Even if it conflicts with religion. As Cardinal Bellarmine (one of the inquisition who tried Galileo) wrote: "I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated."
Excellent. Why have religion at all, then?
If you ask the Vatican for their opinion on embryonic stem cell research, do they disagree with you on a matter of science? Or on a matter of ethics?
Ethics, though they often attempt to disagree on matters of science as well, like when they try to pretend condoms don't work for AIDS prevention.
Do you believe that scientific research should be conducted within an ethical framework?
Sure. However I think the religious ethical framework is a horrible one and should be discarded as soon as possible.
In my ethical framework there's absolutely nothing wrong with embryonic stem cell research.
The problem with evolution is that it's taught in schools as fact, whereas it's all theory.
Newsflash: gravity is a theory too. "Theory" means "the current best explanation for something that happens". Meaning, we know evolution happens (fact) and the theory of evolution is how we think it does.
For instance the theory of gravitation is our current best explanation how gravity works. Maybe some day it will be proven wrong, but that won't suddenly mean that gravity ceased existing and make us all float in the air. It'll just mean that the stuff we do know happens (that we stay on the surface on the planet for instance) happens for a different reason than we thought.
and even Darwin admitted that his own theories could be proven wrong based on new discoveries
Duh. That's what makes it science. If it's not possible to disprove, it's not scientific.
intelligent design should be as well.
ID is a load of nonsense that doesn't make any predictions and doesn't lead to any conclusions. It's entirely pointless to teach it. It doesn't belong in school.
Yes; if Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov and Isaac Newton believed in God (not in a Biblical sense, but as a scientific god) would you call them obtuse?
Yes. Competence in one area doesn't imply competence in another.
Evidence came up in Einstein/Asimov/Newton's own work; Einstein stated that every action in the universe could be explained using simple mathematics, Asimov saw humans as machines of intelligent design, and Newton attempted to crack the Bible code. Are they still obtuse people?
Yes. Newton figured out a good deal, but then it turned out that there were perturbations in the movement of planets. And at that point, he gave up and said "God adjusts them once in a while". Which turned out to be entirely false. His belief stopped him from finding out more.
BTW, Einstein's belief was so un-christian I don't get why people bother referring to it. Einstein speaks of a non-interventionist god that I'm not even sure why he bothered believing in, because according to him it doesn't do much of anything, certainly not judgement or salvation.
Well, since we're specifically discussing the context of the Torah, I'd say the Jewish God in this case.
Ok, and why that specifically? On what grounds do you think that's the most accurate view?
Then it appears that you can safely discard the historical or literal accuracy of the text for yourself.
That's an odd thing for a religious person to say.
Alright, I won't challenge you on this. What you are displaying is emotional reaction to a fictional character that is causing you to interact negatively with real people.
What emotional reaction? The "oppose at every step" part? I typed that in a most relaxed mood, I assure you. I can imagine what my reaction would be in a given situation without experiencing said emotion.
If that is not what you feel, then I suppose while you don't have time to write any treatise, you certainly seem to have time to be... selfish I suppose.
Well, I did speak of enlightened self-interest. Though I don't see where you see the problem in this. The way I see it, I make a comment, somebody else may argue with it, we go through this back and forth, and generally the end result is a good thing no matter who wins. If somebody learns something new that's a good thing.
Re your sig: site seems down. I could use some fanfic recommendations actually.
Yes, but that's still a conflict, only resolved in the favour of science.
Bible says: man was created Science says: man evolved
That's a conflict.
You can resolve it in different ways, for instance:
The bible part isn't supposed to be taken literally. The science must be wrong I find this too bothersome, suppose we change subject?
Also, it's unclear to me how the allegory is justified, given that the entire religion depends on the concept of the original sin, which stops making sense without Adam and Eve.
Actually, if there is a Creator in the sense that's being talked about, "morality" is like a definition to it. The kind of God that exists in the Abraham story is so far above this particular reality that things exist because he defines them to exist. That literally every single thing about reality is a matter of will. That includes things like morality. The Bible actually implies that free will doesn't exist because it "moral", but because God essentially wanted an honest answer... that the reason people exist is literally to provide confirmation of his existence.
Which creator, and which morality? There are thousands of branches.
From the POV of God in the Bible, if you do that, literally the only place to end up is following him.
Funny thing, I seem to arrive at entirely different conclusions.
