abstinece-only sex education

They had visible lesions, Kaposi's sarcoma, flagrant symptoms of full blown AIDS. There were plenty of gross symptoms to test for. And tracking contacts would have helped identify whom to examine.

Wikipedia on Quarantine

If you're going to represent what I supposedly said, QUOTE ME!I never said a thing like what you are attributing to me. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Sigh. Everything you said is exactly what I was talking about. The sum total of your relativistic view -- leaving the choices up to the individual -- is that sex is OK outside all the moral and cultural standards that used to be respected. That was my point. That's the position everybody here holds that I was trying to answer. Oh well.

Well I'm going to get slaughtered here but I have to try at least to clarify what I mean on this thread against another kind of misunderstanding. My views of sex education are completely based on God's law as revealed in the Bible, and in some sense I only apply this law to Bible believers because they are the only ones who respect that law. However, since it is a universal law, it affects everyone equally.Also, it is primarily not about health or self-respect, it's about living in accord with this law, a law that runs this universe -- and if you do that, as a consequence you will be blessed with health, and if you don't do that you can count on negative repercussions.*This law is an objective universal law, it absolutely runs this universe we all live in. Therefore nobody anywhere is exempt from it. Therefore different cultural moral standards, and individual differences of opinion about what's healthy or respectful, as you are using those terms, are all just degrees of harmony with or deviations from the moral law that runs the universe, and mostly they're all variations on basic out-of-whackness with the law.Heterosexual monogamy as spelled out in the Bible happens to be the standard of this moral law. Therefore the more extreme views of sexual permissiveness can only get you deeper into the abovementioned negative repercussions, which will catch up with a person later if not sooner. The Bible teaches that sexual sin is a sin against one's own body, so the form such negative repercussions are going to take with sexual sin is probably diseases of the body.NOW, before you think I want everybody to adhere to this law, let me say that I know that is unrealistic. For starters, the Bible makes it clear we're all by nature sinners which means that we are by definition at odds with God and His universal moral law.Nevertheless I want you all to KNOW about this law because it runs your life no less than it runs a Christian's life and maybe some of you will get smart and recognize it. Or not.In any case the current attitude about sex ed as proposed on this thread by everybody except the couple of evangelicals here, is at odds with the moral law and an invitation to various forms and degrees of personal and cultural unpleasant repercussions. This is because the moral law doesn't just sit around taking note of violations, it operates by cause and effect the way physical laws do -- violations will get you slapped down one way or another.I would also suggest that throughout history it appears that most cultures have formed their laws and standards about sex more or less on some intuited understanding of this law. Social science is always looking for instrumental reasons for moral standards, such as how they hold the family together or favor child protection and the like, and such reasons can be supposed to be involved easily enough, but the ultimate standard is the universal law, and if it is being respected there will be family order etc. When the law is violated, family breaks down, causing stresses and strains to individuals and various social institutions, sexual acting out of all kinds increases, sexual diseases proliferate, weirder and weirder sexual deviations may proliferate, etc., and ultimately a society will self-destruct.SO monogamy, while not universal by any means, is pretty standard across cultures, and adultery and sexual promiscuity is pretty universally frowned upon. PLEASE GET IT, I AM NOT SAYING it doesn't exist or even that it is rare. FROWNED UPON does not mean there are no violations. Obviously every kind of sexual sin is common to the human race. Obviously. Prostitution is common. Homosexuality has been with us all the way back. Some societies have been polygamous and so on. Etc. etc etc. NEVERTHELESS cultural STANDARDS AND MORES no matter how much they are violated -- GENERALLY favor the conservative arrangements, and to some