RE: What IS good, and how do we determine it?
June 18, 2015 at 3:07 pm
(This post was last modified: June 18, 2015 at 3:09 pm by Pyrrho.)
(June 18, 2015 at 2:34 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(June 18, 2015 at 2:10 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: And this means that we need to reject the teachings of the Catholic Church. You yourself acknowledge that having so many children is a problem, and yet you support an organization that actively works to make the problem worse. Every time you put money in the offering plate, you are helping to pay for advertising and political activity that actively tries to make the problem worse, by trying to eliminate access to birth control and to tell people that it is immoral to use birth control. You should stop doing that, as your voluntary contribution works against what you know to be right.
I just want to address this real quick because it just seems to me as very far from the truth.
1. The Church teaches to save sex for marriage. This alone would cut down on a lot of pregnancies.
2. While the Church does teach married couples that they should not use contraception, she also teaches couples to be responsible when it comes to planning a family. And "no contraception" does not mean a husband and wife need to have a lot of kids. I avoided pregnancy for my first 4 years of marriage, and I used a fertility monitor for that. The Church provides many resources and establishments to teach people how to morally avoid pregnancy through fertility monitoring.
3. The Church also urges people to adopt children that are already existing rather than creating more through the means of IVF.
I feel like your blame on the Church is a little unfair here.
You are ignoring part of my post that dealt with such issues:
(June 18, 2015 at 2:10 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: ...
Now, you might want people to just stop having sex. But you know that is not realistic; people are going to have sex. And so we need to deal with this fact, rather than pretend otherwise. To have a solution for overpopulation, the solution must actually work. Otherwise, it is useless, and if it prevents actions that would work, it is worse than useless, it is then detrimental. Real problems need real solutions, not wishful thinking.
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Also, as noted by pocaracas already (see this and this), states with abstinence only kinds of sex education have the highest teen birth rates. So that is not working, and continuing with that will only lead to more teen pregnancies.
I am sure a lot of fathers of teenage girls would be happier if their daughters just would not have sex. But many teenage daughters do have sex anyway, and so that reality must be faced. Just telling people to not have sex does not stop them from having sex, and does nothing to help with overpopulation.
Continuing to push a failed policy is a very bad idea. As I stated previously, real problems need real solutions, not wishful thinking.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.