Yeah, I missed a big part of your point on that. But another part maybe I didn’t? Your post started out talking about norms against nonmarital sex. Then you jump from that to saying they’re norms against reproduction—which doesn’t sound right, religious people reproduce fine. And then you say (unless I’m missing something) that they’re based on hypocrisy, enabling other people to not follow these norms, which also doesn’t sound right.
Successful religions don’t suppress reproduction in practice. But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior, sometimes expressing overt disgust with sexuality. This creates a gradient of social rewards that aids group cohesion, but requires most people to be “imperfect” by design. An important failure mode is that some conscientious people try to fully internalize the explicit values, ending up with clinical symptoms of sexual aversion that persist even when officially sanctioned (e.g. in marriage).
But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior
I think we just disagree here. The Bible doesn’t say married people shouldn’t have sex, and no prominent Christians say that either. There are norms against nonmarital sex, and there are norms against priests having sex, but between these things you draw a connection and generalization to all people which doesn’t sound right to me.
OK, so we’ve got something like a factual disagreement. Here are some observations that would change my mind substantially:
Credible testimony from someone who’d previously been documented claiming that their variant of Christianity had inculcated in them an anti-sex attitude, that they’d been lying to normalize their non-culturally-conditioned aversion to sex.
An exposé demonstrating that many such prominently documented testimonies were fake and did not correspond to actual people making those claims.
I try to find the Christian bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex (e.g. Matthew 19:9-12, 1 Corinthians 7), and persistently fail to find them. Or someone persuasively explains that I’m idiosyncratically misinterpreting them, and I can’t find evidence of many people agreeing with me (e.g. those verses showing up when I do a Google search for “bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex”).
A methodologically careful cross-cultural survey demonstrates that this sort of well-attested sex-aversion isn’t more common in people raised in high-commitment Christian communities, than in people in other cultures with no such messages.
I don’t know about the Bible itself, but there’s a long and storied tradition of self mortification and denial of corporeity in general in medieval Christian doctrine and mysticism. If we want to be cute we could call that fandom, but after a couple thousand years of it it ends up being as important as the canon text itself.
For every person saying “religion gave me a hangup about sex” there will be another who says “religion led to me marrying younger” or “religion led me to have more kids in marriage”. The right question is whether religion leads to more anti-reproduction attitude on average, but I can’t see how that can be true when religious people have higher fertility.
This doesn’t seem to engage with the content of the post at all, or with my multiple corrections to your implausible misunderstandings, so I think this is a motivated pattern of misunderstanding and I’m done with your comments on this post.
There is text in the bible that strongly suggests the new testament set up celibacy as morally superior to sex within marriage. In practice, this mostly only one-shotted autists who got “yay bible” from their social group, and read the bible literally, but didn’t read enough of the bible to realize that it is a self-contradicting mess.
You can “un self contradict” the bible, maybe, with enough scholarship such that people who learn the right interpretative schemes can learn about how maybe Paul’s stuff shouldn’t be taken as seriously as the red text, and have all the “thoughtful scholars” interpret the mess in a useful and mostly non-contradictory way...
In real life, normies just pick and choose, mostly by copying the “pick and choose” choices of people who seem successful and useful as role models, and they don’t think too hard about which traditions they are following and why they’re following them… but the strong “generalized anti-sex attitudes” in the bible would make a classic example for Reason As Memetic Immune Disorder. They aren’t used there, but they easily could be.
Yeah, I missed a big part of your point on that. But another part maybe I didn’t? Your post started out talking about norms against nonmarital sex. Then you jump from that to saying they’re norms against reproduction—which doesn’t sound right, religious people reproduce fine. And then you say (unless I’m missing something) that they’re based on hypocrisy, enabling other people to not follow these norms, which also doesn’t sound right.
Successful religions don’t suppress reproduction in practice. But many do maintain an explicit approval hierarchy that ranks celibacy and sexual restraint above typical sexual behavior, sometimes expressing overt disgust with sexuality. This creates a gradient of social rewards that aids group cohesion, but requires most people to be “imperfect” by design. An important failure mode is that some conscientious people try to fully internalize the explicit values, ending up with clinical symptoms of sexual aversion that persist even when officially sanctioned (e.g. in marriage).
I think we just disagree here. The Bible doesn’t say married people shouldn’t have sex, and no prominent Christians say that either. There are norms against nonmarital sex, and there are norms against priests having sex, but between these things you draw a connection and generalization to all people which doesn’t sound right to me.
OK, so we’ve got something like a factual disagreement. Here are some observations that would change my mind substantially:
Credible testimony from someone who’d previously been documented claiming that their variant of Christianity had inculcated in them an anti-sex attitude, that they’d been lying to normalize their non-culturally-conditioned aversion to sex.
An exposé demonstrating that many such prominently documented testimonies were fake and did not correspond to actual people making those claims.
Examples of the sort of thing I mean:
I Took a Christian Virginity Pledge As a Child And It Nearly Destroyed My Life
Growing Up Evangelical Ruined Sex for Me
Overcoming Religious Sexual Shame
I try to find the Christian bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex (e.g. Matthew 19:9-12, 1 Corinthians 7), and persistently fail to find them. Or someone persuasively explains that I’m idiosyncratically misinterpreting them, and I can’t find evidence of many people agreeing with me (e.g. those verses showing up when I do a Google search for “bible passages saying it’s better never to marry or have sex”).
A methodologically careful cross-cultural survey demonstrates that this sort of well-attested sex-aversion isn’t more common in people raised in high-commitment Christian communities, than in people in other cultures with no such messages.
What would change your mind?
I don’t know about the Bible itself, but there’s a long and storied tradition of self mortification and denial of corporeity in general in medieval Christian doctrine and mysticism. If we want to be cute we could call that fandom, but after a couple thousand years of it it ends up being as important as the canon text itself.
For every person saying “religion gave me a hangup about sex” there will be another who says “religion led to me marrying younger” or “religion led me to have more kids in marriage”. The right question is whether religion leads to more anti-reproduction attitude on average, but I can’t see how that can be true when religious people have higher fertility.
This doesn’t seem to engage with the content of the post at all, or with my multiple corrections to your implausible misunderstandings, so I think this is a motivated pattern of misunderstanding and I’m done with your comments on this post.
There is text in the bible that strongly suggests the new testament set up celibacy as morally superior to sex within marriage. In practice, this mostly only one-shotted autists who got “yay bible” from their social group, and read the bible literally, but didn’t read enough of the bible to realize that it is a self-contradicting mess.
You can “un self contradict” the bible, maybe, with enough scholarship such that people who learn the right interpretative schemes can learn about how maybe Paul’s stuff shouldn’t be taken as seriously as the red text, and have all the “thoughtful scholars” interpret the mess in a useful and mostly non-contradictory way...
In real life, normies just pick and choose, mostly by copying the “pick and choose” choices of people who seem successful and useful as role models, and they don’t think too hard about which traditions they are following and why they’re following them… but the strong “generalized anti-sex attitudes” in the bible would make a classic example for Reason As Memetic Immune Disorder. They aren’t used there, but they easily could be.