Radiometric Dating Disputed and Refuted
April 11th, 2010
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Radiometric dating is a pretty awesome area of science that involves dating materials by using isotopic ratios and the decay rates of radioisotopes found in various samples. It’s the most accurate means of dating the earth and based on radiometric dating, scientists have concluded that the earth is 4.54 billion years old. So called “young earth” creationists hate this, because they insist the earth is actually six thousand years old. Thus they love to attack radiometric dating. Here’s a great video that explains the issue and how radiometric dating really works
I’d like to add that it’s not as if radiometric dating needs to stand on its own on this one. Yes, it is the gold standard for dating of geological material, but there are many other observations that can be made which indicate that the earth must be on the order of billions of years old. The fact that there is room for discourse in refining the accuracy of the calculated dates does not mean that the data is completely wrong by many orders of magnitude.
What other data indicates:
- Rock formation and strata – At least hundreds of millions of years old. While we do not have rock layers that go all the way back to the time shortly after the earth’s formation, the rock layers we do have do go back hundreds of millions to over a billion years. Based on the rate of rock formation and material disposition, it can be inferred that the earth must be at least hundreds of millions of years old, if not considerably older. The oldest known rock strata are estimated to be about 2.4 billion years old.
- Temperature – Over one hundred years ago, Lord Kelvin calculated that the earth would have required between 20 and 400 million years to cool from a molten state to its present form. These calculations were correct but did not take into account the heating effects of radioactive decay, which was not known about at the time. Factoring in radioactive decay, it is clear that the earth must have gone through more than a half billion years of cooling to have the solid and relatively thick crust it currently has.
- Plate tectonics – Fossils and geological formations can be found on different continents indicating that they were once connected. Rock formations on the sea floor can be determined to have been produced from oceanic ridges. The earth is constantly erasing the record by recycling the crustal material in subduction zones, but the existing record and the known rates of continental drift, crust creation and seafloor indicate that the process has been going on for more than a billion years.
- Fossil Fuels - The surveyed reserves of fossil fuels such as coal and oil would have taken many millions of years to accumulate. The processes that create fossil fuel continue today, such as accumulation of turf which is compressed into peat, the precursor of coal. Based on the chemical and physical forces that create these materials and the rate of accumulation, it can be determined that the oldest forms of bituminous coal are at least 300 million years old. Anthracite coal comes from reserves which go back even further.
- The age of the sun – The sun is dated at about thirty million years older than the earth (a very short period of time in such time scales). The age of the sun can be determined through analysis of star life cycles, the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the sun, the rate of nuclear fusion and the propagation of solar vibrations. The sun is about 4.57 billion years old.
- Dating of lunar samples – Samples of rock from the moon have been radiometrically dated and also analyzed extensively both physically and chemically. These samples contain particles embedded from solar winds, such as helium-3 and deuterium. They also are “weathered” by solar radiation, cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Based on both radiometric dating and the disposition of particles in lunar samples, their age has been determined to be about 2.4 to more than three billion years old.
Conclusion:
Radiometric dating is the most precise method of dating and allows for accurate dating of the very oldest samples of material, allowing the solar system and earth to be dated all the way back to the beginning. However, it is not the only method of dating. Many others don’t provide an absolute age of the earth, but do clearly indicate that the earth must be more than hundreds of millions or billions of years old. Furthermore, these observations are all completely in agreement. None indicate that the earth appears to be “young.”
When combined with radiometric dating, the evidence is clear and entirely one sided. The earth is billions of years old.
There is some room for scientific discourse over the actual age as indicated by radiometric dating and other methods. Based on what factors are taken into account, it’s possible that the data can be interpreted differently to within a few million years. However, for the “young earth” to be the case, the data would not simply need to be off slightly, as might be the case with a minor variation in material distribution or elemental abundance, it would have to be off by many orders of magnitude. Not only would radiometric dating need to be so completely wrong as to be off by orders of magnitude, but our understanding and observations of nearly all geological forces would need to be.
