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.
Okay... There might be a lot to unpack here. Note that a lot of this was based on thoughts I had inklings of, but were really crystallized by Yuval Harari's book
Sapiens. If you have not read that book, I absolutely recommend it. I can't say that more strongly. Read the book!
One of its key points is that underpinning modern society is humanity's ability to coalesce around shared myths. There are many of these myths. Human rights / civil rights. Money. Government. The Social Contract. Political parties. And, yes, religion.
Note that when I call religion a myth, it's akin to what I think CD always says: "All models are wrong. Some of them are useful." The word "myth" is triggering for some, because they think myths are false. But that's not true. Government exists. Money exists. But their power is only supported by the shared belief in the myth. Generally when those myths break down, things are bad. WRT money, think Weimar republic or Zimbabwe. Money is incredibly valuable and useful, until people don't believe it. Then it's worthless.
Also note that when I call religion a myth, that is NOT a statement on the existence or nonexistence of any supreme being we might call "God". Obviously you all know I don't believe in such a being. But I also can't definitively prove or disprove that. And in the end, it's irrelevant. And I mean that; it's irrelevant. The value of the myth is just as powerful whether there is a God or not. As long as enough people BELIEVE in the God and the myth, it can fulfill its intended purpose.
So let's think about the purpose. And this goes straight to your point about non-marital sex. Whether there's a God or not, religion has historically served a very critical purpose as it relates to setting the rules of a functional society. Like the Patton Oswalt example, the state of nature is that the biggest and the strongest can take whatever they want. You can't have a functional complex society if that is the governing myth. So we needed something else. It was a set of rules where most people kinda realized "if we all agree to do this, society works." And if you can enforce that with the reward of eternal bliss for conformity, and the threat of eternal damnation for non-conformity, well, that's a pretty powerful carrot and stick.
So, yes, I absolutely believe that a lot of what religion has to say about sex is trying to create rules that align with a successful and functional society. As you point out, there are MANY problems caused by single-parent households, and so religion would have an incentive to have rules that discourage that.
But, there can be some major problems when you involve humans who can shape that myth. Religion, corrupted by humans, is a way to make people rich and powerful. With religion, converting adults is hard. But indoctrinating youth is easy. So religion is a numbers game--if you can't convert others, might as well out-breed them. So anything that supports breeding is good; anything that gets in the way is bad.
So you have a conundrum trying to apply this in modern society. Single parents are bad, so you're against non-marital sex. But breeding is good, so you're against abortion (or anything similar, like publicly mandating insurance funding of birth control, as we see with the fights over Obamacare). It's a cognitive dissonance problem; someone shouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place, but now, she HAS to have the baby.
It gets messy. And given that the social order exists because of the myth, anything that threatens the myth is a threat to the social order and must be opposed. Gays and lesbians are non-conforming because they don't breed, so we have to do everything we can to discourage them. I think the whole issue with trans right now is almost that nobody knows what to do with them, but they are an even more extreme non-conformance, so they they are a threat to the social order and must be opposed.
The myth doesn't deal well with non-conformity. So the myth has to have built-in ways to discourage it. And we see that with religion, IMHO.
But the fact is that we can adjust the myths. We're adaptable. We can create new myths as we see fit. Or we can tweak or ignore old myths. But that's hard for people who are emotionally invested in the old myths, or those who are incentivized or benefity from the old myths. As it relates to religion, religion/myth is a core portion of most peoples
identity. When you threaten their religion/myth, you threaten their identity, and that is going to get a visceral and angry reaction. Which is, of course, what we see.
Human society exists because we've coalesced around shared myths. But it also creates dysfunction because people become attached to those myths and so change and conflict between competing myths causes discord.
And so we are where we are.
