If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I’m not sure whether it’s true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.
The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call “men disrespecting women”.
Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.
Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean “keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts” then I won’t be able to convince you, because by respect I mean “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse.”
If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.
If you want to say Pope Paul VI’s prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse” seems wrong.
Do you really believe that’s Pope Paul VI definition?
I suppose if you were asking me “do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions” it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I’d bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of
I didn’t use the word “personal”. Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.
Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of “respecting women” get’s defined top-down.
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you
That’s not what I’m doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I’m reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.
It’s bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying.
It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.
Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the
reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.
I don’t see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers
Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the “cool people” within living memory. The RC’s still don’t respect
women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.
Do y’all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?
Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it’s moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it’s profanation and therefore gross/evil.
Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it’s a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it’s good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can’t see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.
(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)
I’d say “respect” for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.
It is not “respect” of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Sex aversion in cultures I’m most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don’t know if it’s because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it’s innate.
But that’s not quite my question. What I’m asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don’t feel it’s morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don’t think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they’re not fundamental bases.
And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It’s a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?
I’m not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.
Or interacial kisses?
No, that one’s easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place—impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.
Whereas I’d expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they’re nobler in the sack. (And two women can’t have sex, silly.)
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it’s a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.
I don’t know that there is a culture (other than some subcultures in the modern First World) who don’t consider sex sacred, though certainly there’s quite a gap between “Son, if you ever lust after another guy you’re going to Hell!” and “Son, if you don’t suck enough cock, you’ll lose your vital energy!”.
No, sacredness is way more specific. Sacred things are:
Special. They belong to their own sphere of sacred things apart from mundane ones.
Powerful. If you fuck with them, they will fuck you up.
Important. You care about them a lot.
Emotionally charged. This kinda follows from the above, but the stronger and more unusual emotions you add, the sacreder. Awe is sacred as balls.
Big. You can’t quite comprehend them; maybe there’s too much importance or power or emotion for you to handle, maybe they act unpredictably (because they’re people or something), maybe they’re inherently and magically mysterious.
A lot like your parents when you’re a little kid, really.
the prevalent culture is very much not to regard sex as sacred in that sense
That’s how that culture “wants” people to think (believe-in-belief) - because sex-in-itself has largely the “taboo” + “big” + “powerful” factors for it so people shrink from thinking too much about it; while the “importance” and the “emotional charge” factors are attached to the intersection of sex and romantic love/marriage/childbirth. Thinking about sex with those attachments is easier in such a culture than thinking about sex-in-itself.
Presumably to make sex without those latter attachments less desirable/less of a goal on a memetic level, but keep the overall cover of sacredness.
Sounds plausible/falsifiable enough within MixedNuts’ model, doesn’t it?
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
Now I don’t find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.
The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being “bad”, “gross” and “disgusting” or even outright “evil” by my peers. However, that’s only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don’t have real data.
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
I don’t think so. I think that everything vile, disgusting, and repugnant got normal, not just gay sex.
I say this from observation of people who have conditioned themselves for a politically correct lack of disgust reflex. They also have a non political lack of disgust reflex: Observe, for example the “no pressure” video, and the cannibalism video
I predict that you are also no longer disgusted by poop eating, cannibalism, or the malicious infliction of painful and destructive injury.
I predict that if you watch the “no pressure” video, or the cannibalism video, you will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Someone who quite genuinely does not find feminists disgusting, is likely to be sincerely astonished when lots of people who piously pretend that they do not find feminists disgusting react with outrage at the “no pressure” video.
Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example “date rape”, “marital rape”, and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.
Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.
The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.
(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)
According to the New Testament:
let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.
The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time,
And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today’s sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.
From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried “hypocrisy” after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.
If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I’m not sure whether it’s true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.
The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call “men disrespecting women”.
Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.
Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean “keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts” then I won’t be able to convince you, because by respect I mean “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse.”
Your welcome.
If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.
If you want to say Pope Paul VI’s prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse” seems wrong.
Do you really believe that’s Pope Paul VI definition?
I suppose if you were asking me “do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions” it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I’d bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.
I didn’t use the word “personal”. Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.
Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of “respecting women” get’s defined top-down.
That’s not what I’m doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I’m reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.
It’s bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying. It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.
Honestly, I think there’s a fairly tenable argument that all of those things have happened (not 4, but...).
I think the better objection is that there’s no causal connection between those things and birth control.
Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.
I don’t see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers
Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the “cool people” within living memory. The RC’s still don’t respect women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.
Do y’all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?
Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it’s moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it’s profanation and therefore gross/evil.
Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it’s a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it’s good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can’t see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.
(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)
I’d say “respect” for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.
It is not “respect” of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).
That’s the preaching-to-the-converted version. When preaching to the unconverted, more pragmatic arguments tend to be brought forward
Unwanted pregnancy would have been as disastrous as disease in the econiomcally constrained socieites of our ancestors. .
Or interacial kisses? Depends where y’all come from, I figure. Old chap.
Short answer: conditioning.
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Sex aversion in cultures I’m most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don’t know if it’s because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it’s innate.
But that’s not quite my question. What I’m asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don’t feel it’s morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don’t think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they’re not fundamental bases.
And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It’s a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?
I’m not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.
No, that one’s easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place—impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.
Whereas I’d expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they’re nobler in the sack. (And two women can’t have sex, silly.)
Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it’s a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.
Miswiring.
Is it? So sex isn;t sacred. it is just believed to be. By some people.
I don’t know that there is a culture (other than some subcultures in the modern First World) who don’t consider sex sacred, though certainly there’s quite a gap between “Son, if you ever lust after another guy you’re going to Hell!” and “Son, if you don’t suck enough cock, you’ll lose your vital energy!”.
Not sure what you mean by “sacred”. Almost everybody obsesses about it, positively or negatively. Is that sacredness?
No, sacredness is way more specific. Sacred things are:
Special. They belong to their own sphere of sacred things apart from mundane ones.
Powerful. If you fuck with them, they will fuck you up.
Important. You care about them a lot.
Emotionally charged. This kinda follows from the above, but the stronger and more unusual emotions you add, the sacreder. Awe is sacred as balls.
Big. You can’t quite comprehend them; maybe there’s too much importance or power or emotion for you to handle, maybe they act unpredictably (because they’re people or something), maybe they’re inherently and magically mysterious.
A lot like your parents when you’re a little kid, really.
Uh-huh. Where I come from, the prevalent culture is very much not to regard sex as sacred in that sense.
Attempt at explanation:
That’s how that culture “wants” people to think (believe-in-belief) - because sex-in-itself has largely the “taboo” + “big” + “powerful” factors for it so people shrink from thinking too much about it; while the “importance” and the “emotional charge” factors are attached to the intersection of sex and romantic love/marriage/childbirth. Thinking about sex with those attachments is easier in such a culture than thinking about sex-in-itself.
Presumably to make sex without those latter attachments less desirable/less of a goal on a memetic level, but keep the overall cover of sacredness.
Sounds plausible/falsifiable enough within MixedNuts’ model, doesn’t it?
You can rescue any theory with a furry of auxilliary hypotheses.
Fixed that for you.
I stand by this answer.
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
Now I don’t find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.
The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being “bad”, “gross” and “disgusting” or even outright “evil” by my peers. However, that’s only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don’t have real data.
I don’t think so. I think that everything vile, disgusting, and repugnant got normal, not just gay sex.
I say this from observation of people who have conditioned themselves for a politically correct lack of disgust reflex. They also have a non political lack of disgust reflex: Observe, for example the “no pressure” video, and the cannibalism video
I predict that you are also no longer disgusted by poop eating, cannibalism, or the malicious infliction of painful and destructive injury.
I predict that if you watch the “no pressure” video, or the cannibalism video, you will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Someone who quite genuinely does not find feminists disgusting, is likely to be sincerely astonished when lots of people who piously pretend that they do not find feminists disgusting react with outrage at the “no pressure” video.
Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example “date rape”, “marital rape”, and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.
Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.
The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.
(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)
According to the New Testament:
And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today’s sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.
From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried “hypocrisy” after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.
Are you quite sure that’s not being pro-consent?