I dunno, it seems to me that the 70's were the Big Thing in the 90's. You had all the stupid clothes... my wife would continuously point out teenagers wearing things she wore when she was 12 or so, a lot of period movies and 70's influenced music (disco == bad, but rock == good). Don't forget that 70's show on Fox (I wish I could remember the name of it;) ). Nick-at-Nite and TVLand are running tons of shows from the 70's (whereas they used to run mostly older shows).
There was a run of popular "disaster films" just like in the 70's. Gas prices have been rising....
Of course you realize that any month now Smurfs will re-emerge...
Ummm...
There is _always_ a cultural undercurrent of fascination with retro from about 20 years ago. Growing up in the 70's, the big fad was the 50's with Happy Days, Sha Na Na, Grease, etc. I remember the big deal being made out of 1987 being the 20th anniversary of the "Summer of Love". Of course, now everyone is inundated with 70's culture including all the bad clothing (but strangely none of the good clothing!). Now the new wave and electronic styles of the 80's are re-emerging. This is nothing new, and generally represents people's in their 30's and 40's nostalgia for the popular culture of their youth, and is perpetually glommed onto my mass-marketing (especially the commodities of popular music, movies and TV).
I have a lot of nostalgia for compauter and video games of the 80's, mostly because so many of them were very rich given the technological limitations. Many hot-n-fancy 3D games these days have mindlessly simple and repetitive game play and the NetHack remains one of the most sophisticated games ever for over 15 years. I used to covet the few machines in the AJ Computer Lab at Virginia Tech that had 320k of memory because then I could play PC-Hack (what it was called back then).
Anyhow, the whole nostalgia thing is always fun, but it's certainly nothing new.
And as far as music goes, the real renaissance has been in the progressive realm. There is more good sophisticated music coming out now than any time I can remember in the last 25 years. With such wonderful virtuoso groups as Spock's Beard, Dream Theater, the Flower Kings, Bozzio, Levin and Stevens, Transatlantic, Liquid Tension Experiment just to name a few we can enjoy complex music created by people versed in classical and jazz rather than heroin and nihilism. Of course, you will never hear any of this on the radio, but hopefully the 90's trend of deliberately bad music ("grunge", anyone? 60's garage music without the energy and passion) will give way to popular music that is once again merely boring.
Based on my experience Netscape _always_ has the new software up on the site up to a few days before they mention it on netscape.com. That's been true as long as I can remember. I couldn't get in to the ftp server myself, but it didn't surprise me that it's not announced yet.
Thank you. I did not realize they did all their balloting by mail. Doesn't Oregon also allow for Internet voting, or am I on drugs? I believe Arizona did in the Democratic primaries, IIRC. I know Oregon tends to be on the leading edge of these sort of things.
Ummm... maybe for Unitarians or the typical vacuous MTV-watcher who claims to be Christian only so his Mom won't hassle him, or some content-free feel-good Protestant sects, or some psycho-babbling talk-show evangelists. But "believing in Christ" for the majority of Christians implies a moral code based upon and extrapolated from the teachings of Jesus, and handed down by His Church, guided from error by the Holy Spirit.
Before there were Internet terminals in libraries, did you ever hear of parents complaining about their children finiding pornography at the library? Did you ever hear complaints that children are innocently or purposefully walking into adult bookstores?
Ideas and images are just that, but they can still have a very deleterious effect on immature people who are incapable of understanding them. Do you think a young child should see the commendable "Schindler's List"? I think you would just terrify the poor child and he or she would gain no understanding of what the movie is all about. Adults on the other hand will gain an understanding of the events portrayed in the movie and the significance of protecting against it happening again.
We don't let medical students perform surgery, we don't let pilot trainees land a jumbo jet, we don't let incompetant poeple write mission- critical software (well, except for Microsoft...). Similarly, you cannot expose children to every conceivable concept and expect them to assimilate and understand it all. You must walk before you can run, and I think it is in society's best interests to suffer this inconvenience and imperfect implementation in order to repsect the rights of parents to feel safe about their children using a public facility.
