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[bliss_imperfect]

Thought this was kind of interesting, especially in light of my sister's insistance on a more traditional courtship. I do agree with a lot of things the article says - children should be tied to marriage, for example. That we're setting ourselves up for gigantic amounts of fail by acknowledging that sex happens but not appropriately, as a society,

Comments

[commissardowey]

I agree, children should be tied to a committed married couple, but you can't really enforce that to be a requirement. I know plenty of specialist groups that would go bananas over such an action because of religious laws being enforced onto general law. Overall it generally doesn't work out, but there are cases where it works out juts fine, and to prevent people from that option, eh. I myself never really want to get married, but if I meet someone, wnat to stay with them and have children, it could work out great. I have some disagreeces with marriage on a lot of grounds, which you may or may not know.

Some else I think that isn't working properly right now is the child support program (in my opinion). This frightens me considering our recent development towards a cohabitation instead of marriage. Right now the child support program heavily favors the mother of the child, and not who it was intended to favor: the child. Do I have any idea how to fix this? Not really, I'm a simple geologist. :P

[anonymous]

With my believer hat on, I can image God saying "I told you so..."

With my scientist hat on, people need to realize that "traditions" are highly evolved social structures. In any social system, rough points tend to get worn away over time, and systems that work tend to get preserved. Darwin's principles definitely apply. Rapid mutations (discarding traditions and creating new structures on the fly) almost always lead to failure. On the other hand, we are in the midst of the social equivalent of rapid climate change - structures that were well evolved for life a century ago may not be as well evolve for the current social environment. But nature's answer to climate change is rarely making a lot of changes all at once. Likewise, quickly discarding many traditions is unlikely the answer to today's social problems.

[anonymous]

Oh, BTW - that was Steve S saying that.

[commissardowey]

Geologically this isn't really true. Climate changes tend to show species in the fossil records suddenly disappearing and then are replaced with new species. Very rarely do things fade away or fade into existance.

[anonymous]

Depends a lot on what you mean by "suddenly" relative to the rate of climate change. Beyond the theorized meteor impact and the last 100 years, we haven't seen much in the way of rapid climate change, and while the fossil record do show "mass extinctions", they tended to be "sudden" in the scale of geological time which means they spanned 100's or even 1000's of years.

I will however grant you that species which are completely unable to adapt to the change do tend to disappear quickly. I do not however accept that new species appear "suddenly". The "Cambrian Explosion" took 70 million years. Yeah, compared to the age of the earth, that's fast; but I don't think it counts as "sudden" from an objective POV.

[anonymous]

Interesting read. Good points as far as it goes, but IMHO he's missed something fairly major.
1. "it may not be realistic to maintain the connection between marriage and sex"
2. "it remains essential to maintain the connection between marriage and childbearing"
There's a third link there that is missing entirely: the unavoidable connection between sex and childbearing.

A and B can be separated, B and C should not be separated, A and C cannot be separated.
If sex and childbearing cannot be separated, and childbearing and marriage should not be separated, then it seems to me that sex and marriage also should not be separated. (Transitive property, anyone

[janbergs]

It was much simpler in the old days when there were real prohibitions: (Deuteronomy 22:17-21)

Too bad the prohibitions only went one way.