The Watchmaker
I came across this great little kids video called The Watchmaker about life and creation (via Patrick). I think my Christian readers will get a kick out of it. Turn on your speakers.
Hey, what’s this elephant doing here in this room?
I was glad to see this article in the WSJ Opinion Journal (via Adoro Te Devote) about how women exercising “sexual freedom” never quite works out like it’s supposed to. Some excerpts:
Unfortunately, the young women described in “Unprotected” have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their “sexual choices.” [...]
Thus the danger of sexually transmitted diseases is too often overlooked in the lifestyle choices of the young women at the unnamed college where the author works. But the dangers go far beyond the biological. [...]
The author meets patients who cannot sleep, who mutilate themselves, who exhibit every symptom of psychic distress. Often they don’t even know why they feel the way they do. As these girls see it, they are acting like sensible, responsible adults: They practice “safe sex” and limit their partners to a mere two or three per year.
They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can’t understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong. [...]
“Look at how different health decisions are valued,” the author advises. “When Stacey avoids fatty foods she is being health conscious…When she stays away from alcohol, she is being responsible and resisting her impulses. For all these she is endorsed for keeping long-term goals in mind instead of giving in to peer pressure and immediate gratification. But if she makes a conscious decision to delay sexual activity, she’s simply ‘not sexually active’–given no praise or endorsement.”
If anything, the more “transgressive” the behavior, the greater the reluctance to judge. On a University of Michigan Web site, “‘external water sports’ is described as a type of ‘safer sex.’” (The phrase has nothing to do with a swimming pool.)…The sexual advice blog “Go Ask Alice,” sponsored by Columbia University, provides helpful hints to students on menages a trois (“Nothing wrong with giving it a try, so long as you’re all practicing safer sex”), swing-club etiquette and phone sex (“Getting Started”).
I was in my early 20′s at the height of the Sex and the City craze and saw this sort of thing play out over and over again: girl meets guy she doesn’t know very well –> girl sleeps with guy she doesn’t know very well –> girl tells herself and everyone else that she’s totally cool with this –> girl is actually conflicted and unhappy about it.
Having a lot of female friends and hearing the intimate details of their lives actually convinced me early on, even before I had any sort of belief in God, that we’d been sold a bill of goods on this whole so-called sexual freedom thing. Whether it’s just evolution or something given to us by God or both, for whatever reason, it’s just not good for women’s mental health to have no-strings-attached sex. (Not that it’s good for men either, of course, but it seems to be disproportionately detrimental to women.)
I’m glad to see this article in the WSJ, that people are starting to point out the painfully obvious, age-old truth that having casual sex and/or lots of sexual partners makes women miserable. As the article points out, women in secular culture hear one-sided information. For fear of sounding sexist or judgmental, nobody wants to tell women that they, in particular, should treat sex as a serious matter and aim for chastity; even abstinence education programs tend to make vague, blanket statements applied to both genders equally. Hopefully this message will get out there more and more before yet another generation of women is led down this path that leads to emptiness and depression.
Feminists and sex-selection abortion
I came across another article just now about sex-selection abortion in India:
In a report released this week, UNICEF said 7,000 fewer girls are born in India every day than the global statistic would predict, because of sex-selection abortion.
Parents routinely abort a female baby because of widespread gender prejudice…The strong desire for sons is reinforced by social pressures, and by the burdensome dowries still required of parents when a daughter is married.
Although Indian law bans sex-determination tests, many doctors ignore the law, charging high fees to determine the sex of an unborn child and perform an abortion if the child is female. This unscrupulous business explains why many places, particularly in northern India, have only fewer than 800 girls born for every 1,000 boys.
I wonder what sort of interest you’d get from feminists if you tried to organize a march to protest India’s ban on this practice. After all, the Indian government is clearly infringing on its women’s right to choose. But it’s sort of hard to imagine protestors waving those purple NOW signs alongside “LET US ABORT OUR FEMALE FETUSES!” signs.
I know that most pro-choice people honestly think they’re doing a good thing by advocating for women to be able to terminate “unwanted pregnancies,” but when you think of it in terms of people getting rid of unwanted daughters it seems much more…personal.
Good reading
I am ridiculously busy for the next few days so I doubt I’ll have any updates (though in typical blogger fashion I have some great posts all written out in my head!) In the meantime, go read the latest over at the Darwins’ blog.
I thought this observation about the lack of species solidarity we see lately was very interesting.
And I particularly enjoyed this post in response to an atheist’s doubts that people who believe in God can really be rational. A brief excerpt:
In any given situation, there is often more than one conclusion which explains all of one’s experiences with logical consistence, and at such a point, one must make a decision what to believe. This decision is not merely arbitrary. Usually you will make it because you are convinced by one of the experiences or observations which make up the “evidence” that you are weighing.
In a classic example, it is logically consistent with one’s observations of the world to conclude either that there is an outside world populated by other thinking, acting entities or to conclude that one’s entire experience of the world is the result of a demented imagination, and there is in fact one reality but one’s self. Both explain all of one’s experiences and are logically consistent. However, since solipsism if profoundly un-useful, few people choose to believe it. [...]
At the end of the day, belief in God, or belief in a spouse’s love, or belief that all men are created equal, or what have you may be supported by an incredible amount of evidence, but the belief itself is a choice. The evidence will take you so far. Belief does not have to be some sort of “blind leap”. But it is a crossroads, and one must decide which way to go.
Be sure to read the whole thing. Good stuff.
I hope you all have a great weekend.