If public filters in libraries (however poorly- or well-implemented) used by children is censorship than so are rules against children buying pornography or seeing X-rated movies.
Why?! If you don't believe them, why should it matter what they say? Why is it that people have such a hard time when someone tells them something they don't like? Everyone shouts "Freedom of Speech", but then often get all bent out of shape when someone else exercises it too.
As far as the Ten Commandments go, religion aside, they are a significant basis for all moral code in the Western world, like the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the works of the ancient Greeks, Roman ideas of government, even the code of Hammurabi. I don't know exactly how the posting of these is handled, and don't necessarily agree with it from a Constitutional pointy of view, but the fact remains that they constitute an extremely important historical document.
Any system that allows a voter to submit an invalidly filled out form without feedback to allow him or her to fix it seriously flawed. In Virginia, we use with the machines with push buttons or a form with circles to fill out which is fed into a machine. In the former, invalid choices cannot happen in the first place. In the latter, invalid choices would presumably be immediately rejected by the machine. The fact that Palm Beach let 19,000 people submit broken ballots and walk off in happy ignorance says more about the election officials than the voters.
Statistical abberations aside, the system they used is still seriously broken. I wonder how many other communities have the same problem?
We must shield children from what's harmful until they have the capacity to learn how make that decision for themselves. You don't hand a medical student a scalpel and set him loose in the OR before he's completed his education. Why should sending people out in a world with many real dangers be any different? We have to learn to walk before we can run. That has nothing to do with not respecting the rights and freedoms of children and everything to do with educating them in the right order.
And as far as literal Bible interpretation... it's one thing to say that the Earth was created 5000 years ago because of some tortured logic resulting from reading Genesis, and it's another entirely that when St. Paul says something is wrong to believe it is wrong (after all, Jesus granted St. Peter the right to rule on moral teaching, which has been passed down through his successors to today). Christian tradition holds that Scripture is divinely inspired and therefore transmits the message the Creator intended even through flawed human instruments, but this understanding can only be learned properly through the combined wisdom of the Magesterium, which as a whole is guided by the Holy Spirit from teaching error (again with a strong Scriptural basis, see Acts). However, just because secular customs of behavior fluctuate wildly, the underlying morality of these behaviors does not. Furthermore, eaither you believe Scripture is divinely inspired, or you don't. But if you don't I have a hard time seeing how you (not you personally) would bother to follow Christianity in any form as a religion rather than just a loose guideline of nice, but optional ideas to live your life.
The Bible can, in fact, be interpreted (or more often selectively read) to mean almost anything you say, which is why understanding Scripture must be tempered with interpretation of Tradition as passed down over the last 2000 years. Otherwise, people simply pick and choose what they like and you end up with 40,000 different sects of Christianity that differ on every conceivable aspect of anything even remotely connected to the subject.
I greatly appreciate your polite and reasoned response, but must agree to disagree.
So you're saying that children cannot distinguish which drugs are good or bad, but they immediately discern whether something violent or pornographic is good or bad (or I guess you are saying it's all fine). Obviously you don't know any children or anything about them. They are not just miniature adults, capable of making reasoned and informed decisions. Even most of the teenagers I know are incredibly immature. Kids do stupid things because they don't know better. They are not rational people. My kids are all sweet, wonderful children with above-average intelligence (based in my observations of their vocabulary, math ability, etc), but they still have the common sense of cabbage. This is no fault of their own, and I'm confident they will develop this normally, as do most people, in time. However, I'm not living in a fantasy world, like you seem to be, that kids will just magically discover the rights and wrongs of the world by themselves.
It was requested that the media refrain from divulging exit poll results until _ALL_ polls closed. They declined, but the major news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN (IIRC)) all agreed to not give out exit poll results for each state until that state's polls closed, which I believe is what they've normally done over the years. Drudge promised to give them out as soon as he got them, but his site was so hammered it was unreachable all day.
Just remember, no matter what happens, vote early and often.