But, meh. You have some kind of fierce negative emotional reaction to a character in a story you do not believe. And you express that opinion to others, not to change their mind because you do not express it in a persuasive manner, but to temper your own emotional reaction and vent the stress it causes you.
Oh great, an armchair psychologist! I must admit it's a fun game to play, but you fail rather badly at it.
I'm not stressed, I'm having fun. I enjoy having arguments with people. Sometimes I try to convince the audience, but often all I'm looking for is a discussion with a specific person, and for getting things started sometimes just a few sentences suffice. Depending on how things go I may write in more detail on my opinions later.
My time's limited, so unfortunately I can't type a full treatise on morality in every comment.
Such a reaction to a character in a story is unhealthy, so if you honestly do not believe in God, and yet you honestly have this kind of emotional reaction to this particular discussion, I would seek out some psychological or therapeutic help to find out if you have some stresses in your life that are causing recurring suffering. Or if you know causes of recurring suffering withing your life, do what you can to end them.
Nope. I'm not angry, not even a bit annoyed. In general I'm perfectly happy and think my life is going perfectly fine. My life is remarkably free of stress and suffering.
Christianity is one of the reasons credited to the enormous advancement of science in Europe as opposed to other parts of the world in the same time period.
During what time period?
The Vatican has one of the longest-running observatories in the world, and has long had an interest in science.
Sure, so long it doesn't conflict with the religion. Go ask the Vatican what's their opinion on embryonic stem cell research.
"If such a creator existed, it would be an immoral creator" Because he doesn't fit *your* definition of morality?
Correct. Even if there is a creator, obviously I'm free to have my own morality, or I just couldn't possibly disagree with the creator.
Morality is in many respects relative. I disagree on the morality of some things with my parents, for instance. On some matters I think it'd be very hard or impossible to come up with a definitive answer.
That is not a rational foundation. That is survival instinct or something like that.
It's very much a rational foundation. When pondering the morality of an action I ponder things like whether having a rule followed universally would make the world a better or a worse place. That takes reasoning, hence it's rational.
You can discount it. But can you disprove it?
I don't need to disprove it, the burden on proof is on you to prove it. Until you do, I will act as if it didn't exist.
Given the huge amount of claimed miracles I figure it'd be easy enough for any deity to provide some proof. Gideon supposedly got some in Judges.
Besides, my original point was not that you needed to believe the story of Abraham or not; it was about his action (taking his son to the altar to sacrifice him) being taken out of context. The story as it's told is not about a man who, without any previous encounter with God, is told to sacrifice his son. There's a context. If you are going to judge a story, you have to take it completely. You cannot take apart that context without changing the subject.
My view is that asking somebody to sacrifice their son is morally wrong, it doesn't matter if until that point the one asking was the holiest being in existence.
Except evolution very directly contradicts religion, because it proves that we weren't created, and DNA research contradicts the idea of that there was an Adam and Eve.
The conflict is very much real. Of course one can just pretend it's not there, or resolve it into the favour of one of the sides, but that doesn't make it not exist.
If such a creator existed, it would be an immoral creator, and it'd be a worthy cause to oppose such an evil entity at every step. Morality is not imparted nor defined by the creator.
What is *your* rational foundation for morality?
Enlightened self-interest, to put it simply.
Not higher thoughts. A life of experiencing miracles. Fire coming from the sky upon a city is not just a "higher thought".
I've never seen any such thing happening, nor had a reliable account of it, so I entirely discount it.
Ah yes, this must be the "love" I heard so much about.
Fortunately in modern times most people think of such policies as being insane, so your views aren't going to get much traction. Please take the earliest time machine back to the middle ages.
For the record, here's my take on it:
There's absolutely nothing wrong with sex when neither participant is married.
If one is, it should only matter in a divorce proceeding. If both parties are fine with it, there's nothing wrong with it.
Marriage is a purely legal status and has nothing to do with morality.
The information was examined by multiple parties and no conspiracy or malice was found. It was a big PR failure, but there's no evidence of scienfitic misconduct, nor "other forces at work".
If you want me to believe your claim of wrongdoing, I expect some proof of it, specifically something explaining why all of these got it wrong:
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (UK) Independent Climate Change Review (UK) International Science Assessment Panel (UK) Pennsylvania State University (US) United States Environmental Protection Agency (US) Department of Commerce (US)
But I'm not arguing about that. SSDs are new, bugs are expected until issues are hammered out. However, both SSDs and HDDs share a considerable amount of failure modes (circuitry, firmware, sensibility to power problems in the computer), so on those parameters neither is intrinsically better than the other.
