Pope in Africa talking out of his ass - seriously wtf????

I might add to this reply so it may get edited later.

I want to state that what "An Ancient's" Specific argument is that condoms are not effective if not used by either professionals or in laboratory tests. That is what I am asking him to provide evidence of....Not that they may be inconsistently used. I realize that sometimes they do fail but that it is not as large a number as he seems to be trying to promote.

I am trying to discuss that promoting the use of condoms is not a bad thing. Of course, I advocate trying to get a more complete sex education about risk factors. I also try to state that the open discussion of sex is a good thing and not a bad thing. Dealing with religious people on different boards and they don't seem to want sex taught openly. We are talking about many people who think that masturbation is harmful.

I also apologize for stating that you did not read the article. The tone you seemed to be portraying it and the tone it has appeared to be different.

Edit: I am not seeing, if I understand you correctly, that there is increased risk behavior because of condoms and condom education? There may be increased risks because of a more urban environment and other factors.

Vaginal sex with a condom in a monogomous relationship where you both know each others aids-free sexual history is pretty safe.

Vaginal sex without a condom in a monogomous relationship where you both know each others aids-free sexual history is less safe but fairly safe.

Vaginal Sex with a condom in casual and random relationships is unsafe.

Anal sex with a condom in casual and random relationships is very unsafe.

Anal sex without a condom in casual and random relationships is extremely unsafe.


The pope is encouraging the second best option to discourage falsely confident people getting sick.

Please post a study which indicates that properly protected sex between partners through anal sex is more risky than properly protected vaginal sex.

I'd also like to point out that in order for consistent and proper condom use to promote the spread of AIDS it would have to cause people to have at least 8 times as much casual sex. I can expand on the absurdity of that figure if anyone wants me to, but I think I'll just let it speak for itself.

Yes, but you can just as easily argue that this is a failure of the implementation of condom distribution and safe sex education programs as that it is an indictment of the effectiveness of the basic idea. The fact that encouraging people to use condoms often doesn't work because people use them inconsistently does not necessarily mean that it is useless or counterproductive to encourage people to use condoms; it may simply be a problem of implementation or resources (the latter I find very believable, given the part of the world we're talking about).

Any more absurd than the statement that 99% of people throughout history practiced abstinence before marriage

In fairness, in many primitive cultures you married pretty much as soon as you hit puberty; in that sort of society abstinence before marriage wasn't exactly difficult. Adultery on the other hand was probably pretty damn common. Ironically, probably, so was massive hypocrisy about it. It all makes sense if you look at it from an evopsych perspective.

I always assumed the real factor was "You are Pregnant, You Better Get Married"

Edit: I wanted to tack this on - Some sources also support the idea that often a man might kill for a woman and might the woman might end up in serial marriages. The exact permutations of this, I have not followed too far.

Its not having sex which is the problem, its having sex with people who might have AIDs

If you were a Zimbabwean man, would it be rational to have sex with a Zimbabwean women, if you knew there was a 1/4 chance she had aids.

Would it change if you thought you were 100% protected from the disease, like many of the otherwise intelligent people here believe.

@Desert Fox

I'll research it later

Using condoms reduces AIDs, but are not an antidote for due diligence.

I don't think anybody's really arguing that they are, the problem is with the idea that they don't do anything and are actually counterproductive.

Your original post seems to suggest that with proper protection, homosexual acts are less safe than heterosexual sexual acts. That is an argument which needs to be supported.

I wanted to expand on my original answer. If properly used, it would seem that condoms can be 95% to 99% safe when used for even casual sex based on the fact that Nevada brothel workers have not had any cases of HIV/AIDS even though they have a huge number of casual encounters. In addition, some of the material posted shows quite clearly the percentages of effectiveness. As such, you need to move Casual Contact always using condoms to "Relatively Safe." It also would seem to be safer than a monogamous relationship without the use of condoms - for reason just simply because many are dishonest in a relationship.

If you are having lots of sex with your spouse you generally won't be sleeping around with other people.

Actually, the mechanisms to discover who got it first are already known and practiced in cases where such determination is needed. Do some research into the subject.

As I've already stated, people who are screwing around generally aren't in healthy relationships with their spouses, so you're reasons are not valid in the majority of cases.

Not at all, they're going to die anyway, there isn't a cure for AIDS, only the very lucky ever recover from it, the best you can do is stave off the inevitable for a few years in most cases.