So you are saying if you had a satellite dish with all the channels, you'd just toss your five-year-old the remote and say "Have Fun!"? If she feels bad, are you going to send her to a fully stocked medicine cabinet and say "Take something." Are you going to give her exactly what she wants to eat even though she asks for chocolate cake three meals a day.
Think about what you're saying.
Despite what you might think, children are not mature enough to understand certain things until there is a solid logical and moral foundation built. Otherwise they have no way of distinguishing right from wrong. Children are not completely independant and autonomous people otherwise they'd have the right to vote and we'd kick them out and let them get jobs. Your ridiculous notion that protecting your children from harmful things is wrong "infuriates" me. You might be willing to abdicate your responsibility to give kids a chance to learn the right things _before_ all this stuff comes along. I will not. Furthermore, even when my children (I have 4) are old enough to be out on their own, when I don't have total control of what they see or who they are with, there will still be the same rules at my house that there are now. And yes, I practive all the things I teach them.
As far as this creating "closed-minded" people. Well, guess what? There are some things you should be closed-minded about. Some things are wrong. Period. This moral relativism that we are constantly bathed in is intellectually bankrupt and just an excuse by people who are unwilling to stay away from immoral behavior yet somehow care about the fact that others may disapprove.
You're the first person I've heard so eloquently and logically describe the issue.
Children cannot innocently walk into an adult book store... why should the Internet be any different?
No doubt that the filtering issue is sticky, what with plenty of legitimate things being filters because of the filters' stupidly primitive criteria. Nonetheless, it is perfectly acceptable and in no way falls into the realms of censorship to filter public terminals. After all, you can't get hardcopy pr0n in any library I've ever been to (not that I've asked:) ).
Just because no one is perfect does not mean that there is not a moral absolute that is worth pursuing. Your argument is another exmaple of the following:
Rick: If you didn't do A, B wouldn't happen.
Response: But everybody does A, so you're wrong.
Marxist dogma will always fail, because without a moral context into which the economic philosophies are placed, no one is going to do what it takes to make it work... and we all know that most Marxist societies exist/existed in a relative state of moral vacuum. It presumes that people are naturally perfect, and if treated perfectly equally, ambition, envy and greed would magically disappear.
Christianity treats everyone as naturally good, but subject to the constant temptation to do wrong, against which we all must strive to overcome with the grace of God.
Yeah, it has the complication that people don't want to follow the rules set down. But actually, that's not very complicated at all.
Just because something is an ideal that most people are unwilling to attempt to follow doesn't make it any less true. Your complications are nothing more than disagreeing with the morality.
Life is not always simple, but there is a basic morality spelled out by Christianity that is really not very hard to understand and is not hard to follow if you are really willing to try. Unfortunately, very few people are... including me sometimes (I'm not perfect either).
The superficial trappings of some of these festivals were assimilated into Christianity the same way local culture is assimilated into the Mass in places like Africa and Asia. It's a good way to help people make what would otherwise be a sharp cultural transition when they convert to Christianity.
Show me the temples being built to Diana or Zeus in the last 2000 years. Who walks around with a symbol of Mithras or Lug or Thor or Ra these days? I think you'd have to look long and hard.
Don't pretend for a minute that these religions play any significant roles in the modern world.
Christianity isn't out to control people. People do not go around shouting "Convert or Die!", nor was that ever a significant method of conversion when compared to other religions or political factions and even when it did happen, it was clearly against what Christ taught. Christianity is not about control but bring people to understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As you can see in John 6, if you don't like it, leave. No one's holding a gun to your head.
Condoms prevent STD's? What planet are you from? Condoms are only 85% effective against pregnancy and that can only happen about 5 days a months.
The AIDS PSA industry is deluding you into believing you're safe simply because people would otherwise not even bother at all if they understood the real risks. Translated: They;re willing to mislead you because they know people value meaningless boinking over life itself.
I have to laugh at these PSA's that tell me AIDS can affect anybody. I can tell you it will _never_ happen to me (unless I get it through a medical procedure). On the other hand, a gay friend of mine is always getting AIDS tests and seems to have a fatalistic attitude about it all.
