Well I'm going to get slaughtered here but I have to try at least to clarify what I mean on this thread against another kind of misunderstanding.
To Faith respect for onesself may mean not masturbating or having sex with a person unless one is in love and has gotten married. To you it may allow for masturbation and sex with another when that a person is in love and is certain of an egalitarian and commited relationship whether in marriage or not. To me it may mean masturbation as well as sex whether in a serious relationship or not, as long as one treats one's partners with honesty and courtesy. There is absolutely no objective way to judge one as right and having one's kids taught the other's position might very well be offensive.
Is a homosexual relationship healthy or respectful? Well based on objective measurements of a variety of illnesses and problems (which is like what you are doing with abs only education) it ISN'T. And certainly Faith would have a valid position to feel and want to teach her kids that it isn't healthy and it does not involve respect for onesself or one's partners.
My views of sex education are completely based on God's law as revealed in the Bible, and in some sense I only apply this law to Bible believers because they are the only ones who respect that law. However, since it is a universal law, it affects everyone equally.
Also, it is primarily not about health or self-respect, it's about living in accord with this law, a law that runs this universe -- and if you do that, as a consequence you will be blessed with health, and if you don't do that you can count on negative repercussions.
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This law is an objective universal law, it absolutely runs this universe we all live in. Therefore nobody anywhere is exempt from it. Therefore different cultural moral standards, and individual differences of opinion about what's healthy or respectful, as you are using those terms, are all just degrees of harmony with or deviations from the moral law that runs the universe, and mostly they're all variations on basic out-of-whackness with the law.
Heterosexual monogamy as spelled out in the Bible happens to be the standard of this moral law. Therefore the more extreme views of sexual permissiveness can only get you deeper into the abovementioned negative repercussions, which will catch up with a person later if not sooner. The Bible teaches that sexual sin is a sin against one's own body, so the form such negative repercussions are going to take with sexual sin is probably diseases of the body.
NOW, before you think I want everybody to adhere to this law, let me say that I know that is unrealistic. For starters, the Bible makes it clear we're all by nature sinners which means that we are by definition at odds with God and His universal moral law.
Nevertheless I want you all to KNOW about this law because it runs your life no less than it runs a Christian's life and maybe some of you will get smart and recognize it. Or not.
In any case the current attitude about sex ed as proposed on this thread by everybody except the couple of evangelicals here, is at odds with the moral law and an invitation to various forms and degrees of personal and cultural unpleasant repercussions. This is because the moral law doesn't just sit around taking note of violations, it operates by cause and effect the way physical laws do -- violations will get you slapped down one way or another.
I would also suggest that throughout history it appears that most cultures have formed their laws and standards about sex more or less on some intuited understanding of this law. Social science is always looking for instrumental reasons for moral standards, such as how they hold the family together or favor child protection and the like, and such reasons can be supposed to be involved easily enough, but the ultimate standard is the universal law, and if it is being respected there will be family order etc. When the law is violated, family breaks down, causing stresses and strains to individuals and various social institutions, sexual acting out of all kinds increases, sexual diseases proliferate, weirder and weirder sexual deviations may proliferate, etc., and ultimately a society will self-destruct.
SO monogamy, while not universal by any means, is pretty standard across cultures, and adultery and sexual promiscuity is pretty universally frowned upon. PLEASE GET IT, I AM NOT SAYING it doesn't exist or even that it is rare. FROWNED UPON does not mean there are no violations. Obviously every kind of sexual sin is common to the human race. Obviously. Prostitution is common. Homosexuality has been with us all the way back. Some societies have been polygamous and so on. Etc. etc etc. NEVERTHELESS cultural
STANDARDS AND MORES no matter how much they are violated -- GENERALLY favor the conservative arrangements, and to some extent do work to keep the society under some kind of restraint so that sexual acting-out doesn't bring the whole house down overnight.
What's NEW on planet Earth I dare say, is our current all-out permissiveness about sexual behavior. That the behavior has always existed everywhere is not the point. The point is that even where it was tacitly accepted it was never treated as right; it was never before wholeheartedly embraced by a culture as the right way to think about sex until the last few decades in the West.
The current way of thinking despises the idea of a universal morality, of a law to which all must submit; also despises the idea of cultural restraints, likes to interpret them as just the controlling tactics of a power elite, for instance, a religious power elite usually; condemns them as repressive, inhumane, unhealthy and so on. All these opinions have been expressed on this thread. These are the tenets of The Sexual Revolution. This is what I have been talking about.
It is the permissive tenets of the Sexual Revolution that are now running our sex ed classes. This philosophy says anything that turns you on is OK, is healthy, is good, as long as -- oh things like, as long as you are well informed about it, are respectful about it, don't impose it on anyone, are careful about health issues, and similar standards.
** All very wise standards within the permissive frame of reference, except for the fact that the frame of reference itself, the basic philosophy that everything sexual is OK according to one's own personal assessment, otherwise known as moral relativism, is the screwiest philosophy ever to come down the cultural pike, never before seen on planet earth AS THE OPERATING STANDARD FOR THE SOCIETY AT LARGE that I know of, and a sure recipe for cultural suicide.
So, this is what I mean when I say that abstinence-only is the only sane standard and the only thing a sane culture would teach its young, and why I haven't said a word about the specifics of other information that might also have to do with sex ed questions.
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I am sure there are all kinds of ways I can't imagine what I've said above is going to be misconstrued, and all I can say to anyone who feels inspired to respond is, please read carefully so there aren't too many wild misreadings and red herrings for me to deal with. If something isn't clear please ask.
* This edit is the latest of them all but belongs in this order. It got said in
Message 242, but it needs to be said here. On the cause-effect factor, sin leading to negative repercussions and obedience to the law leading to health, of course this isn't some simplistic one-to-one correlation that could be easily traced. We all sin in multiple ways all the time, and sex is only one of the moral areas involved. Also, we inherit sin and consequences in some fashion from our ancestors, about which we are not likely to know much if anything. Besides that, God may act to alter the normal playing-out of His law, to deal with a person in an individual way, though of course the law will be satisfied somehow or other eventually. And Jesus said sin is not always the cause of disease. So the picture is complex, and I merely mean to be making a general point: Long life and good health follow from being in harmony with God's law, and the reverse from disobedience to it. AND I believe the wise men of many cultures have known this much about the connection between health and morality.
** Edit: Here's another possible misunderstanding I'd like to try to catch in advance if I can. Abstinence is also taught as an option of course, within these relativist parameters, because the standard is whatever the individual thinks is right. In practice what this means is that abstinence is only respected as an individual attitude and not as a standard in itself. In practice sexual permissiveness is the guiding standard just because there is no absolute standard against it.
EDIT: Another angle that wasn't covered. The Law of course is not only about sexuality, I'm merely addressing that aspect of it because that's the topic of this thread. The Law can be stated as succinctly as the Ten Commandments, or reduced to Jesus' condensation, love to God and to neighbor; or it can be dealt with in great detail as Moses did in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and even that doesn't cover all its possible applications and interpretations by a long shot.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Edited by Faith, : Added note on scope of Law
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Edited by Faith, : To rearrange edits for order and clarity.
Edited by Faith, : grammar in last paragraph. Sigh.
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