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April 11th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
If you look at enough creationist arguments, young-earth or otherwise, you find that they are all so depressingly familiar. It’s amazing how many different people can repeat the exact same recycled arguments. There is no originality or creativity; all of them paraphrase the same stale ideas. Many of them were debunked decades ago, or in some cases, more than a century ago. But they must work on some people, and it is outright frightening that there are those that can vote that don’t have the intellectual skills to see through this kind of nonsense.
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April 11th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
It’s worse than that; there are those who can’t see through this nonsense who stand a reasonable chance of becomming president of the US(it’s not implausible that McCain could have won if he played his cards better, he could have croaked it in office and then Sarah Palin would have been president).
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April 11th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
I am not a young earth creationist by any means, but to play devil’s advocate, isn’t there a much simpler answer to the science that indicates earth is older for the creationists?
If you assume that the world was created by god, then this creator can make things however he wants. He could simply create the rocks and meteorites and everything with whatever isotope ratio he wanted. If he wanted them to all have the ratio of isotopes in them that indicated an age of billions of years, then he could. He could make a planet in a day that had rock strata that appeared to have taken millions of years to form. He could even put fossils in them of animals that never existed. He has the power to place every atom as he wants and thereby make it appear one way or another.
If god is truly all powerful then no amount of evidence can prove anything because he could have just made it so. He could fabricate anything as it is.
It is even possible that god made the world yesterday. He could have created you yesterday and when he created your brain he implanted a lifetime of false memories. He could have even created the world five seconds ago and you’d never know because he made every neuron in your head contain the memories of a life that never happened in a world made to make this memory seem real.
(Kind of like “The Matrix”)
Therefore, there’s no need to refute any scientific evidence to the contrary. You can just say the measurements may be true but the conclusion is false, because god made it that way.
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April 11th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Magic Donuts said:
This is in fact the bases of the argument called the Omphalos hypothesis which was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that in order for the world to be “functional”, God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels (omphalos is Greek for “navel”), and that therefore no evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable. The idea has seen some revival in the twentieth century by some modern creationists, who have extended the argument to light that appears to originate in far-off stars and galaxies.
Omphalos is rejected by Young Earth Creationists because it implies a deceitful God, which they find theologically unacceptable. They argue that Adam did not have a navel. They also assert that the trees in the Garden of Eden had no growth rings.
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April 11th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Rejecting it presents problems as well. If Adam had no navel did he also have no fetal arteries or veins? presumably his offspring did. It would mean his body would have not been laid out quite the same.
And no hair? Presumably he started growing hair once created. Did it come in stubbly like when follicles exist but the hair has been shaved off? Or did it come in first fine and then thicker, as when hair develops from a hairless area?
If no finger or toe nails, then what? Just bare nail beds? And what about the skin? The outer layer of skin is made up of dead cells. Did he have bare nail beds, no hair and the outer dry layer of skin missing? Anyone who has lost a nail or scraped their skin a bit knows that it’s not very comfortable to have those features missing.
Did the trees have leaves? Or did they bud them when created? What about the ground? Surely there needed to be soil, but it could not be made of the decayed organic matter of trees past.
I’d go so far as to say that if you believe in creationism you almost must accept this view because otherwise things don’t work out from the beginning. You end up with humans who have no top layer of skin and presumably are very uncomfortable until they develop one. You have trees that don’t have the grain necessary for proper capillary action of fluids.
Aside from that, we have tree ring data going back at least 20,000 years. The oldest measured trees are a few thousand years old, but we have overlapping samples of well preserved trees that can be used to date much further back.
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April 12th, 2010 at 1:42 am
But that can’t be right. The Book says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” and *then* God said “Let there be light”, so clearly the earth came first and the sun is younger still.
(For those that don’t get it, that was sarcasm)
As for God creating things to look old, why bother, when it’s a whole lot easier to just make them actually be old?
