[evman150]

Originally Posted by flamesfever

That's fine for a group of nomad humans, living in a hostile environment. However, as the population increases, I believe you have to have more structure in society to create stability, and religion has provided most of that structure to date.


I believe the sexually liberal society which has been influenced by the sexual revolution, of which pornography (particularly hard core) is a part, is not going to cause the downfall of humanity, however I believe it is a contributing factor in many of the problems in todays society. Some of the changes I see are:

- the tendendy of the young to form uncommitted commonlaw relationships in spite of potential legal, emotional, and childbirth hazards.

- increase in teen pregnancies

- increase in fatherless children

- increase in number of grandparents raising children

- virginity looked down upon

- increase in sex during first date

- reducing the sanctity of marriage

- increase in std's. etc.

I believe Western Society is starting to suffer to a degree because of the relaxation is basic ethics and morals that guide society. As evidenced not only in changes in the family, but also in business etc.

It's not easy to pin point the causes and how they all relate to each other. I believe it's the complex interpay of rising population, rising affluence, sexual attitudes, drugs, advances in technology, movement away from religion, etc.

In my opinion, there has never been a more important time in our history where society is more in need of the morals and ethics that come from religion and other sources. I think without the ability of humans to find some way of periodically recalibrating their moral and ethical compasses, they have a tendency to drift off course.

I can fully appreciate all the problems caused in the name of religion today, but to ignore or discount all the good it has done, and abandon it altogether is akin to "throwing out the baby with the bath water". I believe the answer is to participate in it, and influence the changes that bring it up to date, so that it can provide a more positive and guiding influence in society.

I'm late to this thread, so I apologize if this posting misses the mark, but your post reminded me of this:

Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence
James W. Prescott, Neuropsychologist
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, p. 10, November, 1975.

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"The neuro-psychologist, James W. Prescott, has performed a startling cross-cultural analysis of 400 pre-industrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop non-violent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals that have been deprived — at least during one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence — of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion, and individual displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torture and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.

We do not understand human behavior well enough to be sure of the mechanisms underlying these relationships, although we can conjecture. But the correlations are significant. Prescott writes: “The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity.”