Mormonism Manufactures Consequences for Sin

[_guy sajer]

[
Based on much research that I am aware of, this is a highly questionable statement.

You mean the few sources you pulled off google just recently, that you'd never seen before, and which you cherry picked to support your pre-determined position?

[_Runtu]

As to evidence that the Church's teachings on sexuality are free of "psychological and sociological consequences", of course they're not. Are they damaging in any way? Of course not.

There appears to be some reason to question this conclusion. Taken from another thread:

According to the article "Husband-wife Similarity in Response to Erotic Stimuli" (Journal of Personality, Vol. 43, Issue 3, p. 385-394), those with more restrictive, more negative, and more authoritarian views of sexuality are more aroused by pornographic stimuli. The article "Sexual Guilt and Religion" (The Family Coordinator, Vol. 28, Issue 3, p. 353-357) discusses a study showing that while sexual guilt is more influential than religion in predicting sexual attitudes and behavior, "the more frequently [people] attend church, the more likely they are to have high sexual guilt which interferes with their sexuality." In other words, religion can lead to sexual guilt, and sexual guilt can lead to unhealthy sexual behaviors such as compulsive masturbating and porn use.

But Guy, it's not the church causing the guilt, but the sinful members causing themselves to feel guilty. ;-)

[_Lucretia MacEvil]

[

It really would be a waste of effort to disprove that "premarital sexual activity comes free of psychological and sociological consequences" because nobody in their right mind would ever believe in such an absolute. I didn't hear KimberlyAnn say it either. Maybe instead you could present evidence that "the church's teachings on morality come free of psychological and sociological consequences," if that's what you believe.


Here is what Kimberly said:

There are multitudes of people who have safe premarital sex which does not result in any negative natural consequences, or at least none as damaging as the consequences manufactured by Mormonism

Based on much research that I am aware of, this is a highly questionable statement.

As to evidence that the Church's teachings on sexuality are free of "psychological and sociological consequences", of course they're not. Are they damaging in any way? Of course not. Don't have sex before marriage, wait for that one special person and save one's sexual expression for that unique and special relationship; honer one's covenants with God and keep his commandments, avoid the problems and tragedies associated with premarital sex (the perception of deep emotional bonding when none in reality (especially with regard to many males), exists, unwanted pregnancy, child poverty etc.), perceive one's sexuality as a divine gift and one's sexual expression with one's eternal companion as a sacrament to that special and sacred relationship, yes, damaging and destructive ideas to the Oprahworld, and even more so to the Kinseyworld in which we still live to this day. Kim Gandy will have none of it, any more than Betty Friedan or Helen Gurly Brown would have any of it. The sexual revolutionists of the Sixties and Seventies were doing nothing more than sacrificing the souls of future generations to their own generative organs; erecting a massive Lingam to the great god Playboy and his consort convenience abortion on demand. Oh, I'm not saying that the arguments have not been clever and oh so very sophisticated (and it was sophistication that was glorified in the Sixties and Seventies over both intellectual rigor and moral imagination), just that they lack just as much intellectual and moral substance as similar arguments would have lacked them in ancient Greece or Rome.

Okay then, thanks for admitting that Kimberly made no such absolute statement as you previously inferred.

Sex is totally subjective. Religion started using sex to its advantage long before the Mormons came along and they haven't really added anything to the argument, only prolonged the agony, so to speak ... If you've ever had sex yourself, you'll have to admit it's not such a big thing as religion makes it out to be. It doesn't change anyone's life all that much, only if one is preconditioned to take on underserved guilt. Preserving one's virginity doesn't have any benefit in and of itself, only if one is preconditioned to take on underserved virtue on its account. Do it or don't do it, but if you think not doing it is your salvation, or that doing it will free you, you're mistaken. Forget the extremists on both ends (GAs/feminists), just do it or don't do it, but get on with it.

[_Coggins7]

There appears to be some reason to question this conclusion. Taken from another thread:

According to the article "Husband-wife Similarity in Response to Erotic Stimuli" (Journal of Personality, Vol. 43, Issue 3, p. 385-394), those with more restrictive, more negative, and more authoritarian views of sexuality are more aroused by pornographic stimuli. The article "Sexual Guilt and Religion" (The Family Coordinator, Vol. 28, Issue 3, p. 353-357) discusses a study showing that while sexual guilt is more influential than religion in predicting sexual attitudes and behavior, "the more frequently [people] attend church, the more likely they are to have high sexual guilt which interferes with their sexuality." In other words, religion can lead to sexual guilt, and sexual guilt can lead to unhealthy sexual behaviors such as compulsive masturbating and porn use.

I won't even go into here, because of some present time constraints, the severe problems of using two obscure studies by personality theorists (let us not mince words when we mention that clinical psychology is a highly philosophical and plastic discipline easily molded to coincide with fashionable intellectual trends within the larger society, and has been bent to such ends for generations) while ignoring other data available that may tend to confute such claims. There is social science material to the contrary, you know.


This is so typically Liberal as to be both hysterical and numbingly predictable at the same time. Only a true, dyed in the wool social Leftist would make the claim that serious moral self discipline and moral imagination with regard to the proper exercise and use of our sexuality actually produces social and psychological pathology, as opposed to the rather pedestrian observation well backed by several generations of cultural experience, that it is the unrestrained expression of sexuality, deracinated of religiously grounded controls and demarcation lines, that creates both personal and social pathology as well as sexual dissatisfaction, which there is research to show is, overall, higher in healthy marriages than outside of that institution. In other words, church attendance doesn't increase the likelihood of compulsive masturbation and indulgence in pornography (as if Liberals are, in general, against that), but indulgence in masturbation and pornography increase the likelihood that such things will--well, be indulged in, and increases the likelihood that they will become pathological (and the prevelance of sexual addiction in modern western countries, especially the United States, is not indicative of church attendance (this idea is counterintuitive at very best, and has no precedent in any serious major social science study I am aware of. I say "serious" because social science has been wrong on so many occasions on so many issues that, admittedly, we could quote all the journal articles we like all we please to no avail, as there is little intellectual continuity from decade to decade on many issues to which the 'social sciences" are relevant) but of the deracination of human sexuality that took place during the late Sixties and Seventies.

In other words, personal and social pathology are created by the desacralization and trivialization of human sexuality, not by its delimitation and channeling within within the confines of the marriage covenant. The standard old self justificational leftwing nostrum that personal self control creates pychopathology (the underlying assumption being that human beings are rabid sexual animals festering with lust on a continual basis that if frustrated by Judeo/Christian moral boundaries simmers to the boiling point and than explodes in various psychological symptoms (hence, Huge Hefner's theory that war is caused by dried up old men who haven't been laid in a very long time)), is still with us, and wants to Trump the much more rational and historically grounded view that the development of personal self discipline in the areas of human appetites and passions tends, as one might expect if one is serous in its persuit and holds such values as important, toward precisely the restraint that is sought, and, as this study points out, tends towards other benefits that must be weighed against the overarching Liberal principle of orgasm at any cost.

www.heritage.org/research/family/Map_of_Religion.pdf

The very obvious and historically supported rejoinder to all this is that it is precisely the cutting loose of the sexual boat from the moorings of the sacred as well as from the idea that human sexuality is little more that the romantic or recreational business of two isolated individuals, and has no implications beyond those two (the larger community, its moral fabric, future generations etc.), that produced the inevitable psycho/social pathologies so pervasive in and indicative of the post Sixties world in which we live and its fundamental philosophical substrate, relativism.

[_SatanWasSetUp]

Think for a moment if you date in college and find a sweet partner that you engage in pre-marital sex and then your partner leaves you to find another partner for one reason or another. How would that make you feel

It depends. Did an angel with a flaming sword force him to take on a new sex partner? If so, I would expect the woman to allow her man to have as many sex partners as the lord allows, for they are given to him, and he is justified, for he can have sex with ten virgins and not commit adultery.

[_Coggins7]

Sex is totally subjective. Religion started using sex to its advantage long before the Mormons came along and they haven't really added anything to the argument, only prolonged the agony, so to speak ... If you've ever had sex yourself, you'll have to admit it's not such a big thing as religion makes it out to be. It doesn't change anyone's life all that much, only if one is preconditioned to take on underserved guilt. Preserving one's virginity doesn't have any benefit in and of itself, only if one is preconditioned to take on underserved virtue on its account. Do it or don't do it, but if you think not doing it is your salvation, or that doing it will free you, you're mistaken. Forget the extremists on both ends (GAs/feminists), just do it or don't do it, but get on with it.

As I have pointed out in another post, deracination. Suffice it to say that your poor, truncated, and arctic view of human sexuality leaves me feeling roughly the same as after watching a kitten being run over by a ride-on lawn mower.

[_Coggins7]

You mean the few sources you pulled off google just recently, that you'd never seen before, and which you cherry picked to support your pre-determined position?

Typical leftwinger. Duck and cover.

If you can't or won't deal with the evidence at hand in an intellectually serious way, what are you doing debating the issue. You clearly cherry picked your own two obscure studies, and yet you won't so much as look at counter-evidence. With no documentation regarding the construction, protocols, or controls used in the study, or the prior assumptions or theoretical orientation of the psychologists who ran it, there is little here to go on. We can both go to our local university library and check out these studies ourselves, or subscribe to the website journals and read them there. I've linked to a huge cornucopia of analysis at Heritage and the Howard Center that are all copiously referenced. The fact of the matter is, that in plasticine disciplines like Clinical Psychology, counseling psychology, and personality theory, there are going to be very different interpretations of data over rather short time frames, and huge subjectivities in the collection and interpretation of raw data.

Typical. Perhaps you and Fort could pack up your little black bags of leftist shibboleths, load up your Prius, and head off to Baffin Bay to watch the ice caps melt. And say "hi" to the swimming Polar Bears when you see them chasing Al Gore back to his tobacco farm.

[_guy sajer]

There appears to be some reason to question this conclusion. Taken from another thread:

According to the article "Husband-wife Similarity in Response to Erotic Stimuli" (Journal of Personality, Vol. 43, Issue 3, p. 385-394), those with more restrictive, more negative, and more authoritarian views of sexuality are more aroused by pornographic stimuli. The article "Sexual Guilt and Religion" (The Family Coordinator, Vol. 28, Issue 3, p. 353-357) discusses a study showing that while sexual guilt is more influential than religion in predicting sexual attitudes and behavior, "the more frequently [people] attend church, the more likely they are to have high sexual guilt which interferes with their sexuality." In other words, religion can lead to sexual guilt, and sexual guilt can lead to unhealthy sexual behaviors such as compulsive masturbating and porn use.

I won't even go into here, because of some present time constraints, the severe problems of using two obscure studies by personality theorists (let us not mince words when we mention that clinical psychology is a highly philosophical and plastic discipline easily molded to coincide with fashionable intellectual trends within the larger society, and has been bent to such ends for generations) while ignoring other data available that may tend to confute such claims. There is social science material to the contrary, you know.

Coggins, I'm not ignoring other data. You'll note that I only said that these studies give reason to question what you've argued. I do not suggest that they are convincing nor that they Trump anything you've provided.

There's almost always social science evidence to the contrary. That's the precise point I was trying to make to you.

This is just something else to consider, that's all.

[_guy sajer]

You mean the few sources you pulled off google just recently, that you'd never seen before, and which you cherry picked to support your pre-determined position?

Typical leftwinger. Duck and cover.

If you can't or won't deal with the evidence at hand in an intellectually serious way, what are you doing debating the issue. You clearly cherry picked your own two obscure studies, and yet you won't so much as look at counter-evidence. With no documentation regarding the construction, protocols, or controls used in the study, or the prior assumptions or theoretical orientation of the psychologists who ran it, there is little here to go on. We can both go to our local university library and check out these studies ourselves, or subscribe to the website journals and read them there. I've linked to a huge cornucopia of analysis at Heritage and the Howard Center that are all copiously referenced. The fact of the matter is, that in plasticine disciplines like Clinical Psychology, counseling psychology, and personality theory, there are going to be very different interpretations of data over rather short time frames, and huge subjectivities in the collection and interpretation of raw data.

