What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[paulpablo]

Well what if a child has abducted 14 babies and has locked them away in a shed someplace and they're going to starve to death unless you get the information out of him of where the babies are.  If I knew the child had this information I'd be willing to use violence to get the information out of him.
As for slavery, sometimes it's been preferable to take slaves rather than just kill people on the battlefield or leave them to die.

[robvalue]

I can't hope to cut through everything that's going on here, so I'm not even going to try! All I can say is it's very interesting to read. Much of Catholic doctrine is absolutely shocking to me.

I will say that "waiting to have to have sex until you're married" achieves nothing regarding reducing pregnancy at all. Even worse, it may cause people to get married earlier than they otherwise would (or at all) so they can have sex. Again, the marriage is irrelevant. It's an abstract social contract, which itself bears no more actual weight on the sexual behaviour of the people involved than an unmarried couple. It's legal aspects are mainly financial and to do with children and so on. It does nothing and says nothing about having children. It would be no different than telling someone to wait until they find their life partner.

So the less people have sex, the less children are had, yes. But telling people to wait until marriage (a) generally doesn't work (b) can lead to deceit, secret affairs and having to lie to those close to you and © can cause marriage just to have sex (d) telling people they can't do something under any circumstances, without giving them a demonstrable reason why, can just cause rebellion and for them to do exactly that. These are all serious problems. To be blunt, it's an incredible naive and demonstrably bad way to achieve the professed goal. However, contraception does reduce the number of pregnancies, and therefor the number of unwanted pregnancies, by a staggering amount. And this applies to marriage and outside marriage. It applies to people who have been told to wait until marriage but aren't going to. Classing this as immoral is a hugely damaging thought process all round, and highlights the danger of theologically dictated doctrines with no bearing on reality. It is strange you would support this (and other it seems) messages from the Old Testament which you so readily dismiss. I would be very interested to hear what exactly all the horrific stories in the OT are allegory for.

[pocaracas]

Rob... for a catholic marriage is much more than a social contract.
It is also on of their most cherished sacraments.
And you can never break a sacrament... that's why Henry VIII decided to dissociate himself from the catholics and start the church of England... remember?

[robvalue]

Sure But whatever it means to them, it is not stopping them having sex before marriage, on the whole, unless I'm misunderstanding the data. So it's not affecting their sexual activity in general, whatever else it may mean to people.

I suppose those people are not True Catholics™ that break it?

That is absolutely hilarious. I want to break god's laws, so I make a new religion. God goes, "Fair enough".

[Nope]

. I would be very interested to hear what exactly all the horrific stories in the OT are allegory for.

I would also. What possible lesson could we learn from some of the rules about rape in the bible?

[Crossless2.0]

I am of the opinion that this whole 'the OT stories are allegory' line of interpretation is just a transparent attempt to divert attention from the real scandal: that the Hellenized, largely Gentile church pulled the rug out from under the Jews, co-opted their holy book, spun it in ways that no observant Jew (including Jesus) could countenance, and made it all nothing but a pre-figuration of the Christian myth. It is literary and cultural high-jacking, nothing more, and it allows the Christian who adopts this tack to avoid having to answer for the obviously unsavory aspects of their god's character as exhibited in book after book.

This is what passes for honest Biblical exegesis in some Christian quarters. The intellectual dishonesty is disgusting.

[Mister Agenda]

Christians should discard the OT. The Jews seem to be the only people who can handle it, and they're still rather spotty.

[robvalue]

Sounds about right. The OT is a rampage of immorality, almost a "how not to do it" list. What anyone could possibly learn from it, except how to be a successful fascist dictator, I have no idea.

Town after town slaughtered, including babies and animals while the women are taken for sex slaves? This is an allegory for... erm... be in god's favour or else?

I don't know why Christians keep the OT. It seems like damning evidence against their God that they constantly have to excuse. But then, they like the handful of verses which support certain arbitrary concepts they want to keep so they have the keep the rest of the shit too.

[robvalue]

[Crossless2.0]

Well, they're stuck with it -- rather like an escaping convict is shackled to a slower inmate -- because of the so-called prophesies they have adopted as part of their founding myth. Take away the OT, for instance, and Matthew becomes a pile of incomprehensible garbage.