extent do work to keep the society under some kind of restraint so that sexual acting-out doesn't bring the whole house down overnight.What's NEW on planet Earth I dare say, is our current all-out permissiveness about sexual behavior. That the behavior has always existed everywhere is not the point. The point is that even where it was tacitly accepted it was never treated as right; it was never before wholeheartedly embraced by a culture as the right way to think about sex until the last few decades in the West.The current way of thinking despises the idea of a universal morality, of a law to which all must submit; also despises the idea of cultural restraints, likes to interpret them as just the controlling tactics of a power elite, for instance, a religious power elite usually; condemns them as repressive, inhumane, unhealthy and so on. All these opinions have been expressed on this thread. These are the tenets of The Sexual Revolution. This is what I have been talking about.It is the permissive tenets of the Sexual Revolution that are now running our sex ed classes. This philosophy says anything that turns you on is OK, is healthy, is good, as long as -- oh things like, as long as you are well informed about it, are respectful about it, don't impose it on anyone, are careful about health issues, and similar standards. ** All very wise standards within the permissive frame of reference, except for the fact that the frame of reference itself, the basic philosophy that everything sexual is OK according to one's own personal assessment, otherwise known as moral relativism, is the screwiest philosophy ever to come down the cultural pike, never before seen on planet earth AS THE OPERATING STANDARD FOR THE SOCIETY AT LARGE that I know of, and a sure recipe for cultural suicide.So, this is what I mean when I say that abstinence-only is the only sane standard and the only thing a sane culture would teach its young, and why I haven't said a word about the specifics of other information that might also have to do with sex ed questions.================
I am sure there are all kinds of ways I can't imagine what I've said above is going to be misconstrued, and all I can say to anyone who feels inspired to respond is, please read carefully so there aren't too many wild misreadings and red herrings for me to deal with. If something isn't clear please ask. * This edit is the latest of them all but belongs in this order. It got said in Message 242, but it needs to be said here. On the cause-effect factor, sin leading to negative repercussions and obedience to the law leading to health, of course this isn't some simplistic one-to-one correlation that could be easily traced. We all sin in multiple ways all the time, and sex is only one of the moral areas involved. Also, we inherit sin and consequences in some fashion from our ancestors, about which we are not likely to know much if anything. Besides that, God may act to alter the normal playing-out of His law, to deal with a person in an individual way, though of course the law will be satisfied somehow or other eventually. And Jesus said sin is not always the cause of disease. So the picture is complex, and I merely mean to be making a general point: Long life and good health follow from being in harmony with God's law, and the reverse from disobedience to it. AND I believe the wise men of many cultures have known this much about the connection between health and morality. ** Edit: Here's another possible misunderstanding I'd like to try to catch in advance if I can. Abstinence is also taught as an option of course, within these relativist parameters, because the standard is whatever the individual thinks is right. In practice what this means is that abstinence is only respected as an individual attitude and not as a standard in itself. In practice sexual permissiveness is the guiding standard just because there is no absolute standard against it.EDIT: Another angle that wasn't covered. The Law of course is not only about sexuality, I'm merely addressing that aspect of it because that's the topic of this thread. The Law can be stated as succinctly as the Ten Commandments, or reduced to Jesus' condensation, love to God and to neighbor; or it can be dealt with in great detail as Moses did in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and even that doesn't cover all its possible applications and interpretations by a long shot.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : Added note on scope of LawEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : To rearrange edits for order and clarity.Edited by Faith, : grammar in last paragraph. Sigh.