Now, the one thing that is different is how the actual storage is done. SSDs can manage the underlying flash in a way that provides for somewhat elegant failure modes.
Hard disks on the other hand, can't do that. A rotating platter is a rotating platter, if the mechanism is broken there's no way of providing a safe readonly mode, as it's not possible to prevent the head from scraping the platter if something breaks or wears out.
I'm sure it still wears out in some manner or other. Probably by electromigration, maybe by some other mechanism as well (don't know since I'm not familiar with this tech)
I'll grant you that the whole thing could have been handled better, but since then, there have been multiple examinations of the published data and nothing wrong was found with it. The conclusion remains unchanged: global warming is still happening.
Global warming is currently not in question, what's being argued about is why it's happening, how fast it's happening, what effects it's going to have and so on. But that temperature is going up can be plainly seen.
The "global cooling" thing it was an idea from a time where lots of crap was being spewed into the air, and the idea was that enough of that could make the planet cool by increasing the albedo. However, in modern times we no longer emit so many particulates (it's quite unhealthy to breathe for one), so our activity now has a different effect. We could still have global cooling if we were to intentionally fill the atmosphere with particulates.
Why don't we simply REJECT the unverifiable out of hand in cases like this?
Because it's a problem being studied all over the world, and the UEA being stupid doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
My point, there is a lot of "faith" in science, it is just obfuscated in scientific terms and rhetoric, and when people like myself point it out, people get all huffy and indigent, and start the name calling (how is THAT scientific?)
You misunderstand where the real debate is happening. That things are warming is as clear as that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. We had different explanations for that over time, but just because we were initially mistaken (say, geocentrism, epicycles) doesn't mean that where the sun rises and sets is suddenly invalidated. Instead we just need a better explanation of why it does it the way it does. Same reason with global warming, the graphs still show an increase, all that's up to debate is the details.
Except that you're talking about a society with no phones and no internet access.
For 5000 people to gather in such conditions he must have been extremely well known, and important enough that news of that he will be spreaking would spread quickly far and wide. Even with modern tech any person would have a very hard time pulling in 5000 people by just promising to speak, unless they were very well known.
The way I see it, for 5000 people to show up, he'd have to be such a celebrity that the romans would have been perfectly well aware of him. After all news could only spread by people talking to each other, and it's hard to miss half the town discussing one guy.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the christian bible attempts to explain about "god". That this being is at once a real phenomenon, and at the same time inscrutible.
IMO, religions work only because besides such things they include plenty on what ought to have some sort of effect in real life. Things like promises of happiness, answered prayers and so on. And lots of that is done in such a way that it can be promised without being obviously delivered.
Conversely, the premise that the testible universe is the only true reality, and that the conjecture of things (of any nature) outside that logical bounding have no value does not fully describe the human condition.
I don't know, I'm just fine with it
Humans thrive on asking the question "what if", and as such there will always be a "home" for "god", even if unfamiliar to current established memes, and this direction of thought will always be popular with non philosophers and philosphers alike.
(Much like string theory is interesting to non-physicists as well as people that are.)
Sure, but each time less and less. There are very few people deeply interested in string theory. Most people if they have any interest at all have it at a trivia level. The amount of people who spend any real amount of time on pondering string theory is tiny.
It makes a good example actually. String theory is an extremely abstract subject. It doesn't promise happiness or riches, a pleasant afterlife or provide a moral framework. As a result most people are only vaguely aware of it.
I think most people don't really spend a lot of time pondering the origin and inner workings of the Universe. Those things are in religion to have a good place where to insert a deity. But by themselves such things aren't all that interesting, and something more important must get attached to that, like moral frameworks and promises of afterlife. And as that's being chipped away, I think religion will eventually turn into something like string theory: something of a curiosity, but of very little relevance to most people.
How does science deal with the inevitable flaws in humans? We are not perfect creatures, and science has come to the wrong conclusions many many times in the past, and have been dogmatic about it.
Peer review, reproduction of experiements and verification of the results.
Certainly, a lot turns out wrong, but a lot has to be right as well, or we wouldn't be talking to each other right now.
Are you claiming the exactitude of religion though? Please explain the myriad of religions and denominations, and the gradual shifting of opinions and policies. At which point did YHWH appear to declare that slavery is wrong, for instance?