Also, it's pretty clear the current state of the society in question is pretty unsustainable anyway, so promoting an earlier collapse instead of a long and drawn out one may actually be beneficial.

And the rest of society, the decent part, will slap them down. If they want to continue to cause trouble:
a) the problem is relatively short term, they are dying anyway.
b) if they cause a lot of trouble, shoot them.

Fear of consequences is historically one of the best preventative measures.

Except that your example didn't work, because it allowed disease to spread fairly unchecked. My example did work, because it killed largely off the irresponsible idiots, keeping their numbers at sustainable levels.

Well, if you aren't going to base your moral system off religion, and you aren't going to base it off Darwinism (ie apparent raw science), what are you going to base it on? What suits you at the time? What the loiudest idiots in society say is best today?

Quite wrong, I'm not giving the death penalty, they're giving it the themselves.

They know the risks, they took the risks, they suffer the consequences. No-one should help them out of that, they brought it on themselves. I had nothing to do with them catching HIV, nor will I have anything to do with helping them avoid the consequences of it as long as they persist in their actions.

This is Africa we're talking about.

A) I've already told you the whole Purity Pledge idea is a retarded one that was never going to work anyway, so using it's failure is hardly an example.
B) You're study is flawed by it's sample group.

This is the basis of your problem, you want to beleive something, so you assume something else, then don't bother to actually look into the field as you've already staisfied yourself. Then you refuse to pay the slightest attention to what anyone else is saying, save to almost certainly deliberately misrepresent what someone is saying.

Yes, Khorne will be pleased.

BWAHAHAHAHA, your "rebuttal" is based on a stupid generalization based off a total lack of research or appreciation of the complexity of the problem! Why am I not surprised at all? Actually, a major problem with the spread of AIDS in many areas is cases like truckers that sleep with infected prostitutes while they're on the road and then give the virus to their wives. The idea that adulterers automatically won't be sleeping with their spouses is just stupid.

Actually, no, I don't feel like doing your work for you. Since you know all about this, it shouldn't be too hard for you to post a link or two. What I have found with some quick Googling is that the length of the latency period and the onset of symptoms seems to vary widely, with initial phase symptoms "usually occurring a month or two after exposure" and latency lasting "from months to a decade" (link). This does not fill me with any confidence in regards to this "we can tell which one of you got infected first, even to within a few weeks" thing.

Bullshit, as I've already explained.

IIRC, modern antiretroviral drugs can prolong life significantly.

Oh yes, the fact that the extra violence won't collapse society is a really good rebuttal to the fact that your social policy will create extra violence. Oh wait, no it isn't. Just because society won't collapse doesn't mean your policy isn't going to put strain on it and cause suffering to people besides the people you've decided are the villains and want to punish.

See my points to Monster in regard to the first point. As to the second, since many primitive societies practiced early marriage this meant that most extra-marital sex would have been adultery. The adulterers would often then have gone back and given any STDs they caught to their spouses. And let's not forget that many of these societies were deeply sexist and women had very little power, so quite a few of these "extra-marital affairs" were probably either outright rape or done with questionable consent from the woman. Yes, I'm sure the old system worked marvelously.

Ah, I think I understand now. You're one of those religious people who's so used to thinking of origin stories and moral guides as a package deal you have trouble wrapping your mind around the idea of a belief system where the two are seperate. I almost wonder if perhaps you aren't trolling the atheists here by rubbing in their faces what you falsely assume is the logical conclusions of their own belief system.

Actually there is a very well developed system of humanist ethics that owes nothing to Social Darwinist sociopathy, and considering how often it's been discussed on this very board I'm surprised you apparently don't realize this. It is based on the core principle that suffering is bad and should be eliminated wherever possible and practical. It is self-consistent and uses as a core postulate something pretty much everyone can agree on - that they don't want to suffer. It is a world away from the utter sociopathy that is Social Darwinism, which is really nothing more than a legitimizing ideology for oppression and injustice.

You could help them, you deny them help. By your actions you condemn them to death. There are justifiable reasons you can refuse to help somebody and let them die, but at least be honest enough to admit you have culpability and responsibility.

Still no sources on your own...What should be said about a person not willing to find sources of their own?

You are dancing around the issue of the study. The study looked at those who made the pledge and did not. Most of those that did not make the pledge also had pre-marital sex.

