"Peacekeeper" David
;)
At 12:08 PM 7/20/2006, you wrote:
Hmm.
On 7/20/06, Jim Guinee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
jim:
In find that conclusion ludicrous
paul:
Of course you do. But you're wrong.
jim:
Oh, thanks, that clears it up.
I'm wrong because you say I am.
No, you're wrong for the reasons I laid out carefully in my comments.
You're ignoring them. If I'd simply written "you're wrong" and left it
at that then your comment would be fair. But I explained my position,
and therefore your comment is not fair.
paul:
The underlying problem here is that you're simply assuming that what
religion promotes must be highly moral. That's not the case.
jim:
Once again I will point out that curtailing sex outside of marriage
diminishes so many social and health problems, something that no one can
refute but instead changes the argument to "well, we can't control
ourselves so forget about it"
Nonsense. That's not what happened here. Reread the thread - you're
misrepresenting it entirely. (see below, for my suggestion on how to
get back on track)
Shoddy LCD?
I don't find it shoddy that my religion exhorts me to cool it until I find
a woman that I then marry and then knock our socks off for the rest of our
marriage, creating a much higher probability that our kids will be wanted,
that our health won't be compromised, that I won't get some outside of
marriage and risk everything IN my marriage.
I could go on, but why bother?
Strawman argument.
I'm not making any personal remarks to anyone, unlike you are now doing.
I'm simply making some general arguments.
If people want to read something judgmental into what I say, that's not my
problem.
Not true. In an earlier post today you wrote (to me) "In other words,
let's not examine confounding variables because it might destroy your
ill-founded premise?". That's a false personal accusation, almost
certainly the result of your failure to read my comments.
You can bristle over the implicit message that you think I'm claiming a
higher moral ground here, and I can bristle over the implicit message that
embracing anything akin to fundamentalist religion makes me an idiot.
And in an earlier post to Nancy in which she referred to the religious
right as "oppressive" you wrote "At the risk of sounding like a pious
twit, religion is oppressive because religion exhorts you to be a
better version of yourself".
Jim, the problem here is that you've settled on what you assume must
be the state of mind of people who disagree with your assumptions, and
instead of reading what we're writing, you're responding to that
fictional person in your head. Then you're losing track of what you've
written yourself (the two examples I just cited), which results in you
digging a deeper hole.
One way out of this would be for me to help to start over here. It
seems that in this last paragraph you're suggesting that you do not
really believe that religion puts one on a higher moral ground. I read
you as saying that it does, and I still believe that was your intent,
at least implicitly, but I may have been wrong. Even if I wasn't, you
may have decided that you do not want to make that claim. Fair enough.
Obviously I do not believe it, and neither do at least some others
here, and it cannot serve as a base assumption for a discussion.
I also claim that your response here contains a strawman argument.
Discussions often get into useless spirals around these, so let's be
clear: I DO believe that it would be great if everyone could have a
wonderful, lasting marriage, and I do believe that if that were the
case, the benefits would easily outweigh the costs. I simply don't
believe that it is the case, and I don't see any evidence that anyone
is in a better position to guarantee those marriages. I also don't see
anyone here (or anywhere else, for that matter) arguing that good
marriage is bad, but I'll bet there are plenty of people here who'd
easily make the case that bad marriage is bad. <grin> Holding sex
hostage to marriage simply seems like a really risky idea - not only
for the reasons I've already given, but in addition because I think it
would promote even more bad marriage.
Paul Smith
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Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and Counseling
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
229-333-5620
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/dtwasieleski
"The only thing that ever made sense in my life
is the sound of my little girl laughing through the window on a summer night...
Just the sound of my little girl laughing
makes me happy just to be alive..."
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