abstinece-only sex education

Thank you bro. But Schraf seems to need to misrepresent and ridicule me. Far be it from me to interfere with her pleasures.

Who says they were god-loving. No doubt they were reaping the consequences of fornication. That's how such things are brought about, or didn't anyone here know that?

You don't get moral behavior out of a manipulative mechanical program, you just get calculated behavior that superficially looks moral to people who don't think much.Your whole focus is mechanical and instrumental, mine is moral. There's nothing for us to discuss. Carry on.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

???

Must be a Britishism.

I haven't said ONE THING about abstinence "programs." I simply abhor this "scientific" mechanical manipulative instrumentalistic way you all talk about this stuff, it's dehumanizing. Abstinence IS what should be taught, but HOW it is taught is a big subject I haven't investigated enough to be able to advocate anything in particular.Again, this self righteous carrying on about how there's something wrong with teaching abstinence simply because young people in our sex-saturated culture ignore it is just mindlessness.

Uh, OK, but CK is a Brit and he got it and I didn't.Maybe Americans don't try to get the teacher's attention the way Irish/Brits do. We're more self-centered maybe. "Me me" or "I know I know" or "Call on me, Teach" are more our style.So you get an A in fornication... I mean, in knowing what fornication is and how it leads to syphilis. Funny it escapes others here.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Said so myself I believe, but you seldom read through a thread before answering so you wouldn't know that. I said I'd probably propose another thread later on to address the general point that interests me more.I would think it's not totally off topic, however, to be criticizing the topic itself and the terms it's being cast in.Anyway, must go. Maybe you'll luck out and get another abstinence-only advocate to misrepresent. Have fun.Edited by Faith, : typo correction "abstinence"

No, I haven't been ignoring it as a public health issue and I don't separate the morality issue from the public health issue as you claim. The only way to deal with the public health issue in the long run is to deal with it as a moral issue. That has been part of what I've been saying.But in order for it to work, it would require a sea change in the culture at large back to the moral perspective. Abstinence-only fails because of the current amoral worldview that dominates the discussion.The sea change isn't going to happen (short of God's having mercy on us in the form of a miraculous revival) because science has the terms of the problem all sewed up in their amoral instrumentalist terminology. The abstinence-only failure only confirms the instrumentalist worldview which will fail in the long run.Edited by Faith, : Added first sentence.

The claim is that the abstinence-only position INCREASES the incidence of sexual behavior. How is that the result of withholding information? Obviously the accusation is that the philosophy of abstinence is to blame for this result. Again, the only proof that young people are being hurt is that they ignore the teaching of the program. I find this accusation absurd that it's the program's fault that they do so.HOW the program is set up I really don't know. Nobody has bothered to give the outlines on this thread. All that's been said on this thread is that it doesn't work, therefore it's evil, and the way it doesn't work is by the kids doing the opposite of what the program advocates.In other words, its advocacy of abstinence-only is why it doesn't work, and this is because the kids ignore it. But that's the PROGRAM's fault.I get from this the impression that the whole idea here is to ridicule the idea of abstinence. There is no serious effort being made to discuss the actualities involved. Edited by Faith, : to correct a few grammatical problemsEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

You are making generalizations that simply don't apply to the reality of the situation. The reality is that there were TWO, count 'em, TWO, "venereal diseases" or STDs, known to humanity at large before the 60s -- or really the 70s and 80s which were when the fruit of the 60s seeds started to sprout. TWO. Syphilis and gonorrhea. The others that are now so common were UNKNOWN. I don't know that they were totally unknown to science, but they were unknown as far as anything the average person had to think about. You are acting as if Oh this is just evolution as usual. NO, this is a NEW THING since the 60s. Their very opportunity to "evolve" occurred with the huge increase in promiscuity. Why is this being denied? =Syphilis and gonorrhea were the ONLY STDs anybody ever thought about, for HUNDREDS OF YEARS. They were the ONLY ones known throughout the 50s and well into the 60s. The fact that after decades of concerted effort to control them they were finally suppressed is irrelevant to the point. It took massive work to get them suppressed. And now we've got NEW ONES that are going to take at least as much work IF it is even possible to control them by purely medical and chemical means. Your attempt to make all this sound like business-as-usual is out of touch with reality. You are making a false equivalence. See above. This optimism you express is out of touch with the historical facts.Edited by Faith, : corrected quote codes

I've been making the point that this whole attitude toward sex that you are expressing here is new, part of the 60s-initiated sea change, and it is variations on this attitude that have been driving the promiscuity that is the real reason for the increase in STDs. The whole thing is philosophically driven; it is NOT a matter of "biological force" or this increase would not have been happening.Amazing. You are blind to this increase. You ignore the fact that only syphilis and gonorrhea were health problems related to sex prior to the 60s. You pretend it's all business as usual. You ignore that the average person never thought of herpes or human papilloma virus or AIDS before the 60s bloomed in full. You pretend it's all just human biology as usual. The problem is a philosophical one, a problem of ideas that have changed the whole face of the culture. Abstinence-only is the obvious philosophical response to it. But this is derided as stupid because nobody wants to live by that philosophy any more really, though this is not honestly given as the reason.The truth is that everybody now accepts this sexual freedom philosophy. Everything you are saying implies your own acceptance of it. Except for your denial that it is new. But why not face it as the new thing it is? You are implicitly trying to solve it by addressing it mechanically, with condoms and other supposed protections.What happened in the sixties was the unleashing of a huge Pandora's box of cultural ills that can only get worse. You don't want to even think about the root cause, which is the culture-wide spread of the philosophy of sexual freedom. So good luck with your mechanical solutions. They are Band-aids on a festering wound.

You misrepresent what I said. Surprise surprise. I'm not even going to bother to read your link since you didn't bother to represent my point accurately.I repeated many times that I was talking about what the average person was aware of. No other STDs existed IN THE PUBLIC MIND before the Sexual Revolution, or had any impact on general public health concerns, only syphilis and gonorrhea. Edited by Faith, : grammar

You think they didn't knock themselves out educating people about syphilis and gonorrhea? Where were you?

I am responding to the OP, sticking within the parameters laid down for the thread. Nobody said one word about the program itself except that it promotes abstinence only.