Or they were already married, as the average age for women to get married was much younger in the 50s than it is today.
(my bolding)
Do you have a cite for that or is it simply hatred?
Just to be sure so that you won’t walk around the issue, you said that abortion laws and facts about condoms were produce fot the purpose of increasing the number of unwanted children.
You also said that religions are specifically trying to increase the AIDS problem.
Addressing only the condom issue, here’s an article from The Guardian that gives a brief history of the Catholic church’s position on condoms.
That doesn’t imply “unwanted” children, but the church clearly sees condom use as depriving the world of more Catholic people. I don’t think it’s too big a leap to assert that this policy may have done harm in impoverished and/or overpopulated parts of the world.
He said “ignore the spread of AIDs”. Not the same thing. And by putting out misinformation about condoms the Catholic church has most definitely contributed to the problem.
Mach Tuck, has it occurred to you that either the Guardian or yourself are making an unwarranted conclusion based on a claim about another topic? If the Pope said that he wants more Catholic children in Italy, does it also necessarily mean he wants more children in Africa? Until he comes out and says so outright, this would remain speculation.
Consider a counter argument. The Vatican’s long term well-being depends on getting the Italian Catholics to have one or two kids to keep future Italy, well, Italian, and also at least borderline Catholic. Not to mention that Catholic Italians might even donate some money to the Church and stuff 
. By contrast, pushing Africans to have five children instead of three would not make much of a difference for the Vatican as a political institution, and it can easily make things worse for the Catholic Church over there, e.g. if overpopulation starts causing religious wars. Or if all those extra Africans sneak into Italy and camp out on St Peter’s footsteps. Neither can you get much money in donations from starving landless African peasants 
ETA: 13th century pope Pope John XXI - Wikipedia is suspected of writing a book on family planning called “Treasure of the Poor”. So it is certainly not inherently out of character for Catholic Church to be opposed to population growth, supportive of growth, indifferent to it or whatnot. The same, obviously, can be said about secular governments whose opinions may vary by time and place, depending on the circumstances.
Has it occurred to you that the pope is head of the Catholic church everywhere, and as such the Catholics in Africa - not just the ones in Italy - are obliged to do what he says?
Why are you bending over backward to give benefit of the doubt to the Catholic church on this matter? They have put out factually incorrect information, probably knowingly IMHO. That does harm in the world, regardless of whatever their true intentions may be.
African Catholics are “obliged” not to use condoms since that is his teaching to everybody. They are not “obliged” to have more children to avoid being individualistic because that is his teaching aimed specifically at Italians. So that part of your post is not supported by the evidence you provided.
Years ago, I worked for a company that asked for volunteers on various Saturdays to pick up food from canned good charities along with fresh fruit and salads for homeless food lines. By doing this, for a couple of hours, our bosses would buy us lunch the following week.
Thing is, there were NO religious charities involved. No priest, no sermons, no “readings”. We didn’t hold their necessities hostage while they listened to some religious drivel. Instead, needs were met. They ate, we ate, all were fed with true nourishment.
Since then, I’ve never given to a religious food drive simply for this reason.
interesting anecdote. Yeah, so? The main OP is about problems caused by religion and a subthread resulting from my hijack is about problems caused by liberalism. Does this have to do with either of these? Which problem have those preachy religious charities caused in your opinion beyond the problem of offending those aid recipients who just don’t take kindly to sermons? Their food aid and sermons may have been a bandaid, but presumably not for a problem caused by any religion (at least, not based on the evidence provided).
My point is that charity never needs religion. Not giving starving people food UNTIL they hear the word of the lord may be a small form of abuse to you, but bigger to me.
If I refused to give food to those in need before they took an E-Meter test would be the same as hearing a sermon first. Religion is not needed in charity of any kind, and it usually becomes a burden to the problem.
And I was disagreeing with Martin Hyde’s post. The food drives I support only feed, not brainwash.
Of course they are. The priests in African countries denouncing condoms and finding alleged “witches” in communities ARE the work of the Catholic Church as an entirety.
Italy, like many European countries is having low or negative population growth, which has an impact on, among other thngs, pensions and social security. He was specific about Italy.
The Africa quote is not against real facts.
May have done harm? Sure, like many other things.
You do realise that the RCC position on condoms is not “have sex with anoyone but without condoms” and that the number of people who decided not to use condoms while having sex with a girlfriend/boyfriend/one-night-stand7mistress, lover/prostitute because of religion is outstadingly close to zero?
He said “religious driven efforts to ignore the spread of AIDS”, which is an action to conceal or cover it.
Also what **code_grey **said.
According to the Guardian article, Benedict made his comments about the Italian birth rate in 2007. If so, he was trying to provide further rationale for a decades old policy.
As to part one of that sentence, yes I realize that’s their inane policy which ignores the basic natural drives of humans and all other living things. I grew up Catholic, and one of the many reasons I left was because their dogma was so incredibly unrealistic. As to part two, cite?
