:: Beams admiringly at kaylasdad99 ::
Yeah… what he said.
Okay, my history may be a bit off here… but didn’t John Hancock sign the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE in 1776?? I may be mistaken, and sorry for the hijack.
FriendOfGod, you claim
For us to believe your argument, you need to:
1.) Produce evidence that violence, drug use, teen pregnancies, abortion, and divorce rates have risen in the last 40 years. (I imagine you could produce evidence of some of these.)
2.) Produce evidence that in the last 40 years, Humanistic standards have gained ascendancy in this country. (Again, you may be able to produce some evidence of this.)
3.) Prove that #2 has caused #1. I doubt you can do this. You have fallen prey to several possible logical fallacies here: Post Hoc, ergo Propter Hoc: because one thing follows another, it is held to cause the other; Joint effect: one thing is held to cause another when in fact they are both the joint effects of an underlying cause; Insignificant: one thing is held to cause another, and it does, but it is insignificant compared to other causes of the effect; Wrong Direction: the direction between cause and effect is reversed; Complex Cause: the cause identified is only a part of the entire cause of the effect
As for Humanism ruling this country, here is a humorous look at how Christians are a minority in this “atheistic nation:” http://www.infidels.org/misc/humor/lioaca.html
I’ve posted this before, but here’s a study that belies the idea that sex education and the idea that teens will do it in any case leads to teen pregnancy, STDs, and abortions. My personal feeling is that religiously-based repressive attitudes toward sex contribute to America’s higher rates of undesirable sexual behaviors. http://www.healthcentral.com/drdean/deanfulltexttopics.cfm?id=25757
And as far as faith helping prevent divorce, here’s a bit from the Barna Research Group:
Also, before you tell me you can’t prove any of this, but it hurts God, so it’s bad!, remember that you are the one that started with “evidence” that the country is in decline, citing objective facts such as violence and divorce rates. If you had simply declared your opinion that sex ed offends Jehovah, I doubt anyone would have bothered to respond.
Let’s see . . . my dad was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1945, and attended high school there from 1960-63. During that time, he saw beatings, stabbings, shootings and rapes. For those of you poor at math, 2000-1960=40. Try again, FoG.
First of all, there was little such stigma; it just wasn’t nearly as publicized. It was a “family matter.” You’d be amazed at how many people of my parents’ generation were born or conceived . . . er . . . “without benefit of clergy.”
Second of all, teen pregnancy rates are down, partly due to the success of Planned Parenthood and contraception programs.
Well, **pldennison **, all thanks for the heads up inre Humanism. I was not aware of Dewey’s influence on public education, nor his belief in Humanism. Although, that said, there seems to be nothing that I would object to strenuously in their tenets. Of course, I’m an atheist, so my reading is biassed.
So, FriendofGod, I would like to apologize to you for my incessant hammering to provide a cite for that accursed Humanist agenda. The rest of my hammering, though, still stands.
Waste
Flick Lives!
It seems that arguing with FoG is like slamming your head into a brick wall, only slighty more pleasant and slighty less effective.
FriendofGod, I know you are doing what you believe is right, but please understand that not everyone is going to agree with you. When you preach at people who do not wish to be preached at, it is only going to harden their resolve that you are wrong.
Hello all,
I won’t be able to give a blow-by-blow response at the moment to everything, but I would like to briefly reply to two posts …
pldennison said:
Thank you and I accept your apology. That was genuinely very big of you.
Also, thank you for posting the information on humanism. You’ve inspired me to find my copy of the Humanist Manifseto and post parts of it.
Demise said:
Well I actually expect VERY few people on this board to agree with me! Your last line, however, is a good point. Hmmmmmmmm … I guess sometimes I’ll admit I enjoy jumping into these debates to make a point no one else on this board would make … partly because I’m curious exactly how people will disagree with it. And it is interesting. But your point is well taken and I probably should not push the point too overtly.
Having said that, I will make an attempt to give a more detailed response to kayl, pl, GL, grem, and Aeryn in the next day or so.
What about Holocaust denial? Shall we give equal time to Holocaust deniers, or flat earthers?
Hate to break it to you, FoG, but there’s an entire field of study called “ufology” too.
BTW…
can you explain protein homology? 
-Ben
From today’s Washington Post, an article about teen pregnancy rates, available in full at
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56249-2000Aug8.html
states, among other things:
“Births to teenagers have fallen to their lowest rate in the 60 years that statistics have been kept, a government agency said yesterday.
Births to girls ages 15 to 19 dropped last year to 49.6 per 1,000, down 3 percent from 1998 and 20 percent from 1991, according to preliminary numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).”
Beat that for a current cite!!!
It also states:
“Government analysts said more teenagers than ever understand the importance of safe sex and more teens are abstaining from sex.”
Someone would have to perform a regression analysis to discover what portion of the decline was attributable to sex education/available contraception and what portion was attributable to abstinence. I’ll check the NCHS site later today.
FriendofGod wrote:
So you believe in legislating morality, then?
You mean like how witnesses to the Columbine massacre claim she did not, in fact, say “Yes” or anything like it?
