(June 4, 2015 at 7:44 pm)Jenny A Wrote: Oh I think there's at least a little more to it than control of desires. Human sex is dangerous compared to that of other animals. Absent modern medicine the maternal fatality rate for pregnant women was quite high. Humans remain infants is need of care and training for much longer than other animals. In the absence of birth control or modern medicine, it's not surprising we worried more about sex. It just that established religions are inherently conservative and don't change with changing tech so easily.
Additionally, with the well known universal expansion of the Church (I mean Catholicism) and the mix between political and religious authorities it became a good way to control procreation and perhaps even incite people to be poor by having lots of children because in Catholicism (unlike some parts of the protestant work ethic) being poor is good because it means you'll go to heaven - It also means you are more ignorant and starving and don't have time to rebel against the pseudo-feudalist State (I say pseudo because arguably the State in the middle ages wasn't genuinely a State until the late theorizations done by Jean Bodin)
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you
