re: #42 Obdicut

No, it’s that you expressed yourself badly.

Do you understand my point that religions originated in more archaic times? I mean, it’s very easy to find religions that don’t have such a strain, right, so it’s not a feature of religion itself, right?

I’m not like you, then.

Are you just uninterested in the whole ‘restriction of women’s rights’ thing I was saying? Most of the ‘control ’ exerted by religions over sexuality is over women, not men. In addition, there are a lot of other aspects you tend to find in religions that prohibit abortion which regulate women to second-class status. Isn’t that connection relevant?

No, I’m agreeing with it. =) Restriction of women’s rights IS the entire issue.

My observation was that WHY is restricting women’s rights so prevalent? Yes, it’s because most of these religions originated in ancient times. But per your own point, even relatively more modern, secular instances of such awfulness (i.e. Nazi eugenics) tend to rely on controlling female sexuality.

To me, that’s the kind of pattern that’s a head-scratcher. Why would both an ancient religious institution, and a modern secular one, both independently come to the same method of barbaric control? Why do religions across the globe that never communicated to one another all have rules and laws about sex as core tenants? Why not common rules about not wearing red on Thursdays? That seems awfully coincidental, wouldn’t you agree?

My theory is simply that if you want to assert the greatest deal of control over a populace, sex and reproduction is a really great way to do it. It’s a biological imperative, meaning it’s essentially a guaranteed eventuality, meaning by putting arbitrary rules around it, you get a great leverage point to assert additional control over people’s lives and families in a way that touches quite literally everyone on the planet. Female reproduction in particular is a tempting target because it meshes with most historical discrimination, but it could logically be either.

I’m not saying that religious folks are sexual control freaks. (Although as we’ve seen care of Charles, there’s certainly some, like our friend here!) Nor am I saying we would all be somehow better if religion were to go away. I’m not a naive, militant atheist who likes to throw around statements like “religion poisons everything.” Hitchens was right about a lot of things, but he was such a dick, it cancelled a lot of it out in my mind.

Rather, I don’t see religions as anything special — if you don’t believe in a divine backing to them, their behavior around social control and the tools they use to do it suddenly don’t seem all that different from the secular eugenics wackos.

That was the observation I was trying to make, and positing that it’s really the only way to “make sense” of many hyper-conservative religions’ internal consistency and hypocrisy issues around abortion, procreation, sex, sin, etc.