How the sexual toxicity of the 1960s has harmed the Church

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niceatheist said:
People have been having sex since, well, forever, and have been doing it in ways that never fit with the Church’s often austere thinking. The 1960s wasn’t the invention of a sexual revolution, it was simply an acknowledgment that people have sex, and as it turns out, sometimes have it other than in the missionary position every second Wednesday at 7pm. And really, it’s not like boatloads of people suddenly started attending orgies in the late 1960s. Most people still got, and still do, find a mate, have kids, and go on with their lives. What is different is they don’t get to their pastor or rabbi anymore to find out if it’s okay to do on Tuesdays at lunch time.
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Is there any sex act that your morality proscribes? Incest? Bestiality? If so, why?
 
Well incest has some pretty practical reasons. Genetically, it’s a very bad idea, and usually it involves coercion if not outright sexual assault. Beastiality involves a party who cannot grant consent, so is also inherently wrong.

But this comes dangerously close to comparing, say, oral sex, group sex or homosexual acts to incest and beastiality. Is that the intent here?
 
edwest211 said:
A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.”
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Yes, they were able to do this because they changed the wording from abortion to “women’s healthcare”.
 
Here is an overview of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade.

Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973),[1] was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion, while also ruling that this right is not absolute and must be balanced against the government’s interests in protecting women’s health and protecting prenatal life.[2][3] The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: the Court ruled that during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother.[4] Because the Court classified the right to choose to have an abortion as “fundamental”, the decision required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the “strict scrutiny” standard, the highest level of judicial review.
 
niceatheist said:
Well incest has some pretty practical reasons. Genetically, it’s a very bad idea, and usually it involves coercion if not outright sexual assault. Beastiality involves a party who cannot grant consent, so is also inherently wrong.

But this comes dangerously close to comparing, say, oral sex, group sex or homosexual acts to incest and beastiality. Is that the intent here?
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No, my intent is not to criticize (yet) but to draw out the principles underlying the atheist’s moral code.

When we last exchanged ideas, the conversation ended without your reply to:
o_mlly said:
What principle argues that the Germans acted immorally [genocide] but the rapists of antiquity and the Middle Ages did not?
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We cannot argue productively until I understand the limits of your moral code expressed as principles.

My present understanding, which could be wrong, is:
  • There is no God.
  • There are no “oughts.”
  • Morality is subjective.
  • Every man is the master of his own moral code.
  • Man needs to live in community.
  • The community has moral principles with which the man does not agree.
  • The man does not submit to a morality that is not his own but only conforms in order to belong.
  • The man is free to do what he wants as long as he believes doing so will not cause expulsion.
  • The man works to break down the community’s moral code in order to increase his freedom of action.
As to incest, are all atheists in agreement, that is, incest is inherently wrong? Ditto bestiality.
 
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Can everyone at least agree that their generation is better than everyone elses.

I think an interesting exercise would be what good came out of my generation, and if the answer is I fixed the previous generations naivety then that is the wrong answer. What positive things are we doing as a legacy.
 
The baseline of morality back then taught that blacks were not entitled to the same rights as whites and that children of different races shouldn’t go to school together

It wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows back then. The 60s did bring some positive changes to our society
 
When did Martin Luther King, Jr. start the Civil Rights Movement? 1955. The 1960s brought exactly zero positive changes as far as sexual morality.

Destroy the family.
Deform the meaning of human sexuality and act on it. Talk about it to others as something good.
Smoke dope and use other illegal drugs like LSD, a dangerous hallucinogen.
 
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o_mlly said:
We cannot argue productively until I understand the limits of your moral code expressed as principles.

My present understanding, which could be wrong, is:
  • There is no God.
  • There are no “oughts.”
  • Morality is subjective.
  • Every man is the master of his own moral code.
  • Man needs to live in community.
  • The community has moral principles with which the man does not agree.
  • The man does not submit to a morality that is not his own but only conforms in order to belong.
  • The man is free to do what he wants as long as he believes doing so will not cause expulsion.
  • The man works to break down the community’s moral code in order to increase his freedom of action.
As to incest, are all atheists in agreement, that is, incest is inherently wrong? Ditto bestiality.
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If I may…

There is probably no God.
There are no oughts to be derived from the proposal that there may be a God.
Morality is subjective.
Everyone (not just men) are masters of their own moral code.
Man doesn’t need to live in a community (although it was helpful that he did when moral instincts were being evolved).
Communities do not have moral principles. Individuals do.
Anyone (not just men), by definition, cannot agree to a moral principle that is not their own.
People sometimes lie about their true position in order to fit in with any given community.
Anyone (not just men) is free to do whatever they like within the boudaries set by the community in which they live.
Some people (not just men) strive to change the consensus to better match their individual view (it’s called politics).

Your list was excessively simplistic. Mine a little less so. But a bit more explanatory. Each line could be argued individually with a certain amount of agreement and disagreement on both sides. Trying to reduce it to bullet points doesn’t really help.

And no-one can speak for all atheists. But as niceatheist said, there is a natural tendancy to avoid incest (thanks to evolution). Is it inherently wrong? No. And again, thanks to evolution for your automatic response to that. And sex requires two consenting participants, so bestiality is out.

I think you knew the answer to the last two anyway.
 
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edwest211 said:
When did Martin Luther King, Jr. start the Civil Rights Movement? 1955. The 1960s brought exactly zero positive changes as far as sexual morality.

