The truth is that the world was never family-friendly. I mean take for instance the life of 17th century Massachusetts judge, Samuel Sewall, which he recorded in his diary. Sewall started his diaries in 1674, a few years after he got out from Harvard.
Dead children form a grim garland around all the volumes of his diary. He fathers sons and daughters regularly, and as often as not they die in early childhood. The reader becomes accustomed to lyings-in and funerals coming within a few pages of each other.
On Monday, December 7, 1685: "About One in the Night my Wife is brought to Bed of a Son, of which Mother Hull brings me the first News: Mrs. Weeden Midwife." This was Henry, who would live for just fifteen days. Sewall describes his funeral on Christmas Eve, carefully listing the mourners and ceremonies.
The drama of Henry's birth and death is repeated over and over. A year later the baby is named Stephen; he survives for six months. Sewall's continual fatherings and buryings are eventually benumbing. There are too many to take in. It is only after his wife has delivered her fourteenth child, in January 1702, that Sewall ends an entry of thanksgiving with the words: "And it may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing."
The terrors of birth rival the terrors of the plague, measles and smallpox. One day, Sewall tells his eleven-year-old son Samuel that he should be ready to die from the smallpox, as nine-year-old Richard Dumer just has. Sam eats an apple as he listens, seeming "not much to mind" — until he says the Lord's Prayer his father prescribes and bursts into terrifying cries.
Dead children form a grim garland around all the volumes of his diary. He fathers sons and daughters regularly, and as often as not they die in early childhood. The reader becomes accustomed to lyings-in and funerals coming within a few pages of each other.
On Monday, December 7, 1685: "About One in the Night my Wife is brought to Bed of a Son, of which Mother Hull brings me the first News: Mrs. Weeden Midwife." This was Henry, who would live for just fifteen days. Sewall describes his funeral on Christmas Eve, carefully listing the mourners and ceremonies.
The drama of Henry's birth and death is repeated over and over. A year later the baby is named Stephen; he survives for six months. Sewall's continual fatherings and buryings are eventually benumbing. There are too many to take in. It is only after his wife has delivered her fourteenth child, in January 1702, that Sewall ends an entry of thanksgiving with the words: "And it may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing."
The terrors of birth rival the terrors of the plague, measles and smallpox. One day, Sewall tells his eleven-year-old son Samuel that he should be ready to die from the smallpox, as nine-year-old Richard Dumer just has. Sam eats an apple as he listens, seeming "not much to mind" — until he says the Lord's Prayer his father prescribes and bursts into terrifying cries.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