If you read the material which Monster104 posted also showed that the vast majority of them studied also had sex outside of marriage.

Ever heard of "Shotgun Weddings"?

I'm not so sure about detecting who is infected first and within a few weeks thingy, but it is possible to trace the passage of the virus through RNA or DNA analysis. Something about mutations and permutations. But then again, An Ancient doesn't believe in evolution.

Ugh. I'm rather disappointed in my so-called 'fellow Christians'. I figured googling something like 'conservative christian rates abstinence' would get me lots of hits to support my assertation. Instead I got lots of reports that evangelical Christianity seems to have higher rates of teen pregnancy compared to the rest of the nation. And only one, almost throw-away statement (sorry can't be bothered looking it up again) that there was a correlation between regular church attendance and higher rates of abstinence.

Anyway, it proves that cultural indoctrination does work, but I'm still rather disgusted that more people who claim to be Christian don't actually hold on to some of its more basic tenets.

}p :rage:

Some sources also give them higher rates of divorce than Atheists and Liberal Christians.

Desert Fox, if you want a disproof of An Anicient's claims that STDs killed off anyone who wasn't a wholesome monogamous person for 99% of human history I'd point him in the direct of nonhuman animals. Monogamy is fairly unusual in the animal kingdom. In our closest relative, the chimp, a female in estrus may get plowed up to 50 times a day by virtually every male in the troupe (ref). Strangely enough, chimps have not all been killed off by STDs, nor have STDs exerted enough evolutionary pressure to cause chimps to move away from opportunistic mating.

Of course it probably has a lot to do with the fact that they live in low-density societies which tend to have much lower disease load than agricultural ones. But hey, he specified 99% of human history, and around 190,000 of the 200,000 years of human history were spent in precisely such low-density societies (and that's not counting the pre-human hominids).

Mind you, I'm not suggesting the chimp model was historically typical for humans. Humans pair-bond because it increases the odds of survival for the highly dependent offspring, and probably has other social benefits as well such as dramatically reducing sexual competition between males and therefore fostering tribe solidarity. I suspect we've lived in mother-father families since Homo Erectus; between Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus you see a marked decrease in sexual dismorphism, indicating reduced competition between males. That said, the typical human pattern is probably also for adultery to be quite common, as cheating has big evolutionary benefits for both males and females (I was going to go into them but this post is already getting too long-winded as it is). BTW, it is probably also for adultery to be forbidden and looked down upon even as tons of people do it, as there are also very good evolutionary reasons to not want your partner to be mating with anyone but you. The archetypal human pattern can probably be described as long term male-female pair-bonding with occassional covert side matings.

I seem to remember from my anthropology class, which was many years ago, that youths tend to in small groups have relationships with a number of other youths before settling down with one for the most part (and then likely a bit of cheating after wards as you state) I will try a google search on this to see what I can come up with.

Jarad Diamond also talks about interviewing a women (from a primitive tribe) who one of her husbands killed the other for her so there was likely a lot of battling for women. Murder is a large factor of the death of males in primitive groups.

Also, watching "A Candle in the Dark" by Arthur C Clark and have to be amused about him talking about girls who get pregnant at a young age / teenagers suggesting that space aliens did it.

Condoms are such a mood killer.

Figure there's a natural teenage tendency to rebel. Add in the fact that conservative christian tendencies are going to result in stricter parenting, making some teens want to rebel more and more dramatically. Throw in the fact that the teens in question won't necessarily know how to use a condom, if using one occurs to them, and know that they'll be in deep shit if they get caught with birth control of any sort.

It's a pretty natural end result once you account for human nature.

If you read what I actually wrote, it should be obvious that it's the stricter families that have higher success rates for abstinence (higher rates of church attendance would generally be expected for the more conservative, stricter families).

You stated that it was a throwaway quote...that generally means that there is no source and who knows if it is even the case. We would assume that the "purity pledge" girls are more often church going than the ones who did not. That did not effect their sexual activity by any appreciable margin.

If you wrote what you apparently meant to say, this might be the case. Instead, we have you admitting that most sources say the rate of teen pregnancy is higher, that you could only find one throw-away statement backing your argument, at which point you follow up with a completely unsupported conclusion.

I meant it in the sense of one paragraph being buried in a whole article. I've looked the article up again, see here.

There's different degrees of church-going, or observance.

That is not entirely true, which the same article directly addresses, "The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners."