Couldn't Help Noticing

Dr Caplan’s statistics

Further to Marty's observation (below) about Dr Caplan's article, the thing that strikes me is that Dr Caplan seems to be arguing that we just have to accept that it is completely unrealistic to ask teenagers not to engage in sexual intercourse before marriage. He says:

it flies directly in the face of everything all ordinary Americans know about teens and sex

and

The message that sex must wait until marriage is not the right message to send to a young person. The people sending the message almost never lived up to it in their own lives and nothing turns a kid off like hypocrisy.

Yet his own statistics contradict his point. According to his own article:

Recent surveys show that 70 percent of U.S. teens have engaged in oral sex by the time they reach 18, and more than 45 percent have had intercourse at least once.

In other words, a very significant proportion of teenagers have managed NOT to engage in inappropriate sexual activity as teenagers. Furthermore, I suspect that the proportion remaining celibate has declined since the time when the current crop of parents were teenagers. In other words, there are a significant number of us parents and teachers who can genuinely ask our teenagers not to engage in sexual intercourse before marriage—without any hypocrisy being involved.

I must have no common sense

Below are some excerpts from an article by Dr. Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania:

There may be a sillier strategy for dealing with sex among teens than promoting the choice of ‘abstinence-only-until-marriage,’ but I am not quite sure what it is. Not only is such an approach contradicted by everything that medicine and science know about teens and sex, but it flies directly in the face of everything all ordinary Americans know about teens and sex…

The message that sex must wait until marriage is not the right message to send to a young person. The people sending the message almost never lived up to it in their own lives and nothing turns a kid off like hypocrisy. Furthermore, most kids themselves just don't believe it…

And lastly, regardless of what someone's age is, it makes more senseto talk about maturity, love and mutual respect than to send an absolute message that sex is unacceptable outside marriage. Science and common sense, not wishful thinking and hypocrisy, should guide what we teach kids about sex. (Emphases mine)

Sometimes I get labeled a ‘conspiracist’ because of my view that the media often deliberately misrepresents Christianity. I don't think it is a stretch to see my point with this article.

Notice how the sides are laid out by Dr. Caplan in the last paragraph above. You can either be sensible and talk to your teenager about maturity, love and mutual respect OR you can be a silly absolutist and just tell your teenager “no sex until your married!” and hope he/she listens. This is a gross polarization. Is it outlandish to think that you can talk to your teenager about abstinence along with the idea of maturity, love and mutual respect? Is “no!” the only thing Christianity has to say in the area of sex and relationships? Dr. Caplan would have you think so.

I guess I forfeit being common in using my sense that God's Word can even change the lives of teenagers in a sex-driven culture. And I guess my common sense should also forfeit any hope that Christianity will ever get a fair play in the national media.

It warms a publisher’s heart

Encouragements like this one (that just came in from a pastor) keep us going for months:

We have been getting our people more familiar with the 2 Ways to Live gospel presentation. Which has been a great encouragement, esp. for Michael, the neighbour of some of our church folk. He read through it last week, and decided that God's generous offer of forgiveness and new life was too good to refuse. Praise the Lord.

It's not only fantastic to hear of someone coming into the Kingdom, but it's a great reminder that under God's sovereign hand the proclamation of the gospel message can and will bear fruit for eternity.

Are they hopping mad?

An enormous pink bunny has been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will stay for the next 20 years.

(Source. View more photos of it.)

This is the statement found in the press kit of the makers, a Viennese art group called Gelatin:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;

and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbit's body, a country dropped from the sky;

ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.

Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.

Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.

Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.

I love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

Apart from thinking, “This is fruitier than an apple orchard,” there is something about the philosophy of the giant bunny that appeals to me—not the “walking all over its carcass and falling in love” part but the part about wandering around it and feeling “as small as a daisy” or like a Lilliputian discovering Gulliver (compare with another work by Giancarlo Neri called The Writer, a giant table and chair on Hampstead Heath, London. This article says that it is now so much part of the local landcape that pranksters have been using it as a pizza delivery address!). The rabbit, the artists hope, is supposed to give us a sense of our own size and insignificance. Even its decaying pink spongey flesh is supposed to help us understand our mortality. The artists, however, expect us to embrace it—to love the fact that one day we will die for and become as nothing.

But something jars because we know that, despite the reality of the way the world works, death is profoundly unnatural. Decay and mortality are the stuff of sorrow, not of joy. However, I guess if one is not acquainted with the one who has conquered both, what else is there to do but, “Eat, drink and merrily knit giant soft toys, for tomorrow we die”?

Journalistic flexibility

I couldn't help noticing a Sydney Morning Herald editorial yesterday acknowledging that the Church has a valid voice in public debate and is worth listening to:

Together, the churches continue to represent a communal conscience in a largely individualised society. Together, they are better placed than most other institutions to provide a continuing moral critique of the effects of policy decisions both on those least able to defend their interests and on the common good.

This is a comment made in the context of proposed changes to the Industrial Relations laws in Australia, and comments made by Archbishops Jensen and Pell expressing concerns about the Government proposals.

How odd. Does anyone remember an editorial expressing such a high regard for the Church when it voiced its opinion on abortion or euthanasia or any other topic in which the church is out of step with the majority of journalists?

All you letter writers, file this comment away for future reference.