As far your comment about war, that is almost beneath replying to. You clearly are extremely ignorant of world history if you thing that Christians and Jews corner the market on war. Get your nose out of the computer and try reading a book.
Gee, it's convenient that you forget all the admonitions against fornication, sodomy, lewd behavior, etc, all throughout the Bible.
Sorry, I don't buy your extremely narrow reading of one verse from the Bible. Thanks for playing.
As to your questions:
Out of wedlock pregnancies are bad because it is likely that the child will not be brought up with two loving parents, nor the appropriate emotional, moral, intellectual and financial support. It's common sense, and is being borne out in study after study that a loving mother and a loving father are your best bet for a happy childhood and a happy, successful adulthood.
We should shield our children from portrayals of sexuality (like almost all popular media) that treat women as simply a mobile carrier for things to stick your pecker in. We should shield children from the depravity of unnatural acts, out-of-wedlock sex (which drives people to kill viable unborn human beings in ways so brutal that you wouldn't even see them in an id game). We should shield our children from a view of sex that treats people as objects to be used for our own gratification, despite the strong emotional or psychological bonding that sexual congress produces. We should shield our children from a view of sex that causes the massive spread of disease and emotional damage. Instead we should teach our children that sex is something natural and beautiful, when it is used in both is unitive and procreative ways with the sacred bonds of marriage.
I'm sorry you are no longer a Christian, but it's obvious your knowledge of doctrine is extremely superficial if not out-and-out wrond, so I can understand why you left.
Experience will not being knowledge and wisdom without a thorough underpinning of logic and morality, both of which are almost completely absent in our society.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, it seems to me that the 70's were the Big Thing in the 90's. You had all the stupid clothes... my wife would continuously point out teenagers wearing things she wore when she was 12 or so, a lot of period movies and 70's influenced music (disco == bad, but rock == good). Don't forget that 70's show on Fox (I wish I could remember the name of it ;) ). Nick-at-Nite and TVLand are running tons of shows from the 70's (whereas they used to run mostly older shows).
There was a run of popular "disaster films" just like in the 70's. Gas prices have been rising....
Of course you realize that any month now Smurfs will re-emerge...
Eventually we will feel nostalgia for nostalgia...
"Remember when we used to have nostalgia for the 50's in the 70's. Those were the days."
Rick
I do that all the time, but I guess I should be ashamed.
Boing boom Tschak!
p.s. The source of my quote is a personal friend who is a hotshot consultant with so much experience he regularly forgets more than I know.
Ummm... There is _always_ a cultural undercurrent of fascination with retro from about 20 years ago. Growing up in the 70's, the big fad was the 50's with Happy Days, Sha Na Na, Grease, etc. I remember the big deal being made out of 1987 being the 20th anniversary of the "Summer of Love". Of course, now everyone is inundated with 70's culture including all the bad clothing (but strangely none of the good clothing!). Now the new wave and electronic styles of the 80's are re-emerging. This is nothing new, and generally represents people's in their 30's and 40's nostalgia for the popular culture of their youth, and is perpetually glommed onto my mass-marketing (especially the commodities of popular music, movies and TV). I have a lot of nostalgia for compauter and video games of the 80's, mostly because so many of them were very rich given the technological limitations. Many hot-n-fancy 3D games these days have mindlessly simple and repetitive game play and the NetHack remains one of the most sophisticated games ever for over 15 years. I used to covet the few machines in the AJ Computer Lab at Virginia Tech that had 320k of memory because then I could play PC-Hack (what it was called back then). Anyhow, the whole nostalgia thing is always fun, but it's certainly nothing new. And as far as music goes, the real renaissance has been in the progressive realm. There is more good sophisticated music coming out now than any time I can remember in the last 25 years. With such wonderful virtuoso groups as Spock's Beard, Dream Theater, the Flower Kings, Bozzio, Levin and Stevens, Transatlantic, Liquid Tension Experiment just to name a few we can enjoy complex music created by people versed in classical and jazz rather than heroin and nihilism. Of course, you will never hear any of this on the radio, but hopefully the 90's trend of deliberately bad music ("grunge", anyone? 60's garage music without the energy and passion) will give way to popular music that is once again merely boring.