Really? What THAT guy said?! Bwahahahahahaha!!!
I ask again: Why are you guys bending over so far to give the Catholic church benefit of the doubt on this? Neither you or Code Grey have addressed the second implication in the link I provided, which is that Benedict said condom use would increase the spread of AIDs through increased sexual activity, “in defiance of virtually all informed medical opinion”.
Go ahead, defend that. Even if you buy into church doctrine about sex outside of marriage, defend Benedict on that one.
I think that the issue of implications of RCC condom policy are complex enough to merit its own multiple threads worth of debating. I don’t necessarily trust the Pope’s view of the matter from the public health point of view (because, show me the data) but neither do I give much credence to the claims of the “medical opinion”. If a gang of researchers paid by the UN and similar outfits is researching the outcomes of UN favorite policy, guess what conclusion they will come to. So about the specific facts of the matter I am agnostic; indeed I suspect that the answer will be non uniform for different places and situations. E.g. in place A pushing condoms will increase AIDS, in place B it will decrease it and in C it will make no difference.
In general, I think that liberals with their usual magical thinking naivette tend to automatically jump from “a condom reduces chances of HIV transmission during single act” to “promoting condoms among African peasants will reduce HIV rate”. This implicit syllogism is simply baseless. Similarly, you cannot jump from “shooting guns at people kills some of them” to “if we send 10M American men to be shot at in WW2 American population will decrease”. In practice American population boomed because the underlying process is a lot more complex than what you can arrive at by naive reasoning. Other fake and naive liberal syllogisms resulted in AFDC, rent controls, housing standards regulations (which yielded high rents and homelessness, as I talked upthread) and many other disasters.
As far as why people jump to Pope’s defense, well, people don’t like seeing other people persecuted for expressing opinions at variance with the Liberal consensus. While the real state of affairs vis-a-vis truth of competing claims is pretty murky, what stands out most strongly is that the Liberals want to make people who disagree with them to shut up. Or, even better, to start saying what Liberals want said. And you know how they say, first they came for the Pope, then who is going to be next.
How is the Pope being “persecuted,” and how are “liberals” trying to make people shut up?
I think religious support for the “War on Drugs” is a factor hurting inner cities. It’s hardly the only factor, and I don’t think it’s the most important one by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe that’s what the OP was getting at?
I have already answered in post #5. In Catholic countries AIDS rates are very low, thus proving wrong your implication that Catholicism causes AIDS.
They actively try to prevent efforts to stop the spread of AIDS.
What I did was supply a cite that says the pope rather ironically talks out of his ass on the subject of condoms.
Looking over the first few posts, it was YOU who brought up the idea of the Catholic church causing the spread of AIDs so you could try to shoot it down:
Then followed your cite, which was a WHO map that did not break down AIDS by religion in any way. However, WHO (and others with apparently left leaning “medical opinions” according to Code Grey) is on record supporting the use of condoms in stemming the spread of AIDs.
The pope claimed otherwise, which is called being “wrong” *. Taking that sort of position when one has influence over many many people has the potential for doing harm in the world. I really didn’t think anyone would defend that, but here you are.
*Edit: I suspect the pope wasn’t wrong in the sense that he was mistaken, because he probably knew what the prevailing scientific opinions were. More likely he was just not telling the truth, which is worse.
Every Filipino president since Marcos has tried to implement some form of family planning policy in the Philippines. Plans have varied from distributing contraceptives, sex education and even surgical sterilization. The Catholic church has blocked these policies at every step.
Philippine population growth is out of control.
Poverty is rampant as is a lack of education.
I was looking for an article I read years ago, but I couldn’t find it online. Anyway, the reporter was interviewing Filipinos regarding pregnancies and quite a few did not know that sex can cause pregnancies. If they got pregnant, it was a gift from God.
In 2010, the current president Aquino finally passed a Reproductive Health bill.
The bill covers family planning, sex education, distribution of contraceptives, and what they call “prevention of abortion and management of post-abortion complications.”
Abortion remains illegal, but where complications from an illegal abortion happens, the mother can request help.
This bill was long overdue. The Catholic church had in effect been in charge of family planning, which meant no contraceptives and no sex education. An over populated poverty struck Philippines is the result.
I have to give a nod to President Aquino. He pushed this through even though the Catholic church threatened to excommunicate him. And rightfully so, the Philippines constitutionally has a separation of church and state, it was about time someone stood up to the hold the Catholic church has over the Philippine government.
With this new bill, hopefully the Philippines can finally do something to educate and thereby control the population growth rate to a manageable level.
I think this is a good example of how the charity work done by the Catholic church in the Philippines is because of the problems caused by the church.
Correction.
I was under the impression the bill had been passed, but it seems it hasn’t yet.
It is being debated and Aquino seems to have backed down a bit. I guess he took the excommunication threat seriously.