re: #30 Obdicut

The phrase “pretty common strain in all religions” is incoherent. It’s a common strain in religion, but control over the family level is in no way reserved for religion. Eugenics programs were popular in Europe for quite a long time— Sweden closing theirs down only in the ’70s. Sterilization of Roma women still occurs in Eastern Europe. And obviously, China’s “One child per family” doctrine was a gigantic assertion of control over the family.

In addition, there are plenty of major religions that don’t really have much to say about a maximum reproductive throughput, besides a “Kids are cool” statement.

I think that the more common strain is an attitude towards women of control and making them second-class citizens, and I think that stems from the time period in which most religions arose— during extremely mysogynistic and patriarchal times. I think that the control over reproduction is, in general, a side-effect of the treatment of women. But again, this isn’t true for all religions, mostly just the highly socially conservative ones.

Never said it was restricted to the church, either. That’s two folks trying to put words in my mouth. The fact that secular organizations can assert similar levels of mind-bendigly awful control over human sexuality does not preclude an observation that most religions tend to have such a strain as well.

Neither does it imply I think all religious people have the same crazy control issues that their churches do.

If you’re like me, you simply see most religions as fundamentally secular institutions with a vested interest in asserting the greatest deal of power and control over their “citizens” as possible. It doesn’t make them fundamentally worse people or anything. It’s just a useful way to help explain why there’s such crazy seemingly hypocritical logic around the abortion issue.