Based on my experience Netscape _always_ has the new software up on the site up to a few days before they mention it on netscape.com. That's been true as long as I can remember. I couldn't get in to the ftp server myself, but it didn't surprise me that it's not announced yet.
Guilty, as charged. I will turn myself in to the first Jesse Jackson Official Junior Thought Police Officer I meet for reeducation.
Does anyone have any handcuffs?
Sounds like a good idea and Idon't hear anything about people picking two candidates for president and then claiming they were confused.
80% turnout is unheard of in most parts of the country.
Rick
If you used the word "niggly", Mayor Williams might have to fire you for racist remarks.
Rick
Thank you. I did not realize they did all their balloting by mail. Doesn't Oregon also allow for Internet voting, or am I on drugs? I believe Arizona did in the Democratic primaries, IIRC. I know Oregon tends to be on the leading edge of these sort of things.
Rick
You're right, but I never claimed those things didn't happen.
Ummm... maybe for Unitarians or the typical vacuous MTV-watcher who claims to be Christian only so his Mom won't hassle him, or some content-free feel-good Protestant sects, or some psycho-babbling talk-show evangelists. But "believing in Christ" for the majority of Christians implies a moral code based upon and extrapolated from the teachings of Jesus, and handed down by His Church, guided from error by the Holy Spirit.
Let's just put it this way:
Before there were Internet terminals in libraries, did you ever hear of parents complaining about their children finiding pornography at the library? Did you ever hear complaints that children are innocently or purposefully walking into adult bookstores?
Ideas and images are just that, but they can still have a very deleterious effect on immature people who are incapable of understanding them. Do you think a young child should see the commendable "Schindler's List"? I think you would just terrify the poor child and he or she would gain no understanding of what the movie is all about. Adults on the other hand will gain an understanding of the events portrayed in the movie and the significance of protecting against it happening again.
We don't let medical students perform surgery, we don't let pilot trainees land a jumbo jet, we don't let incompetant poeple write mission- critical software (well, except for Microsoft...). Similarly, you cannot expose children to every conceivable concept and expect them to assimilate and understand it all. You must walk before you can run, and I think it is in society's best interests to suffer this inconvenience and imperfect implementation in order to repsect the rights of parents to feel safe about their children using a public facility.
If public filters in libraries (however poorly- or well-implemented) used by children is censorship than so are rules against children buying pornography or seeing X-rated movies.
Please read my post again. You have a talent for a clever quip, but obviously not one for reading.
Why?! If you don't believe them, why should it matter what they say? Why is it that people have such a hard time when someone tells them something they don't like? Everyone shouts "Freedom of Speech", but then often get all bent out of shape when someone else exercises it too.
As far as the Ten Commandments go, religion aside, they are a significant basis for all moral code in the Western world, like the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the works of the ancient Greeks, Roman ideas of government, even the code of Hammurabi. I don't know exactly how the posting of these is handled, and don't necessarily agree with it from a Constitutional pointy of view, but the fact remains that they constitute an extremely important historical document.
Here's the problem:
Any system that allows a voter to submit an invalidly filled out form without feedback to allow him or her to fix it seriously flawed. In Virginia, we use with the machines with push buttons or a form with circles to fill out which is fed into a machine. In the former, invalid choices cannot happen in the first place. In the latter, invalid choices would presumably be immediately rejected by the machine. The fact that Palm Beach let 19,000 people submit broken ballots and walk off in happy ignorance says more about the election officials than the voters.
Statistical abberations aside, the system they used is still seriously broken. I wonder how many other communities have the same problem?
Does anyone know why Oregon still isn't decided?
To reiterate my point simply:
We must shield children from what's harmful until they have the capacity to learn how make that decision for themselves. You don't hand a medical student a scalpel and set him loose in the OR before he's completed his education. Why should sending people out in a world with many real dangers be any different? We have to learn to walk before we can run. That has nothing to do with not respecting the rights and freedoms of children and everything to do with educating them in the right order.
