That was my immediate reaction upon reading the thread title.
I pit the article’s editor for deciding that AIDS is no longer an acronym.
Moving right along:
In that case the husband is already not a good Catholic, so using condoms won’t matter one whit. It becomes his responsibility to save her life, not the church’s.
Why, in an organization that believes in an eternal afterlife which is determined by actions in a relatively short stay here on Earth, do followers even care whether God allows them to become terminally ill if they follow the rules?
Distribution of blight is their God’s business, obedience theirs. Why should a Catholic care if they get AIDS, even from an unfaithful spouse, if the alternative (using a condom) means someone goes to Hell?
The Church should really just baptise babies and then dash their brains out. It would absolutely assure that their souls entered heaven.
You are not understanding the question – what would the Church say to her over this? Insist he use a condom to protect her, or get a divorce, or have faith that god will protect her?
My WAG is that the church would probably counsel her to just stop having any sex at all.
In any case, knowing what she knows, he has already abrogated his responsibility to protect her. It is her responsibility to protect herself.
That’s too over the top. Better to fill their heads with rubbish, a bit at a time.
Indeed, why even take cover in a lightning storm, or evacuate from a hurricance?
Because, in their secret heart of hearts, many of them think, “What if the church is wrong?” Many of them would never say this aloud.
For the unquestioning faithful, well – they’ve been meaning to do some soul maintenance and repair, and just haven’t got to it yet. They haven’t atoned enough yet (they never will).
And take as much of their money as possible. Babies don’t have much moolah.
One of my Halloween costumes is Father Krang, of the Klingon Catholic Church (combining Priest costume with Klingon costume). My/His motto is “Repent and Die”. This is the highest form of Catholic conversion. You get them to repent of their sins, then you kill them, so that they cannot revert to their sinful ways or renounce their conversion.
Someday I’ll find a really scary Klingon Nun for a companion.
Thing is, I was reading an essay by Bertrand Russell the other day and he claimed that Spanish missionaries did exactly this in 1700’s South America. I don’t know if it’s true, though.
Well, you didn’t ask the question, so my understanding or misunderstanding of it is not your call.
SnakesCatsLady asked about condom use in the case of an unfaithful Catholic husband, and seemed to assume/imply that neither party (the husband or the wife) would be using them because of their faith. My reply was that he should be using condoms when he cheats, and that his being Catholic is a moot point because otherwise he wouldn’t be cheating in the first place.
Possibly; I’ll even grant you probably. But what does that have to do with the question that was asked? And how does it relate to the church preferring that people die rather than use condoms?
So now she knows about the cheating, but is still sleeping with her husband? :dubious:
But then they wouldn’t last long; rather like that sect ( the Shakers ? ) that forbade all sex whatsoever.
There’s a rather Darwinian selection process going on here. The fundamental beliefs of religions, including Catholicism, are so insane, so divorced from reality that actually following them inevitably leads to disaster. A modern, civilized culture functions as a modern, civilized culture only to the extent that is willing to ignore the dictates of it’s religions. No matter how much lip service it pays to them.
Hard to argue with the first point, actually. The other two are definitely batshit-insane, though, yeah.
What, no picture? I’m dying to see this.
And yes, Der Trihs, it was (is?) the Shakers. They didn’t do too badly back when there were droves of orphans that could be adopted.
Since it doesn’t work, it’s easy to argue against. People simply won’t do it. It’s like claiming that the “best” way to combat colds is for everyone to stay all cold season in solitary rooms and only contact other people electronically the whole time. Sure, it would stop colds, but people simply won’t do that.
In order for something to be the best solution, it has to have a chance of people actually doing it. Abstention fails this test.
Yeah, that was the Shakers. Though to say that they died out because of the ban on sex is simplistic, and doesn’t explain how the sect survived for almost 150 years before beginning it’s terminal decline.
The Shakers got their members through recruitment and conversion of people coming through one of their main missions/charitable works: Their orphanages. The general concensus I’d gotten when I did some research into the sect was that their orphanages were considered by both outside observers, and some of the few first person accounts of people who grew up in them without then joining the sect, to have been very well-run, and humane institutions. (Note: Not all former Shaker raised children agreed with this view, of course.) Especially compared to the secular standards of the day.
The two things that really made the continued growth of the Shakers unsustainable, and lead to their current near-extinction (According to Wikipeidia there are four living Shakers in their community in Maine.) were the fact that once mortality of young parents, a problem that had lead to the large numbers of orphans the Shakers relied upon for their recruitment, declined with health advances and improved working conditions. The other thing was that the economic factors that allowed them to live in abundance while remaining essentially seperate from the larger world around them were also diminishing. More than one history I’d read made the point that once the Shakers were unable to produce things like clothing for less than ordering it from the outside world, their isolation (never an absolute thing) was doomed.
So, talking about their ban on sex as the sole cause of their decline is simplistic - they had a system that worked, for a good while. But in the end, they couldn’t adapt their methods to changing realities.
Personally, I’ve always liked, and agreed with, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s comment about the Shakers, I can’t find the exact wording, now, but the gist was: Were it not for their peculiar attitudes towards reproduction a person could do far worse than to join the Shakers.
I grant you it’s damning with faint praise, but it sums up my feelings precisely of a sect where they had things like “Winter Shakers” - whole families (gengerally of migrant farm workers) who would ‘convert’ for the winter, for shelter and food, then leave come spring and better working conditions - and apparantly kept welcoming back these people annually.
Well, look, yes it does work. There are people who have made the choice to abstain and have done so successfully (in the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t make that choice myself 
), but people can do it. To say people simply **won’t ** abstain is preposterous.
How then do you explain the empirically observed fact that people, on the whole, generally do not abstain, and are indeed highly unwilling to abstain? Is this not the very definition of “won’t abstain”?
Some people will abstain from sex until lifelong monogamous marriage or such things, sure. People as a whole? They won’t. Never will.
People, as a population, will not willingly abstain from sex. This isn’t preposterous, it’s well recorded fact. There are, indeed, some individuals who can live with celibacy. They are a tiny minority in any population, and arguably would have been celibate wether or not they had been instructed to do so. The vast majority of people are going to fuck no matter what. If you disbelieve me, take a look at rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs when abstinence-only sex education is introduced to a community. Without exception, they increase. Because abstinence-only sex education doesn’t stop anyone from having sex. It just keeps them ignorant about how to have safe sex.
So we can agree that some people do. That means people can. That’s all. Like I said, not something I wanna do myself, but it’s doable.