Yes, religion is adaptable, but eventually it will adapt itself into nothingness.
As more and more is explained by science, religion has less and less relevant answers, until you're left with explanations to matters only interesting to philosophers.
Science is able to study all those things. We do research into ethics (Milgram experiment), beauty (not my area of knowledge, but it's well known symmetry plays a part, artists study aesthetics), community (social sciences), and things like love and wonder pertain to the study of the workings of the brain.
Nope, not really. See the clarification they posted the next day.
Apparently condoms are acceptable to reduce the risk of infection, but still not acceptable for contraception. How that is supposed to work, I have no clue, since both things go together.
And apparently only male prostitutes should use them. I guess the point of that if you're already going to sin by prostituting yourself, it's somewhat of an improvement to use a condom and avoid spreading illness. But that's a very narrow thing, and in no way looks like an approval to me.
Commitment, tax benefits, visitation rights, and an excuse for a lavish party, I suppose.
Nobody cares about that rule. In civilized countries, sex outside of marriage is not a crime, and even in very religious places the rule gets routinely ignored.
So, what you're saying is that people can't keep their dicks in their pants. Gotcha
Yes, that's pretty much it. We have a natural drive to have sex that doesn't much care about marriage.
Doesn't mean they have to. People do all sorts of things that are bad for them, all the time. Smoking, Drinking too much, Drugs... Should we provide "safe smoking", "safe drinking" and "safe crack"?
Yes. Remember how the Prohibition was in the US? It got repealed for a reason.
I fully support the legalization of drugs.
Are you saying we shouldn't change the rape culture in Africa with "Rape, but wear a condom" campaign? Your way sounds more ridiculous.
No. I'm saying that adding a "sex outside of marriage" prohibition isn't going to do anything for it. Somebody who is already going to commit murder or rape isn't going to stop just because you add a jaywalking type of charge on top.
In fact that may make it worse. Possible results of that include forced marriage to the rapist (exists already), or killing the victim.
I'm surprised that you don't view most porn as the objectification of women. Saddened too that you didn't know what I was implying.
I have no clue what this discussion has to do with porn. But for that matter, women look at porn as well, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent. Why have religion at all, then?
Ethics, though they often attempt to disagree on matters of science as well, like when they try to pretend condoms don't work for AIDS prevention.
Sure. However I think the religious ethical framework is a horrible one and should be discarded as soon as possible.
In my ethical framework there's absolutely nothing wrong with embryonic stem cell research.
Newsflash: gravity is a theory too. "Theory" means "the current best explanation for something that happens". Meaning, we know evolution happens (fact) and the theory of evolution is how we think it does.
For instance the theory of gravitation is our current best explanation how gravity works. Maybe some day it will be proven wrong, but that won't suddenly mean that gravity ceased existing and make us all float in the air. It'll just mean that the stuff we do know happens (that we stay on the surface on the planet for instance) happens for a different reason than we thought.
Duh. That's what makes it science. If it's not possible to disprove, it's not scientific.
ID is a load of nonsense that doesn't make any predictions and doesn't lead to any conclusions. It's entirely pointless to teach it. It doesn't belong in school.
Yes. Competence in one area doesn't imply competence in another.
Yes. Newton figured out a good deal, but then it turned out that there were perturbations in the movement of planets. And at that point, he gave up and said "God adjusts them once in a while". Which turned out to be entirely false. His belief stopped him from finding out more.
BTW, Einstein's belief was so un-christian I don't get why people bother referring to it. Einstein speaks of a non-interventionist god that I'm not even sure why he bothered believing in, because according to him it doesn't do much of anything, certainly not judgement or salvation.
Ok, and why that specifically? On what grounds do you think that's the most accurate view?
That's an odd thing for a religious person to say.
What emotional reaction? The "oppose at every step" part? I typed that in a most relaxed mood, I assure you. I can imagine what my reaction would be in a given situation without experiencing said emotion.
Well, I did speak of enlightened self-interest. Though I don't see where you see the problem in this. The way I see it, I make a comment, somebody else may argue with it, we go through this back and forth, and generally the end result is a good thing no matter who wins. If somebody learns something new that's a good thing.
Re your sig: site seems down. I could use some fanfic recommendations actually.
Yes, but that's still a conflict, only resolved in the favour of science.
Bible says: man was created
Science says: man evolved
That's a conflict.
