Help With Aids/Condom argument

[ConfusedTim]

Help With AIds/Condom Argument

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You tell me how this works coz i am confused? The Catholci Church tells people not to have sex outside marriage and only to have one partner. So people who do not listen to this message are they likely to listen to it when it says dont use a condom? Seriously, is that what you think?

It takes two people to have sexual intercourse but only one of them needs to have ignored the church’s teaching against sleeping around. The other may follow the church’s teaching on not sleeping around and not using a condom and still catch AIDS. It is then possible for that second person to pass AIDS to other people. What if a good AIDS-free, condom-free Catholic become a widow/widower and, not knowing they’ve got AIDS, marries another good Catholic? Without a condom the third Catholic gets AIDS. That’s just one possibilty off the top of my head

The first paragraph represnts my attempts to discuss whu condoms dont make a difference to AIDS. The second is a reposte from an atheist. How can i respond?

 

[DOShea]

First things first; neither the world nor the Catholic Church does, nor should, make its decisions or teachings to cater to the people who ignore the rules. Rather, it makes those judgments around the people who follow them.

Want a world example? Drunk driving laws. “Oh, how could I be responsible for that person’s death? I was drunk, without my full faculties.” Does that excuse fly in court? Do we, judicially, say, “Oh, that poor drunk. Why it would be unfair to hold him accountable because he was drunk.”

NO! We don’t do that. Why? Because there was a decision back before the “drunk at the murder scene” that bears consideration. The person got behind the wheel when drunk. The person wasn’t drunk at one point, and had full faculties, and elected to put himself in an impaired state without considering what stupid decisions he would make downstream of that act.

Now apply this to AIDS/condoms. The Church’s teachings (regarding all forms of birth control) are not there because of disease, they are there to make an affirmative statement about the sanctity of life. It just so happens the same thing that is disruptive to the natural reproductive process happens to provide some protection against the transmission of AIDS. So now proponents of birth control try to twist the situation around backwards and attempt to base the morality of the decision not on the original intent, but on the “oh-by-the-way” effect of the condom. In short, they are trying to say the morality of it rests on the protection of people who probably shouldn’t be having sex to begin with, forget completely about all that sanctity of life stuff.

Well the answer is a firm NO. God is not going to stop being holy so some AIDS-infected human can have sex and feel okay, and neither is anyone else who respects that holiness and seeks to become one with it. It would be the same as letting the drunk driver go free by placing the morality, the responsibility of his act on the contents of a bottle.

That seems harsh, I know, but that is the truth, like it or not.

 

[Bluegoat]

If something is wrong in and of itself, it doesn’t become right because of someone’s bad actions.

However, I think the condoms in areas with high rates of AIDS is a very difficult one for those people who find themselves powerless in sexual relationships. Unfortunatly, some of those immoral people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners will even invoke the Church’s rules against condoms, which is terribly hypocritical.

If I were a wife not in a position to refuse sex to my husband who I didn’t trust, I honestly don’t know what I would do.

 

[liquidpele]

First things first; neither the world nor the Catholic Church does, nor should, make its decisions or teachings to cater to the people who ignore the rules. Rather, it makes those judgments around the people who follow them.

I think that is too simplistic of a view. For instance, the united states was pretty much *founded * because enough people disagreed with the rules. Rules are usually there for a reason, but they’re not always efficient or even sensible. For rules to work, they must have grounding into the reality of the situation they attempt to effect.