A few weeks ago
@OrangeAfroMan made a comment that was not altogether atypical for him, but it got me thinking about something that I want to try running past this group.
Fro's comment was one of his usual tirades against religion and he scoffed at (I think it was directed at Christianity specifically but most religions agree on this) religious focus on sex.
I have little kids so it occurred to me that this might be analogous to the tale of Hansel and Gretl.
For the purpose of this discussion let's just set aside any religious beliefs that any of us may have and accept the atheistic premise that religion is totally false and no different from a Grimm Brothers Fairy Tale such as Hansel and Gretl. That way we are meeting Fro,
@betarhoalphadelta and the rest on their terms.
The analogy:
In Hansel and Gretl the children wander into the forest where they are captured by a cannibalistic witch who intends to fatten them up and eat them.
Now we all know that there aren't ACTUALLY cannibalistic witches residing in the forest. That said, I don't want my young children wandering off into the forest anyway because despite the lack of witches, there ARE dangers lurking in the forest. Some of these dangers are even lethal. If my kids wandered into the forest they could get killed by a wild animal, drown in a pond, or simply die of exposure if not found soon enough.
The witch in the Grimm Brothers story effectively stands in for these actual dangers and the story was told in part to keep kids from wandering into the forest where they might suffer from the actual dangers that the witch is meant to represent.
In other words, even though the witch isn't real, I still don't want my kids wandering into the forest.
So now I'll bring it back to Fro's comment. Maybe the religious focus on sex was never actually about sex so much as it was about raising the next generation.
We all know that being from a single-parent background has a massive detrimental impact on expected outcomes. Kids from single parent households are VASTLY more likely to be criminals, victims of crime, unemployed, incarcerated, addicted, etc.
Maybe the focus of most religions on sex was a lot like the Grimm Brothers focus on the witch.
Maybe a whole lot of societies figured out that single parent households were terrible building blocks for a successful society so they came up with "fairy tales" that demonized premarital sex simply to avoid single parent households.
We've effectively done away with the religion and discovered that there isn't REALLY a witch but without stopping to think that maybe the witch was just a stand-in for REAL dangers that are out there.
For thousands of years the "sinfulness" of non-marital sex helped to minimize single-parent households in sucessful societies all over the globe. Even if the "sinfulness" isn't real, there are still detrimental outcomes that we haven't come up with an alternative method to minimize.
