I guess any debate founded off a chick tract is a good debate. A link to this Classic was posted in the pit today.
It brought up a thesis that I’d heard posited and wondered about myself several times.
As put the thesis generally runs like this:
“The laws in the Bible against adultery and certain sexual practices are handed down to us by God. The truth of this can be seen by the fact that if we do not follow God’s laws he punishes us with Venereal disease. Therefore do not question the Bible’s laws.”
I post that, and now that I did, I think we can safely dispense with it. If such is your beleif, or you wish to debate I’d appreciate it if you’d start another thread rather than argue it here.
I have in mind a different question:
Religious rules concerning sex do seem to be proof against venereal disease.
Is this purely coincedental, or were the rules intended or evolve this way.
I would imagine that they evolved that way.
Adultery became a sin, and became religiously outlawed and took on the the aspect of a Divine edict simply because of VD.
I beleive most of those rules in Leviticus and whatnot were to keep people “clean” so they would be holy, which was seen as clean. banging every chink in the tribe would lead to rampant diseases causing messy nastiness, so being chaste was seen as a virtue. The same with eating pork, if not cooked right, the people got trichonosis and died. i think some of the other laws just worked with the whole cleanliness deal ( i can’t figure out how the two fabrics thing would help keep people healthy, but maybe that attracted more fleas or something.)
Well, Scylla, there are only two things I can say to this:
As I’ve mentioned before, the only person I’ve ever met whom I knew had full-blown AIDS was a chaste wife, virgin at marriage and true to her husband. Unfortunately, he was not true to her, became HIV+ and infected her. Obviously, keeping the religious rules about sex didn’t protect her in the slightest.
Venereal diseases are not an opportunity for judgment but for the showing of compassion.
I thought the OT prohibition against adultery served to provide men with some assurance that the children they were raising were there own seed. That would help explain why it concerned only married women (at least according to Alan Dershowitz).
If this is the case, I would expect the strictness of rules against adultery to be directly related to the degree in which child-rearing is a personal, as opposed to communal responsibility.
Sorry about your friend, and I agree about compassion instead of judgement. I wonder if those religious laws developed with a similar attitude of compassion, or whether the mystery and the fear were the primary movers. Were women important enouh to ancient men that they would distinguish a woman’s sickness from that of her husband’s as a seperate sin? Or, would they consider it just and proper if the woman was visited with the same disease of her husband?
