-jumbo about changing behavior will accomplish nothing. People never behaved differently than they do now. I have never heard of a society in which most teenagers were abstinent. In the US teenage pregnancy rates have been unchanged since colonial times. The only reason pregnancy is declining now is because of the increased availability of contraception.
I do not go along with this idea that Grimer and Pope endorse, that we should go around lecturing Africans about their sex lives. People can decide for themselves how they should behave, and what they consider moral. They need no help from us. They do not want lessons in morality from us. If they feel like engaging in depersonalized sexual games, the way ancient Romans, Japanese and Chinese people did, that is entirely their call, and their business. As mayor La Guardia said of the Pope: "you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules."
I know nothing about religion. It seems synonymous with superstition, as far as I can make out. The Pope claimed that the assassination attempt against him was prevented by a dead person, St. Mary, who deflected the gun. I expect he believed that a virgin conceived and bore a child. People who believe in ghosts, biological impossibilities and similar weird notions live in a different world than I do. They are as distant from me as the primitive tribes in South Pacific islands or pre-modern Japanese peasants. I have studied the Islanders and the Japanese. I know a lot about them. I sympathize with them. I admire them, and their culture, arts, and languages. I like their sexual morality, which the Pope would not approve of. But despite my wholehearted admiration and knowledge of them, there is an unbridgeable 400-year gap between us, starting with Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. The Pope stands on the other side of that gap, mired in pre-modern, pre-scientific darkness.
Despite all the pleasant rhetoric and high-minded people who claim there is no conflict between science and religion, it seems clear to me that there is. It is no coincidence that most scientists are atheists (according to the Scientific American and other sources). T. H. Huxley was the first scientist to openly champion science against religion. Everything he said seems correct and up-to-date to me. Religion offers certainty without proof, just the opposite of science. It asks people to believe in fabulous nonsense such as a virgin birth, Noah's Ark, bringing people back from the dead, curing diseases by hocus-pocus and faith-healing (which is to say, blaming the patient for the disease), or changing primate sexual behavior such as homosexuality. I cannot imagine how a sane, educated, modern person could believe such things, but some people do, including many of my friends. Perhaps I lack imagination. I am glad I do! Frankly, I cannot see why anyone would even *want* to believe in these things. They are nightmares, even as myths.
Many religious people fear that science will undermine their beliefs and gradually destroy their culture. That is why they do not want their children to learn evolution in school. These people are not fools. They are exactly right. Science *will* destroy their beliefs and it will alienate their children. The sooner, the better, as far as I am concerned.
Religion has brought about much of permanent value, such as Christian morality and Buddhist philosophy. But it cannot coexist forever in a society that must have science and progress to survive. We have freed ourselves from the limits of nature such as disease and starvation. We now control our own destiny and the fate of the earth. We have the power to destroy the earth with superstition, ignorance and overpopulation, or to save it with enlightened science.
Science has given mankind more understanding, more power, truth, freedom, and more genuine, mature happiness, dignity, purpose and opportunity than all of the 10,000 years of religion it has supplanted. It is the best world view yet devised. It is revolutionary. It conflicts with religion and with all other premodern belief systems. Only one can survive. Either you believe in experiments, evidence and the laws of nature, or you believe that all living species were crowded onto single a wooden boat, and a women had a male child without having sex. You cannot believe both. People who say they believe both are fooling themselves, or driving themselves into a mild form of mental illness.
Of course science has brought about terrible things, too. It gave us nuclear weapons and it contributed much to the Third Reich. But for that matter, religion has generated much misery, oppression and war, most recently in the 9/11 attacks.
Regarding the central tenet of religion, the existence of God, I have not studied this in any depth, but as far as I can tell, arguments for the existence of God are logical fallacies. That is, they lead to infinite regressions, or they are not falsifiable, or they lack consequence (you cannot tell what, if any, conclusion they compel). Plus there are appeals to consequence of belief, appeals to tradition, and various other well-known fallacies. I *have* studied logic and philosophy and these arguments don't cut it, by my standards. I guess that makes me an agnostic, or an indifferent atheist. The definitions of God are so varied in different cultures they seem to have no common ground, any more than sexual morality and other culture-bound ideas and customs do. Even among Christians, some people believe in divine orgies, others in monogamy, and still others think that any form of sex is sinful. Apparently, normal, healthy people believe in every possible permutation of sex and religion, so I conclude that such things have no meaning outside of a particular culture, and they are none of my business.
- Jed