Thank you bro. It is always easier to face getting slaughtered when one gets a word of encouragement now and then.

You're nitpicking. Those with flagrant symptoms are also carriers, and if you track contacts with those carriers you can have a working hypothesis of other carriers who do not show symptoms. The point was simple. What could have been done to control the spread of the disease was not being done for political reasons.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not to mention nonexistent -- except for Jesus Christ.But I'd be interested in your musings on the subject since you've apparently done some reading on such things. I guess this thread isn't the place for it though.

Probably just another of those "Two Culture" things. They are literary types, not scientists, and I would guess they used the term in the ordinary sense of someone with the capacity to spread the disease, and since in those days the viral agent hadn't been identified, OBVIOUSLY that meant identifying those with symptoms, no doubt including tracing their contacts as well. Edited by Faith, : to hyphenate title

Sigh. Look, I can't say EVERYTHING in one post. But you remind me I did think of adding an edit on this and didn't get back to it.Obviously the operations of the moral law are incredibly complex considering all the different kinds of sins and the fact that we inherit sin as well as committing our own. Tracking the cause-effect relationship between sin (or good behavior) and consequence is not something I claim anyone can do for this reason, although sometimes I think we have some clues.And you know, if you don't want me to bite, as you put it, you might practice some restraint in your bratty rudeness.

All true, but I wish it were only worldly morals as usual myself, instead of this transformation of the whole culture into the image of the Man of Sin as it were.Thanks VV.

You were wrong in this case and therefore doubly wrong to "call" me on my views as you did. It is bratty to "call" anybody on "being wrong" and especially bratty from your own stupidly wrong perspective (it works both ways).The following is pure brattiness, full of sarcasm and arrogance. And telling me flat out to stop thinking as I do is beyond rude: I can just go back to ignoring you however, if you have no intentions of dropping your brat act.

Well, thanks, jazz.

