The Sexual Revolution and the Do-Nothing Church

Article here. Interesting to read a POV written from this one. Personally I am not religious at all but some readers may be and find this worthwhile. Excerpt:

'But today the church faces a new and more existential crisis. The threat once again is political ideology, and historically it grew out of socialism and communism and bears many affinities with them. But the new ideology strikes at the heart of the church itself and directly confronts its core mission. While it involves social and political issues that convulse the wider secular society, it also directly attacks and perverts the ministry of the church, specifically marriage, and attempts not merely to neutralize but to usurp the church’s own essential domain of sexual morality. This is not an external evil that the church fails to confront. Like AIDS, it attacks the church’s own defenses and undermines its strength from within.

I am referring to the new radical political ideology that uses sexuality as a claim to political power. While this ideology encompasses much more than marriage (and it began long before same-sex “marriage”), it began its bid for power by attacking and neutering this essential ministry (for some a sacrament) of the church. The church’s first failure therefore was to ignore not an external secular evil—though many secular evils did follow—but an attack on itself that left it helpless in the larger war. The church was hobbled before the war began.

Like all political ideologies, this one also makes claims to control and exercise state power. As such, it should be precipitating another of those perennial clashes of jurisdiction between church and state that have formed defining moments in Western history. But this time the church has conspicuously failed to rise to the challenge. So far, it has produced no Ambrose, Becket, Stanislaus, Fisher, Mindszenty, Wurmbrand, or John Paul. Indeed, the church threw in the towel before the contest started.'

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My take on religion and society. I'm atheist, it took me awhile to get to that. My family is non-religious, however, I was sent to a private Christian school which had a huge influence on me (my parents sent me and my brother there for their educational program), I even taught Sunday school at one time. Although my parents don't practice any religion, because they were strict, many of my friends mistook them for religious people.

Now about morality. People usually categorize something as "immoral" if behavior harms another person, one's self or if it harms society. Although most debate about morality and harming society comes from wether individuals have any moral obligation to do what is best for society, because that often infringes on individual behavior. An example would be recreational drug use. Is getting high immoral? Most religious people would say "yes", most atheist would say "no"

Religious laws usually inhibits behavior that harms society. As an atheist I have tried to join atheist discussions, but they are very pro recreational drug use, pro "sex positive" and pro-abortion. Many atheist see no value in inhibiting this behavior as they are so used to thinking of it as religious control which they are trying to break away from.

I could go on and on, as morality is an intriguing subjects to me, but what it gets down to is, that a healthy society is made up of healthy families. Promiscuous (or "sex positive") women do nothing to promote healthy families, in fact they inhibit it (look at the ghettos). Drug use also destroys families.

Religion has survived for so long because religious people tend to have healthier families. Now, if atheists could get behind living with moral rules like the ten commandments, not because a God tells you to, but because the rules make for a healthier society, then they could overcome (or outbreed) the religious population.

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Your take is entirely reasonable. I draw a distinction between ethics and morality in that ethics is morality based on reason, reason that starts at one or more assertions around purpose or value, since any judgments derived from reason must start from a baseline out of which you can derive conclusions. Morality is or can be arbitrary, ie, w/out an assertion or set thereof based on a common or accepted value or values. Thus to condemn for example eating, say, bananas on any given Thursday, is a moral judgment so long as the judgment starts at an arbitrary reference point. But condemning murder, for example, by starting from the assertion that all human beings with scarce exception prefer to go on living rather than be killed and that ppl collectively refraining from murder furthers everyone's best interests is an ethical judgment. It can also be a moral one too if based on a different kind of assertion.

I feel public policies based on sound ethics are appropriate but ones based on arbitrary moral standards are not simply because morality is capricious and isn't well-justified when imposed. One can choose to assume his or her own moral code but can't defensibly impose it on others. They are free to judge others if they want to based on it, sure, but others are free to ignore those judgments if so inclined.

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