Destroy the family.
Deform the meaning of human sexuality and act on it. Talk about it to others as something good.
Smoke dope and use other illegal drugs like LSD, a dangerous hallucinogen.
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Smoking dope is bad, but testing weapons by killing over a million people is something you are trying to justify?

What happened to communism after you lost in S E Asia? Still looking for an answer for your first proposal for that war.
 
I didn’t lose in Southeast Asia. Military planners were in charge. The course of the war was planned by a relatively small group of people who made certain decisions. I’m not trying to justify anything, just pointing out the facts.
 
o_mlly said:
My present understanding, which could be wrong, is:
  • There is no God.
  • There are no “oughts.”
  • Morality is subjective.
  • Every man is the master of his own moral code.
  • Man needs to live in community.
  • The community has moral principles with which the man does not agree.
  • The man does not submit to a morality that is not his own but only conforms in order to belong.
  • The man is free to do what he wants as long as he believes doing so will not cause expulsion.
  • The man works to break down the community’s moral code in order to increase his freedom of action.
As to incest, are all atheists in agreement, that is, incest is inherently wrong? Ditto bestiality.
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I think some of these points don’t hit my mark at all. I do not believe that every man creates his own moral code. Moral codes are the products of societies. Anyone who falls outside the morality of their society is either going to be censured or punished, depending upon the particular moral code and the severity with which they violate it. When I speak of subjective morals, I don’t mean that it’s just all made up willy-nilly, but that morals, like other aspects of culture are inherited by each individual from the society which they grow up in, and that they tend to change as part of a larger milieu of cultural evolution.

The only people who truly seem unhinged from the wider social mores are sociopaths. I will freely admit that my moral and ethical considerations are largely based on Judeao-Christian tradition. That is the society I grew up in, and by and large I accept the morality bequeathed to me. It’s just that those rules are not static, and have changed over time, by and large as a product of cultural evolution. You can’t just invent morals out of thin air, because if they don’t resonate with some significant fraction of the wider society, you will find yourself an outlier, and at risk of the social censure or punishments as I mention above.

If you look at gay rights, by the 1960s there was growing recognition that penalizing someone for something that is neither their fault, nor could be shown to be harmful either to themselves or those around them, was fundamentally unjust. Homosexuals do not have mental viruses that turn other people gay, when left to themselves and not harassed or marginalized, they can lead relatively normal lives. They don’t fit any of the parameters that would be viewed as a mental illness, and at least some of the higher rates of mental disorder can be attributed to how society has tended to treat them. Furthermore, the laws were applied so unequally. If you were healthy or of aristocratic heritage, you could conduct your sexual affairs quite safely, sometimes even openly, but if you were a homosexual without the advantages of wealth or birth, then the full force of the law and social censure came down on you.

So society’s views on homosexuals evolved. Even the Church, to some extent, carefully moderated its statements on homosexuals, so as not to demonize them for SSA.
 
edwest211 said:
I didn’t lose in Southeast Asia. Military planners were in charge. The course of the war was planned by a relatively small group of people who made certain decisions. I’m not trying to justify anything, just pointing out the facts.
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Yes you are trying to justify things. Each post is an attempt to do just that.

You said that it was justified because the US wanted to win to prevent the spread of communism. You specifically stated that. The US didn’t win and communism didn’t spread. Can you draw any conclusion from that other than it was an utter waste of lives? Still waiting for a response, Ed.

But you don’t want to admit that so then you change the reason to come up with a farcical suggestion that over a million people were killed so you could try out new weapons. An insult to everyone’s intelligence and an insult to all those who died.

And you ridicule those who were against it! A war, in your own words which was a complete waste of lives or one that was designed as a testing ground for weaponry. Which is a proposal, had it been suggested by any politician would be classed as morally bereft and debased.

And gee, the all time classic…‘it wasn’t my fault - it was military planners’. Planning what you have been trying to justify as a great idea. Whilst railing against Woodstock and women leaving the kitchens and smoking pot.

Hundreds of thousands dead and all you can complain about is Jimi Hendrix…
 
edwest211 said:
Meandering a bit are we?
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I’m highlighting your arguments. Your ideas. Your posts. Your examples. Expecting a response to any questions asked about their failures as reasonable proposals is a futile excercise. But I’ll keep asking them.

Your refusal to answer anything whatsoever stands as a testimony to your lack of conviction as to their worth.

For example, your suggestion that the US needed to win to stop the spread of communism. You lost yet it didn’t spread. By any reasonable assesment, however you felt about going into the war, that reason in itself proved to be invalid. And it was a reason that cost well over a million lives. Do you agree with that position? Or would you like to talk about sit coms and kitchens again?
 
More meandering. I didn’t lose anything. I do wonder how those military planners were viewed after the war wound down. Did they do what they set out to accomplish or were they seen as incompetent?
 
Let’s remember that by the time the US pulled out of Vietnam, Nixon and Mao had had their meeting. There was no singular “Communist” threat any more, and while China was no traditional US ally, it was closer to the US than it was to the USSR. With China as a vast eastern buffer to Soviet influence, Southeast Asia simply didn’t have the same strategic importance it had in the 1950s and 1960s. Vietnam certainly wasn’t worth the blood and bullets being thrown into it.
 
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Something that is not mentioned is that China tested its first atom bomb in October 1964. US Marines landed in March 1965. US Intelligence were monitoring the Chinese. That test changed everything.
 
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