Just wanted you guys to know I haven’t forgotten this post. I just finished a marathon post on a different topic and still didn’t get through. I will attempt sometime this weekend to at least partly respond to some of the responses made recently.
… (walks off mumbling, this is what I get for posting controversial stuff on two posts!) …
. . . it occurred to me this morning in the boredom of the Metro ride that much of the “teen pregnancy crisis” is cultural baggage created by a culture where the onset of adulthood is delayed by the mythical beast of “adolescence.” 200 years ago, it might have been considered unusual for young women not to have been married and bearing children by their late teens/early twenties.
Phil
While you’re checking…
I heard something on the radio yesterday about what you’re saying. Births by teens are down. But the announcer also said, as I recall, that teen pregnancies are not down, at least not nearly as much, indicating that there might be an increase in abandonment. What’s the buzz?
Phil: I think you’ve hit the nail pretty close to right on the head regarding teen pregnancies. Pre-marital sex, by anecdotal evidence, is not much more common today than it was is previous years (heck, if anything, it was more common in previous centuries because there weren’t many other pastimes to indulge ourselves within).
What has disappeared are the two ideas that A) a child should be raised with a mother and a father, no matter how unhappy those parents are together; and B) getting married at a very early age is perfectly fine.
So while we have a much higher occurance of unwed teenage mothers, we have a much lower occurance of people getting married at 17 and spending fifty years in a loveless marriage because the girl got pregnant. Speaking in terms of “within the last 50 years” versus “within the last five hundred”.
FoG: Huh. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Christians make up about 85% of Americans. My mistake for assuming that was a majority.
However, it does look like we agree. You despise the religion of Secular Humanism being taught in schools. So do I (though I don’t think it’s nearly as prevalent until you really get into college). The problem is, you seem to want to take Humanism out and replace it with Christianity. I see the same flaws with teaching Christianity that I do with teaching Humanism- that it gives a giant “This is the right way to be!” endorsement by authority figures to something I don’t believe in.
I guess I just don’t understand how you can rail against Humanism and see no immediate, inherent contradiction between that and teaching Christianity in schools.
And quite frankly, that is what you’re advocating. Creationism is completely a Judeo-Christian myth, unless you’re willing to open the floor to all other creation myths, from Greco-Roman Titans to Hindu and Zoroastrian beliefs. By stating, “well, the district can just choose which ones to present”, you once again set up a tyranny of the majority, where Hindus are not presented upon the same level as Christians, and only because there are more Christians as Hindus in an area. Again, unless you wish to argue that having more adherents necessarily means that a religion is more valid, in which case I sincerely hope your conversion to Catholicism is successful and heartfelt (after all, they’re the world’s largest Christian denomination, which makes them inherently more ‘true’ than your branch of Christianity, right?).
I’m going to try to PARTLY catch up on responding to posts in this topic, and I’ll hit the rest sometime this weekend …
kaylasdad99 said:
How so? Are you saying that you aren’t aware of the field of creation science? And you’re criticizing me for admitting I’m not an expert in a field that you apparently don’t think exists.
You believe this? Then I have a question for you. What do you base your beliefs on? If you are certain something is true, what is your certainty based on?
You must not’ve read the 30+ pages of the “Christianity and Love” thread. That’s about as opposite of what I believe as it comes! ANY person can come to Christ, no matter what their background, no matter how much sin is in their life, no matter what.
Well … yeah. So why are you thinking I would disagree with this?
GLWasteful, you said:
Of course not, and that’s my point … it was there but there was a moral stigma attached to it. Today you can be looked down on for being a virgin … back then you could be looked down on for being loose.
To this and all your other requests for cites, I must confess I am basing much of this on stuff I studied and read about in college about 12 years ago. I wish I did have some of it handy, and in fact I might still have some of the newspapers in my parents house that I can find. But I totally understand you not instantly buying it without evidence.
I do have this question … why are you so certain that a Christian website would be inaccurate?
As for the specific item about sexual sin being damaging, sheesh just look around! Who needs a cite? Damaged emotions, wounded people, people getting used for sex and not love, … those are just things I’ve personally seen in people’s lives just off the top of my head. Oh yeah, and that little nasty thing called disease.
I’m male by the way, and I’ve done neither. I did have a friend about 9 years ago, however, from Texas, who had two abortions before becoming a Christian. You should have seen the look in her eyes when she told me about it. I nearly bawled. She was so devastated at what she had done.
Well you might be surprised that I somewhat agree, except with the “everyone” part. Laws being changed won’t solve the root issue … it has to be solved in the hearts of people, one soul at a time.
Of course! And they would have freedom of religion like everyone else. What’s so difficult to get about that?
Regarding “She Said Yes”, you said:
Well I must confess I am surprised! I think you’ll find it an interesting read whether you agree with it or not. You can finish it in no time, it’s not very long. Let me know what you think!
I will mention one more thing about your request for a cite. While I don’t have any specifics in front of me, I can tell you in general what I recall studying. There has been a very deliberate, concerted effort on the part of humanists to get their philosophy taught in schools, and it’s been successful for the most part.
