Comments on: Naughty and Nice

By: ExMoHoMoDon

ExMoHoMoDon — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:47:22 +0000

If one wonders how wicked our age is then only look at the idea that two consenting homosexual adults who have children would actually want the same legal rights that heterosexuals do!! The very idea! Good thing the Mormons are willing to spend millions of dollars and lots of effort to stop it. Oh the horror! Surely we must be in the last minutes of the last day….

By: Rosalynde Welch

Rosalynde Welch — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:11:00 +0000

wondering, your comment makes me think of Norbert Elias’s work “The Civilizing Process,” a history of early modern manners that traces advancing thresholds of shame around violence and sex. In the end he basically chalks it up to state formation, as I recall. Anyway, it speaks to the same observation.

I suppose one way to think about this problem is to what extent human nature is socially constructed. If anyone knows the answer to that question, please let me know.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:04:42 +0000

“anyone have a clue where Julie M. Smith stands on Methodism?”

/hangs head in shame

By: smb

smb — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:40:21 +0000

apropos the swinging of dead cats, Wiggers’ new Asbury biography suggests 18th-century Methodists were occasionally persecuted by people who struck them with dead cats. anyone have a clue where Julie M. Smith stands on Methodism?

By: Velska

Velska — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:09:27 +0000

If anything, I think that the gap between the “world” and the Church of God (the righteous people, not a church organization, mind you; membership in a church has never made one a good person) is widening.

OTOH, it’s sometimes easier to see the difference between the wicked and the righteous.

We need to raise our kids so that their eyes are open very early and they have as much freedom to choose things that they can take responsibility for. That way they learn to choose and take responsibility; and they will, if they get a chance.

So trying to bring our kids up in vacuum will not work in today’s society, IMO. One day they’ll step out in the world and go crazy one way or another.

By: wondering

wondering — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:00:20 +0000

“Modernity is an accelerant for human nature, amplifying the good and the bad”

So how come we’re not burning cats anymore (see my previous comment)? Michael Vick aside, I think modern culture has reduced our taste for wanton cruelty and violence.

Plus, things like ending the slave trade. I think it’s a bit twisted to think that premarital sex is worse than the slave trade.

By: bbell

bbell — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:37:02 +0000

Julie based on my research there was a lot more human trafficking 200 years ago then today. Tens of millions of slaves were shipped by both European powers west and Arab slave traders east. Slaves heading to the sugar plantations in the Car. islands and South America where knowingly being sent to their deaths.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:42:50 +0000

Rosalynde, I’m going to quibble with your quibbles. Aborting disabled children can be a great evil, but I’m not certain that it is a greater evil than the methods used historically for dealing with disabled children (the midwife intervening, exposure, deposit at a convent or foundling hospital for neglect and a near-certain death before age one).

Is there more human trafficking now than there was 200 years ago? I have no idea. Even if there is, we now have a consensus in western cultures that such a practice is abhorrent, which we, obviously and tragically, did not have 200 years ago.

By: Rosalynde Welch

Rosalynde Welch — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:30:08 +0000

I don’t disagree with you overall, Julie, but I might quibble with a few of your points. It’s better to be disabled now, for example—IF you survive through prenatal testing/abortion, and of course so many of those babies don’t. It’s indisputably better to be a privileged woman in a developed country—but human trafficking continues at a horrifying scale that is only made possible by modern globalization, so disadvantaged women in developing countries continue to be very vulnerable, maybe even moreso in certain contexts.

Modernity is an accelerant for human nature, amplifying the good and the bad, because it distributes more power to more people. We’re more able to express our natures in material ways, both good and bad.

By: reader Rachel

reader Rachel — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:21:34 +0000

The lamentations about the wickedness of the present day are usually associated with praise for this “choice” generation that was saved for these perilous latter days. It’s confusing: I thought I was in the reserved valiant generation, but now they’re saying that about my kids.