And as far as literal Bible interpretation... it's one thing to say that the Earth was created 5000 years ago because of some tortured logic resulting from reading Genesis, and it's another entirely that when St. Paul says something is wrong to believe it is wrong (after all, Jesus granted St. Peter the right to rule on moral teaching, which has been passed down through his successors to today). Christian tradition holds that Scripture is divinely inspired and therefore transmits the message the Creator intended even through flawed human instruments, but this understanding can only be learned properly through the combined wisdom of the Magesterium, which as a whole is guided by the Holy Spirit from teaching error (again with a strong Scriptural basis, see Acts). However, just because secular customs of behavior fluctuate wildly, the underlying morality of these behaviors does not. Furthermore, eaither you believe Scripture is divinely inspired, or you don't. But if you don't I have a hard time seeing how you (not you personally) would bother to follow Christianity in any form as a religion rather than just a loose guideline of nice, but optional ideas to live your life.
The Bible can, in fact, be interpreted (or more often selectively read) to mean almost anything you say, which is why understanding Scripture must be tempered with interpretation of Tradition as passed down over the last 2000 years. Otherwise, people simply pick and choose what they like and you end up with 40,000 different sects of Christianity that differ on every conceivable aspect of anything even remotely connected to the subject.
I greatly appreciate your polite and reasoned response, but must agree to disagree.
So you're saying that children cannot distinguish which drugs are good or bad, but they immediately discern whether something violent or pornographic is good or bad (or I guess you are saying it's all fine). Obviously you don't know any children or anything about them. They are not just miniature adults, capable of making reasoned and informed decisions. Even most of the teenagers I know are incredibly immature. Kids do stupid things because they don't know better. They are not rational people. My kids are all sweet, wonderful children with above-average intelligence (based in my observations of their vocabulary, math ability, etc), but they still have the common sense of cabbage. This is no fault of their own, and I'm confident they will develop this normally, as do most people, in time. However, I'm not living in a fantasy world, like you seem to be, that kids will just magically discover the rights and wrongs of the world by themselves.
It was requested that the media refrain from divulging exit poll results until _ALL_ polls closed. They declined, but the major news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN (IIRC)) all agreed to not give out exit poll results for each state until that state's polls closed, which I believe is what they've normally done over the years. Drudge promised to give them out as soon as he got them, but his site was so hammered it was unreachable all day.
Just remember, no matter what happens, vote early and often.
So you are saying if you had a satellite dish with all the channels, you'd just toss your five-year-old the remote and say "Have Fun!"? If she feels bad, are you going to send her to a fully stocked medicine cabinet and say "Take something." Are you going to give her exactly what she wants to eat even though she asks for chocolate cake three meals a day.
Think about what you're saying.
Despite what you might think, children are not mature enough to understand certain things until there is a solid logical and moral foundation built. Otherwise they have no way of distinguishing right from wrong. Children are not completely independant and autonomous people otherwise they'd have the right to vote and we'd kick them out and let them get jobs. Your ridiculous notion that protecting your children from harmful things is wrong "infuriates" me. You might be willing to abdicate your responsibility to give kids a chance to learn the right things _before_ all this stuff comes along. I will not. Furthermore, even when my children (I have 4) are old enough to be out on their own, when I don't have total control of what they see or who they are with, there will still be the same rules at my house that there are now. And yes, I practive all the things I teach them.
As far as this creating "closed-minded" people. Well, guess what? There are some things you should be closed-minded about. Some things are wrong. Period. This moral relativism that we are constantly bathed in is intellectually bankrupt and just an excuse by people who are unwilling to stay away from immoral behavior yet somehow care about the fact that others may disapprove.
Bingo!
:) ).
You're the first person I've heard so eloquently and logically describe the issue.
Children cannot innocently walk into an adult book store... why should the Internet be any different?
No doubt that the filtering issue is sticky, what with plenty of legitimate things being filters because of the filters' stupidly primitive criteria. Nonetheless, it is perfectly acceptable and in no way falls into the realms of censorship to filter public terminals. After all, you can't get hardcopy pr0n in any library I've ever been to (not that I've asked
Just because no one is perfect does not mean that there is not a moral absolute that is worth pursuing. Your argument is another exmaple of the following:
Rick: If you didn't do A, B wouldn't happen.
Response: But everybody does A, so you're wrong.
Marxist dogma will always fail, because without a moral context into which the economic philosophies are placed, no one is going to do what it takes to make it work... and we all know that most Marxist societies exist/existed in a relative state of moral vacuum. It presumes that people are naturally perfect, and if treated perfectly equally, ambition, envy and greed would magically disappear.
Christianity treats everyone as naturally good, but subject to the constant temptation to do wrong, against which we all must strive to overcome with the grace of God.
Yeah, it has the complication that people don't want to follow the rules set down. But actually, that's not very complicated at all.
Just because something is an ideal that most people are unwilling to attempt to follow doesn't make it any less true. Your complications are nothing more than disagreeing with the morality.
Life is not always simple, but there is a basic morality spelled out by Christianity that is really not very hard to understand and is not hard to follow if you are really willing to try. Unfortunately, very few people are... including me sometimes (I'm not perfect either).
The superficial trappings of some of these festivals were assimilated into Christianity the same way local culture is assimilated into the Mass in places like Africa and Asia. It's a good way to help people make what would otherwise be a sharp cultural transition when they convert to Christianity.
Show me the temples being built to Diana or Zeus in the last 2000 years. Who walks around with a symbol of Mithras or Lug or Thor or Ra these days? I think you'd have to look long and hard.
Don't pretend for a minute that these religions play any significant roles in the modern world.
Christianity isn't out to control people. People do not go around shouting "Convert or Die!", nor was that ever a significant method of conversion when compared to other religions or political factions and even when it did happen, it was clearly against what Christ taught. Christianity is not about control but bring people to understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As you can see in John 6, if you don't like it, leave. No one's holding a gun to your head.
Condoms prevent STD's? What planet are you from? Condoms are only 85% effective against pregnancy and that can only happen about 5 days a months.
The AIDS PSA industry is deluding you into believing you're safe simply because people would otherwise not even bother at all if they understood the real risks. Translated: They;re willing to mislead you because they know people value meaningless boinking over life itself.
I have to laugh at these PSA's that tell me AIDS can affect anybody. I can tell you it will _never_ happen to me (unless I get it through a medical procedure). On the other hand, a gay friend of mine is always getting AIDS tests and seems to have a fatalistic attitude about it all.
As far your comment about war, that is almost beneath replying to. You clearly are extremely ignorant of world history if you thing that Christians and Jews corner the market on war. Get your nose out of the computer and try reading a book.
Gee, it's convenient that you forget all the admonitions against fornication, sodomy, lewd behavior, etc, all throughout the Bible.
Sorry, I don't buy your extremely narrow reading of one verse from the Bible. Thanks for playing.
As to your questions:
Out of wedlock pregnancies are bad because it is likely that the child will not be brought up with two loving parents, nor the appropriate emotional, moral, intellectual and financial support. It's common sense, and is being borne out in study after study that a loving mother and a loving father are your best bet for a happy childhood and a happy, successful adulthood.
We should shield our children from portrayals of sexuality (like almost all popular media) that treat women as simply a mobile carrier for things to stick your pecker in. We should shield children from the depravity of unnatural acts, out-of-wedlock sex (which drives people to kill viable unborn human beings in ways so brutal that you wouldn't even see them in an id game). We should shield our children from a view of sex that treats people as objects to be used for our own gratification, despite the strong emotional or psychological bonding that sexual congress produces. We should shield our children from a view of sex that causes the massive spread of disease and emotional damage. Instead we should teach our children that sex is something natural and beautiful, when it is used in both is unitive and procreative ways with the sacred bonds of marriage.
I'm sorry you are no longer a Christian, but it's obvious your knowledge of doctrine is extremely superficial if not out-and-out wrond, so I can understand why you left.
Experience will not being knowledge and wisdom without a thorough underpinning of logic and morality, both of which are almost completely absent in our society.