Typical. Perhaps you and Fort could pack up your little black bags of leftist shibboleths, load up your Prius, and head off to Baffin Bay to watch the ice caps melt. And say "hi" to the swimming Polar Bears when you see them chasing Al Gore back to his tobacco farm.

Coggins, you call me a liberal, yet here are my positions on issues sure to be near and dear to you (though only generally stated):

1. I oppose abortion (though content to let Rowe v. Wade stand, although again I favor parental notification laws)
2. I am fiscally conservative and distrustful of large government; I prefer balanced budgets to deficits
3. I ardently support capitalism, not only because it promotes growth better than any other economic system, but because I also believe in economic freedom
4. I will vote Republican if I judge the candidate better than the Democrat
5. I think political correctness goes to silly extremes; and I believe offensive speech should be protected
6. If it's Hillary vs. Mitt, as of now, I'd probably vote for Mitt.
7. I believe in globalism and free trade; I generally oppose trade restrictions
8. I believe the tax burden to be too high and would like to see it reduced and the system simplified

I could go on, but I think you'll see that I do not fit in your image of a "typical" liberal, so do us both a favor and quit pigeon-holing me into your cartoonish liberal stereotype, which clearly does not apply across the board to me (and I'm guessing to most of your opponents on this board)

[_Mister Scratch]

You mean the few sources you pulled off google just recently, that you'd never seen before, and which you cherry picked to support your pre-determined position?

Typical leftwinger. Duck and cover.

If you can't or won't deal with the evidence at hand in an intellectually serious way, what are you doing debating the issue. You clearly cherry picked your own two obscure studies, and yet you won't so much as look at counter-evidence. With no documentation regarding the construction, protocols, or controls used in the study, or the prior assumptions or theoretical orientation of the psychologists who ran it, there is little here to go on. We can both go to our local university library and check out these studies ourselves, or subscribe to the website journals and read them there. I've linked to a huge cornucopia of analysis at Heritage and the Howard Center that are all copiously referenced. The fact of the matter is, that in plasticine disciplines like Clinical Psychology, counseling psychology, and personality theory, there are going to be very different interpretations of data over rather short time frames, and huge subjectivities in the collection and interpretation of raw data.

Typical. Perhaps you and Fort could pack up your little black bags of leftist shibboleths, load up your Prius, and head off to Baffin Bay to watch the ice caps melt. And say "hi" to the swimming Polar Bears when you see them chasing Al Gore back to his tobacco farm.

Sorry, Loran (does anyone else hear the sound of "Dueling Banjos" wafting through the air?), but Guy is correct. Your source that you cited seems awfully lame indeed. Researchers from Argentina? Does this mean that is I pull up stats from, say, Brazil, or the Netherlands, or some other sexually liberal place, that they will fly with an armchair-hayseed "scholar" such as yourself? You harangue KimberlyAnn for pulling up stats, and yet try to pull the same tendentious crap yourself? Ah. I see..

At least you've got this:

THE PROBLEM OF COHABITATION

"If the family trends of recent decades are extended into the future,
the result will not only be a growing uncertainty within marriage, but
the gradual elimination of marriage in favor of casual liaisons,
oriented to adult expressiveness and self-fulfillment. The problem
with this scenario is that children will be harmed, adults probably no
happier, and the social order could collapse."

- David Popenoe in Promises to Keep.

Poponoe, at least, is a half-way credible scholar. Unlike you, however, he knows how to carefully choose his words. For example, he says "the social order could collapse," as opposed to you, who just assumes that it will. Do you not know a slippery slope argument when you see one, my dear friend?

Check this out:

The trend toward cohabitation and away from marriage is unprecedented. "Never before in Western history has it been acceptable for unmarried couples to live together," said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, on the front page of the Washington Post. "It was unacceptable a couple decades ago. It is acceptable now" (Stalcup 1997).

(emphasis added)

In other words, it is anybody's guess what will happen to "the social order." However, it seems we can be sure about one thing:

The issue becomes even more difficult for ministry when cohabitation precedes marriage.

No wonder you hate cohabitation/premarital sex so much: it makes thing 'difficult' for your "most precious and dear and sacred" Church.