Groundwork was laid by getting people with this philosophy elected to school boards in the late 60s / early 70s and on to today. Many history textbooks have been rewritten to downplay the religious roots of American history (compare one written in the 50s with one written today).
As an interesting aside to this debate: did you realize that in the early 1990s, as communism was falling, Russian officials ASKED CHRISTIANS to come to Russia to TEACH CHRISTIAN VALUES in PUBLIC SCHOOLS?? For THAT I can give you a cite – The Bill Gothard Institute is one I know of specifically that was asked, but there were others as well. They were asked to develop school curriculum specifically based on Christianity! And here in the good ole USA, the very idea of that being done would have the separation crowd up in arms. It’s rather ironic.
grem0517 said:
Very kind! Thank you very much for your comments :).
pldennison:
Thank you for providing the info on humanism! Some time this weekend I hope to find my Humanist Manifest and post more specifics.
I will have to continue later, but I will try to get to the rest of the posts later this weekend!
Night all 
A brief portion of our exchange:
You appear to be missing some of the subtleties in what I wrote, so allow me to spell it out for you: The “mold” I was speaking of is what you describe as “coming to Christ” in the 30+ pages of “Christianity and love” (of which I read every word, IIRC, at a great cost in time that I could have spent far more productively engaging in some activty such as training my four-year-old up in the way that she should grow – faithful acolyte of the Invisible Pink Unicorn).
Allow me to clarify a couple of terms, so as to avoid confusion: “salvation,” the way I am using it, does not refer to avoiding our just punishment for sin; it refers to forging our relationship with the Divine in the Universe. And “Divine,” the way I am using the word does not refer exclusively to the Judeo/Christian idea of God or Jesus Christ; it refers to the spark of life which seperates living matter from non-living matter, creativity from chaos, activeness from passivity.
This is all I should have to say on the subject, and I’m not likely to return to this discussion unless I see something compelling, an eventuality I do not expect to encounter. So, I’m signing off, and reiterating my previous blessing to you: Get a life, and may it be surrounded and filled with persons of love and good will.
:::snort::: Yes, let’s by all means base our public policy on the overwhelming success that is post-Communist Russia. Just turning our public protection responsibilities from the police to the Mafia alone should save us millions in taxes.
Lib:
I took a look at the NCHS website at the CDC and couldn’t find any information on that. According to their site, “[Birth statistics are] based on birth records filed in state vital statistics offices and reported to CDC through the National Vital Statistics System.” So they wouldn’t have information (or don’t publish it) on pregnancies that do not result in births due to miscarriage or abortion, or in births which take place in a manner where statistics are not filed.
FriendofGod:
And despite that moral stigma, it still happened. I know more than a few people who managed to be born less than nine months after the wedding. My daughter comes immediately to mind. Neither was abortion unheard of in the past. My mother told me stories about the girls that she went to high school with who had abortions, one of which was self-inflicted. BTW, she graduated in 1959, what decade was it that you wanted to emulate? And you might have been looked down on by some people, sure, but there were also others who couldn’t wait to get to know you better.
Not inaccurate, biassed. And if the examples that I have found are any indication, terribly, terribly biassed.
Lessee, “Damaged Emotions”? That won’t fly. There have been damaged emotions for as long as anyone can remember. “Wounded people”? Ditto. “People being used for sex & not love”? You’ve no doubt heard of prostitution being referred to as ‘the oldest profession’? “Disease”? Well, AIDS is certainly newish, but syphillis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, et al are almost as old as mankind. So, do you have any others?
I thought as much.
And I had a young lady whose pregnancy was my responsibility. We discussed, wept, and ultimately decided that abortion was the best option. I felt terrible. Not that she had an abortion, but that I was responsible for her being in that position to begin with. Afterward, I volunteered at the Planned Parenthood clinic here in KC. I was an escort. I helped women get through the gauntlet of protesters. I watched young girls wind up in tears because they were being called “murderer” and “butcher”, all while attempting to procure reproductive services, not all of which were abortions. So, I’ll put my experience up against your friend from nine years ago. Please do not act (or speak) as if abortion is something done with no more thought than which brand of spaghetti sauce one might purchase. I can tell you from first hand experience that it most assuredly is not.
And I must apologize. I have been busy building and painting scenery since I said that I would read “She Said Yes”, and have not yet gotten around to doing so. I promise you that I will try and do so within the next week. Also, you are aware, are you not, that she said no such thing? I honestly don’t think that I will agree with it, but I will read it with an open mind.
pldennison has already spoken on this, rest assured that my opinion is the same as his.
Waste
Flick Lives!
As for abstinence till marriage being damaging, sheesh, just look around! Who needs a cite? Damaged emotions, wounded people, people getting married for sex and not love . . .
As for religion being damaging, sheesh, just look around! Who needs a cite? Damaged emotions, wounded people, wars of incredible destruction, abdication of responsibility and reason . . .
As for water being damaging, sheesh, just look around! Who needs a cite? Drowned people, people killed by floodwaters, people lost at sea . . . obviously we need to end our humanistic tolerance of this vile substance which is so damaging to people!
Thought you guys should know that this thread inspired me to start a BBQ Pit thread.