{"id":2675,"date":"2009-01-03T22:35:46","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T03:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=2675"},"modified":"2009-01-04T08:21:27","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T13:21:27","slug":"there-can-be-no-morality-without-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/2675","title":{"rendered":"There Can Be No Morality Without Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via KOS&#8230;A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/effectmeasure\/2009\/01\/what_else_did_you_expect_from.php\"><em>What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers?<\/em><\/a> &nbsp; Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That&#8217;s how the species survives. Maybe you don&#8217;t want them to have sex and maybe they even promise they won&#8217;t, but biology is more powerful than parents or governments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Or even&#8230;religious dogmas.&nbsp; Like those that insist evolution is nonsense because it contradicts the biblical story of creation&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A study published in the journal <em>Pediatrics<\/em> followed 289 teenagers who said in 1996 they took a virginity pledge and compared them with 645 non-pledgers, taking into account religious beliefs and attitudes to sex and birth control. This was done because previous studies didn&#8217;t factor in the possibility that teens who pledge may be quite different characteristics that affect sexual behavior than those who don&#8217;t. So this was an attempt to compare &quot;like with like,&quot; the main difference being that one group had promised not to have sex while the other didn&#8217;t. &quot;Virginity pledges&quot; are a prominent feature of the Bush administration&#8217;s abstinence only sex education programs that didn&#8217;t teach contraceptive practices.<\/p>\n<p>Five years after taking the pledge:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge<\/li>\n<li>Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors<\/li>\n<li>Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex (Jennifer Warner, WebMD News)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There was one significant difference between the pledge and non-pledge group, however. They were less likely to use condoms or any form of birth control when they did have sex.<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t blame them. No one told them how.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing you need to notice about this: Eighty-two percent of them denied ever having taken the pledge.&nbsp; Not that they broke the pledge and had sex anyway, but that they denied they&#8217;d made it.&nbsp; Eighty.&nbsp; Two.&nbsp; Percent.\n<\/p>\n<p>This is where fundamentalism finds its dead end.&nbsp; You can accept that the bible is literally true or you can accept the natural world as it really is but you can&#8217;t accept them both.&nbsp; Fundamentalism won&#8217;t have it.&nbsp; The simple, stark, finger of God writing it on the wall truth is this: fundamentalism corrupts its followers.&nbsp; It has to.&nbsp; When confronted by a fact, the honest thing to do, the <em>moral<\/em> thing, is knowledge it.&nbsp; But fundamentalism demands that you deny any fact that contradicts its own truths.&nbsp; What it instills in a person isn&#8217;t either a love or fear of god, but a casual acceptance of deception, first as a religious duty, then as a necessary part of every day life.&nbsp; See it in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District\">Alan Bonsell testifying under oath<\/a>  that he did not know where the money had been raised to donate sixty copies of <em>Of Pandas and People<\/em> to his school&#8217;s library.&nbsp; See it in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boxturtlebulletin.com\/2008\/12\/29\/7702\">Proposition 8 advertisements<\/a>  that claimed same sex marriage would result in the forcing of churches to marry homosexuals.&nbsp; See it in the eighty-two percent of teenagers in that study who denied they&#8217;d ever taken a virginity pledge.&nbsp; Their religion didn&#8217;t change their sexual behavior.&nbsp; It didn&#8217;t make them more moral.&nbsp; It made them less likely to use condoms, more likely to catch and spread VD, more likely to get each other pregnant, and more willing to lie.&nbsp; What their religion did for them in short, was take away their brakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via KOS&#8230;A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers? &nbsp; Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior&#8230; Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That&#8217;s how the species [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,1],"tags":[13,54,70,12],"class_list":["post-2675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thumping-my-pulpit","category-uncategorized","tag-religion","tag-sex","tag-sexuality","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}