You can resolve it in different ways, for instance:
The bible part isn't supposed to be taken literally.
The science must be wrong
I find this too bothersome, suppose we change subject?
Also, it's unclear to me how the allegory is justified, given that the entire religion depends on the concept of the original sin, which stops making sense without Adam and Eve.
Which creator, and which morality? There are thousands of branches.
Funny thing, I seem to arrive at entirely different conclusions.
Oh great, an armchair psychologist! I must admit it's a fun game to play, but you fail rather badly at it.
I'm not stressed, I'm having fun. I enjoy having arguments with people. Sometimes I try to convince the audience, but often all I'm looking for is a discussion with a specific person, and for getting things started sometimes just a few sentences suffice. Depending on how things go I may write in more detail on my opinions later.
My time's limited, so unfortunately I can't type a full treatise on morality in every comment.
Nope. I'm not angry, not even a bit annoyed. In general I'm perfectly happy and think my life is going perfectly fine. My life is remarkably free of stress and suffering.
During what time period?
Sure, so long it doesn't conflict with the religion. Go ask the Vatican what's their opinion on embryonic stem cell research.
Correct. Even if there is a creator, obviously I'm free to have my own morality, or I just couldn't possibly disagree with the creator.
Morality is in many respects relative. I disagree on the morality of some things with my parents, for instance. On some matters I think it'd be very hard or impossible to come up with a definitive answer.
It's very much a rational foundation. When pondering the morality of an action I ponder things like whether having a rule followed universally would make the world a better or a worse place. That takes reasoning, hence it's rational.
I don't need to disprove it, the burden on proof is on you to prove it. Until you do, I will act as if it didn't exist.
Given the huge amount of claimed miracles I figure it'd be easy enough for any deity to provide some proof. Gideon supposedly got some in Judges.
My view is that asking somebody to sacrifice their son is morally wrong, it doesn't matter if until that point the one asking was the holiest being in existence.
Except evolution very directly contradicts religion, because it proves that we weren't created, and DNA research contradicts the idea of that there was an Adam and Eve.
The conflict is very much real. Of course one can just pretend it's not there, or resolve it into the favour of one of the sides, but that doesn't make it not exist.
If such a creator existed, it would be an immoral creator, and it'd be a worthy cause to oppose such an evil entity at every step. Morality is not imparted nor defined by the creator.
Enlightened self-interest, to put it simply.
I've never seen any such thing happening, nor had a reliable account of it, so I entirely discount it.
Ah yes, this must be the "love" I heard so much about.
Fortunately in modern times most people think of such policies as being insane, so your views aren't going to get much traction. Please take the earliest time machine back to the middle ages.
For the record, here's my take on it:
There's absolutely nothing wrong with sex when neither participant is married.
If one is, it should only matter in a divorce proceeding. If both parties are fine with it, there's nothing wrong with it.
Marriage is a purely legal status and has nothing to do with morality.
See what I said above.
The information was examined by multiple parties and no conspiracy or malice was found. It was a big PR failure, but there's no evidence of scienfitic misconduct, nor "other forces at work".
If you want me to believe your claim of wrongdoing, I expect some proof of it, specifically something explaining why all of these got it wrong:
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (UK)
Independent Climate Change Review (UK)
International Science Assessment Panel (UK)
Pennsylvania State University (US)
United States Environmental Protection Agency (US)
Department of Commerce (US)
But I'm not arguing about that. SSDs are new, bugs are expected until issues are hammered out. However, both SSDs and HDDs share a considerable amount of failure modes (circuitry, firmware, sensibility to power problems in the computer), so on those parameters neither is intrinsically better than the other.
Now, the one thing that is different is how the actual storage is done. SSDs can manage the underlying flash in a way that provides for somewhat elegant failure modes.
Hard disks on the other hand, can't do that. A rotating platter is a rotating platter, if the mechanism is broken there's no way of providing a safe readonly mode, as it's not possible to prevent the head from scraping the platter if something breaks or wears out.
I'm sure it still wears out in some manner or other. Probably by electromigration, maybe by some other mechanism as well (don't know since I'm not familiar with this tech)
I'll grant you that the whole thing could have been handled better, but since then, there have been multiple examinations of the published data and nothing wrong was found with it. The conclusion remains unchanged: global warming is still happening.
Global warming is currently not in question, what's being argued about is why it's happening, how fast it's happening, what effects it's going to have and so on. But that temperature is going up can be plainly seen.