No, not by you, holmes. You aren't usually hostile. Well, in the sense I was outlining, your general views ARE running the educational courses these days, and running the culture at large, because your general views are those of the Sexual Revolution as I sketched it out -- and to one degree or another everybody else's too, as I also mentioned, with various qualifications by some, although you're the only declared Libertine in the crowd. My conservative views, in the same general sort of way, used to run the culture, and pretty much all cultures, as I was also claiming in that post, until the Sexual Revolution. That's the gist of my message. OK, I'll see, but again this thread addresses "abstinence-only" and I've kept my remarks to the meaning of that idea from a Christian perspective, and avoided all the particulars about HOW it is taught, so I don't know how you could guess whether I'm "availing" myself of anything in particular in modern sex ed. I'm simply not addressing sex ed as such. Abstinence-only except within monogamous marriage was once the cultural standard, however frequently violated, and it ought to be the guiding standard of ANY training on sex at ANY level if a culture wants to remain healthy. That's my position. It isn't going to happen, but the important thing to me is to keep it at the forefront of the conversation rather than bogged down in the successes or failures of various ways sex ed is taught, the clinical aspects and so on. Um, well. From one point of view, if anything at all is taught that is in accord with the moral law, of course we're better off than if all-out selfish libertinism were being explicitly encouraged to run amok. But the problem with the health-and-self-respect focus is that all such moral particulars are really ad hoc piecemeal attempts to deal with the negative fall-out from the Sexual Revolution that is running the show, and the fact that it IS running the show gets obscured. Later in this post you even claim Schraf and Brenna and someone else don't have the SR perspective, but my point is ALL of you do. Some qualify it in various ways, but as long as it is considered OK for *anyone* to "choose" any form of non-monogamous sex, that's the philosophy of the SR talking. Hm. I suppose all that's involved, but I'd spell it out more like this: I see proliferating STDs, proliferating varieties of sexual deviance, more breakdown and stresses in families, increase in single parenting, more stress and alienation among more kids, possible increase in crimes, eventual strain on the welfare system. Sure, people figure out ways to cope and cope well at times with all these situations, but cumulatively it can't be a good thing. But I'm simply refusing to address the clinical aspects of sex ed because my interest is in keeping the focus on the loss of the old cultural standard of abstinence-only until marriage. There are no doubt necessary and good aspects to the clinical presentations, but there may also be elements I'd want to object to -- I don't know off the top of my head, but it would be too complicated a discussion for me to want to get into right now. Well, but THAT is also a tenet of the Sexual Revolution mentality, or the moral relativist mentality. Implicit in my whole message is that once upon a time it was pretty universally understood that sex belongs in marriage and that everything else is "bad." Again, this represented the official mores of communities, not that there weren't plenty of people doing what was bad. But the difference is that such things were thought of as bad. What has changed via the Sexual Revolution is that now nobody is allowed to say what is objectively and universally bad or good. So I'm not allowed to say that your libertinism is bad -- and I didn't, merely pointed out that the moral law has something say about it and there are consequences for violating that law. You insist that for you it is good and that you have a right to decide what is good, and all of us have that right to choose our own sexual behavior, because what prevails now, and the Sexual Revolution is right in line with it, is moral relativism -- there ARE no objective standards any more. But there used to be, and pretty much everywhere on earth, as I was saying in that post -- again, even though they were violated.Then there was this concerted intellectual attack on those moral standards, criticizing them as bad for the health, as the product of a power elite's desire to control the people, as a throwback to a primitive mentality, as the product of evil religion and so on and so forth. Thus was the sexual revolution born. And now, as I said, it's running things. No more objective universal moral standards -- only private personal moral standards.And this new mentality is well illustrated by your post, as you go on: Etc. But remember, I am explicitly avoiding this subject because I haven't fully thought it through, and because I may have objections to various aspects of the way the physical information is presented, if I knew more of the specifics, and I simply don't want to make any premature judgments; and because I'm interested in this cultural overview. I have nothing against alleviating suffering. It hasn't been addressed. I have no idea what you are trying to say here. I have no idea what you are saying holmes. I have not discussed any of this, or implied anything about it as far as I intended. I don't recall making any ad hominems, or even thinking much about your particular philosophy while writing my post. And again, I have no idea how far I might agree or disagree with you about clinical knowledge. To me that is a whole other subject. My moral philosophy simply does not hold sway any more. Where you think it holds sway it doesn't. The moral philosophy that holds sway everywhere now is the Sexual Revolution. I did my best to get that across in my post. And I'd need to see these studies you claim show this anyway. I'm less and less a fan of social science. I have absolutely NO idea what you are talking about. How do you know what MY communities are? Such sweeping generalizations about who knows what? And what is this supposed to prove? Huh? And your point is?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What for instance? No, it's based on a lack of knowledge. I haven't investigated the agenda of sex ed programs. And a Christian's primary concern is always that nothing that violates God's will be taught, and if I don't know exactly what's promoted and ponder its implications I simply can't have an opinion. Sometimes mere clinical presentations do exert a permissive moral force, and this is why I'd have to think carefully about what is actually specifically taught. Good, we agree on this. As for the roots being longer, I'm certainly aware that there is a history of such ideas that goes way back, but always within a circumscribed and rather elitist social context. What's new is their becoming culture-wide as you are acknowledging. Just as is the case with some areas of science, especially social science, I think there is a tremendous naivete involved in this idea that mere facts about potent social phenomena can be truly value-free. There is a definite morality that is promoted by many such supposedly morally neutral practical presentations. Since we are not discussing anything in particular here, this is of necessity abstract and vague, but it is why I have avoided this arena of the discussion. It's a big area, and it is NOT necessarily morality-neutral. Um there would be no need to present, say, the graphic particulars of the danger of AIDS from anal penetration to an ascetic I would assume. And would you deny that such a discussion tacitly validates anal penetration by emphasizing how to do it in a way that minimizes the health risk? There's an example of how mere supposedly value-neutral facts can carry a moral message -- always a permissive message of course. Yet of course you might answer but if they don't know the facts then they may do it carelessly and get AIDS. Uh huh. Well, if abstinence-only were effectively taught maybe not. In any case I think I've made the point that even the clinical factual side of sex ed is not some kind of free zone in which we can expect to find common ground as easily as you seem to be suggesting. And please don't jump to the conclusion that I'm advocating withholding any information. I'm simply saying that information is not necessarily morally neutral as you claim.Will have to take up the rest of your post later, if the thread lasts long enough. Or maybe I will add it into this post.Edited by Faith, : to change "no information is morally neutral" to "information is not necessarily morally neutral."Edited by Faith, : grammar, clarity, changed "discuss" to "present."