If Hating Intentional Ignorance Isn’t Reason Enough…
Created by: PublicHealthDegree.com
For once…
Dr Marty Klein, whose work I’ve praised here before got things almost right in his latest posting Can Atheists Have a Code of Sexual Morality but missed out by lumping all organized religions with Christianity. In the otherwise excellent posting he says:
And indeed, young children and emotionally under-developed adults do make moral choices based on the fear of punishment. Organized religion relies on and promotes this style of personality organization: “Do the right thing or God will punish you.”
While this is true of Christianity, it is clearly not the case in many organized religions including Judaism. Coincidentally, the point was even mentioned on last night’s episode of, of all things, The Simpsons where Bart informed Krusty that Jews don’t believe in Hell.
Centuries of having to avoid making waves has led to many things in modern Judaism that really have no chalachic (Jewish law) background. They are merely adaptation of local custom accepted to blend in because, while they weren’t required, they also weren’t prohibited. Given a choice of picking up a few “we’re really almost like you” items or having your village ransacked and your friends and relatives raped and murdered for violating the local customs, it’s not exactly difficult to see how those choices were made.
Judaism, for the most part, rejects the “do what God tells you or be eternally punished” mindset. After all, that hardly demonstrates morality, it merely shows who is best at being compliant and makes it impossible to develop an actual sense of morality. You can’t exactly say, “I made a moral choice” when you have an always present enforcer watching your every move waiting to mete out hugely disproportional punishments for the slightest imperfection.
Judaism bases morality on an attempt to become more like God and do the right thing because you know it is right. Not from fear. Not to avoid punishment. Not for reward. Just because it is right.
And that is a difference worth celebrating even if it ires the occasional Cossack.
A Little Thought Experiment
Let’s supposed that next month scientists create something that
- Is a 99.999999% effective method of birth control
- Kills spirochetes, gonococci and the HVH, HIV and HPV viruses
- Is 100% safe and reversible
Some of the results would be:
- Unwanted pregnancies would disappear
- STIs would disappear
- Demand for abortion would disappear
- People’s only determining factor in their sex lives would be their own personal moral choices
Every pro-choice person I know would only take a break from celebrating to lobby making it universal
Every anti-choice person I know would be working desperately to get it banned.
It’s not about abortion. It’s about controlling people through their sex lives.
UPDATE: I sent this out to friends earlier so they could pose the same thought experiment to their right-wing, rabidly anti-choice friends and the results, so far, are tracking my experience. The anti-choice people consistently prefer a world with abortion to one where sex isn’t punished.
Marty Klein Interview
Marty Klein of the Sexual Intelligence blog was on local TV in San Francisco and, as usual, brought rationality to the discussion of sex and public policy.
Worth a watch:
Conservative Teabaggers
There are times when being out of touch is perhaps just too funny to be believed. The conservatives are now asking their followers to teabag members of the House and Senate and the White House and even GOP Chairman Steele.
Seriously. They are. See clips at the Conservatives go teabagging video from The Rachel Maddow Show.
Thanks to Rachel Maddow and Anamarie Cox for managing to keep mostly straight faces.
(For anyone unfamiliar with “teabagging” see this definition at Wikipedia)
A Bit of British Trivia
According to a British study cited in Sperm Wars, waiting between partners is fairly rare and certainly a lot more rare than most people suspect. The study asked adult women whether they’d ever had sex with more than one man in a given time period.
Not only have most women had sex with more than one man in a day, the actual number seems to be around 2/3rds at 64%. When we expand that to having sex with more than one man in a 5-day period the number jumps to 80%. The numbers do drop to 13% when asked about sex with more than one man in an hour and only 1% will have had sex with two men in less than 1/2 hour.
So much for the tradition of waiting until the 3rd date…
Preliminary Study Adds Another Reason for Depression in Bad Economy
From the Sunday Times (London) and here via the often fascinating Sexoteric blog…
In this age of shrinking financial security, it probably doesn’t help to learn that a preliminary study out of the UK shows that the frequency of women’s orgasms is linked to the financial level of their partner.
Yes, not only is the guy with the wad of cash more likely to get the girl because he can offer a more interesting lifestyle, apparently, her sexual satisfaction is also likely to be tied to his cash level.
Yet another complexity that reflects how much we’ve learned since “Sperm Wars” taught us just how tight the link is between physiology and sexual behavior.