The "global cooling" thing it was an idea from a time where lots of crap was being spewed into the air, and the idea was that enough of that could make the planet cool by increasing the albedo. However, in modern times we no longer emit so many particulates (it's quite unhealthy to breathe for one), so our activity now has a different effect. We could still have global cooling if we were to intentionally fill the atmosphere with particulates.
Because it's a problem being studied all over the world, and the UEA being stupid doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
You misunderstand where the real debate is happening. That things are warming is as clear as that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. We had different explanations for that over time, but just because we were initially mistaken (say, geocentrism, epicycles) doesn't mean that where the sun rises and sets is suddenly invalidated. Instead we just need a better explanation of why it does it the way it does. Same reason with global warming, the graphs still show an increase, all that's up to debate is the details.
Except that you're talking about a society with no phones and no internet access.
For 5000 people to gather in such conditions he must have been extremely well known, and important enough that news of that he will be spreaking would spread quickly far and wide. Even with modern tech any person would have a very hard time pulling in 5000 people by just promising to speak, unless they were very well known.
The way I see it, for 5000 people to show up, he'd have to be such a celebrity that the romans would have been perfectly well aware of him. After all news could only spread by people talking to each other, and it's hard to miss half the town discussing one guy.
Fairly secret? Come on, you don't make a mess at a temple when you're trying to keep yourself hidden.
IMO, religions work only because besides such things they include plenty on what ought to have some sort of effect in real life. Things like promises of happiness, answered prayers and so on. And lots of that is done in such a way that it can be promised without being obviously delivered.
I don't know, I'm just fine with it
Sure, but each time less and less. There are very few people deeply interested in string theory. Most people if they have any interest at all have it at a trivia level. The amount of people who spend any real amount of time on pondering string theory is tiny.
It makes a good example actually. String theory is an extremely abstract subject. It doesn't promise happiness or riches, a pleasant afterlife or provide a moral framework. As a result most people are only vaguely aware of it.
I think most people don't really spend a lot of time pondering the origin and inner workings of the Universe. Those things are in religion to have a good place where to insert a deity. But by themselves such things aren't all that interesting, and something more important must get attached to that, like moral frameworks and promises of afterlife. And as that's being chipped away, I think religion will eventually turn into something like string theory: something of a curiosity, but of very little relevance to most people.
Squid Girl approves of squidly technology.
Peer review, reproduction of experiements and verification of the results.
Certainly, a lot turns out wrong, but a lot has to be right as well, or we wouldn't be talking to each other right now.
Are you claiming the exactitude of religion though? Please explain the myriad of religions and denominations, and the gradual shifting of opinions and policies. At which point did YHWH appear to declare that slavery is wrong, for instance?
Yes, religion is adaptable, but eventually it will adapt itself into nothingness.
As more and more is explained by science, religion has less and less relevant answers, until you're left with explanations to matters only interesting to philosophers.
What do you mean doesn't?
Science is able to study all those things. We do research into ethics (Milgram experiment), beauty (not my area of knowledge, but it's well known symmetry plays a part, artists study aesthetics), community (social sciences), and things like love and wonder pertain to the study of the workings of the brain.
Nope, not really. See the clarification they posted the next day.
Apparently condoms are acceptable to reduce the risk of infection, but still not acceptable for contraception. How that is supposed to work, I have no clue, since both things go together.
And apparently only male prostitutes should use them. I guess the point of that if you're already going to sin by prostituting yourself, it's somewhat of an improvement to use a condom and avoid spreading illness. But that's a very narrow thing, and in no way looks like an approval to me.
Commitment, tax benefits, visitation rights, and an excuse for a lavish party, I suppose.
Nobody cares about that rule. In civilized countries, sex outside of marriage is not a crime, and even in very religious places the rule gets routinely ignored.
Yes, that's pretty much it. We have a natural drive to have sex that doesn't much care about marriage.
Yes. Remember how the Prohibition was in the US? It got repealed for a reason.
I fully support the legalization of drugs.
No. I'm saying that adding a "sex outside of marriage" prohibition isn't going to do anything for it. Somebody who is already going to commit murder or rape isn't going to stop just because you add a jaywalking type of charge on top.
In fact that may make it worse. Possible results of that include forced marriage to the rapist (exists already), or killing the victim.
I have no clue what this discussion has to do with porn. But for that matter, women look at porn as well, you know.