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April 12th, 2010 at 1:54 am
Slight typo which takes the young earth concept into a newborn earth concept:
“The oldest known rock strata are estimated to be about 2.4 years old.”
Well, it’s one of those unprovable nonsense arguments, much like the standard conspiracy theory argument “…or, maybe that’s what they want you to believe…”.
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April 12th, 2010 at 2:41 am
Troberg said:
Perhaps it wasn’t a typo but more of a freudian-esque slip and the esteemed doctor is revealing that he’s one of the “God just made it so it looked old” crowd.
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April 12th, 2010 at 8:40 am
(Other) Matthew said:
Impatience? You try sitting around watching the cosmic paint dry for a few billion years.
Or he wants to test our faith. If we believe the evidence we see and not the “good book” then that proves we don’t have enough faith and thus we can be sent to burn in hell, because that’s how much he loves us!
[Other] Matthew said:
Er, no, I fixed it
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April 12th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Just to really mess with everyone’s heads:
Given that God surely has the ability to control all the dimensions of space and time…
What if God made the universe via the Big Bang etc etc and simply sped time up to get all the waiting over with? Because then the world could be both a few thousand “current” years old and billions of “Earth” years (rotations of the Sun) old.
A bit like fast-forwarding through all the boring bits of a fim you’ve watched a dozen times (to get to the sparring program and then to the lobby scene).
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April 12th, 2010 at 9:40 am
drbuzz0 said:
Oh I don’t know about that. What’s the rush when you’re eternal? And surely one simple planet isn’t the only thing he’s got going on. I mean it’s not like we’re the centre of the universe or anything…
I prefer to think that God has set the process in motion and only tweaked the edges where necessary, which it probably wasn’t. Frankly reality is far more amazing and wondrous than any crack-pot creationist or young-earth theory the fundies can (and oh so frequently do) come up with.
drbuzz0 said:
Or in other words, it seems to boil down to: “I’m lying to you one way or the other, but you have to believe the stupid lie not the intelligent lie to prove your faith in me. It’s not like humanity’s one distinguishing feature is your intelligence, so there’s no need for you to use it. Oh and lying is wrong, so don’t do that!”
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April 12th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
The bottom line is that there is no way one can reconcile Biblical inerrancy, (that is the doctrinal position that Scripture is accurate and totally free of error) with observable fact. Any attempt to do so yields a nonsensical conclusion.
If you are a rational person, you must reject Creationism as a failed hypothesis, if you are a true person of faith, you should need no proof. That is what religion is all about: accepting without proof. If you are looking to science to support your theology, you have basically failed as a believer.
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April 12th, 2010 at 10:14 pm
I’mnotreallyhere said:
That’s completely illogical. Too much effort. What really happened was God slowed down his own perception of time’s passage until the opening 12 or 13-point-whatever billion years seemed like six days to Him, and because He is God, His POV is the ultimately valid one, therefore His assertion that creation took six days is correct.
There. That ought to earn me a doctorate in theology from some diploma mill somewhere.
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April 12th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Finrod said:
Depleted Cranium: The new home of twenty-first century Scholasticism
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April 13th, 2010 at 8:51 am
So you have dismissed creationism as hogwash and used your clever view of science to claim it all is fine and dandy. Good for you, I guess. If that helps you sleep at night and makes you think it is OK to be an atheist then it serves your purposes.
I noticed you still have not fessed up to what your sexual activities are and which ones you approve of. You are very pro-homosexual but are you homosexual yourself? You avoid a clear answer of that simple question. Don’t you think that it would get you more sex to be having sex with both men and women? It would sure show those religious people a thing or two to be going gay all the time. Are you into bestiality? As an atheist, don’t you think that’s OK too?
If you think all that you do is fine and everything your friends do who are gay or bestiality sex freaks or who are into anything else, maybe having sex with children, why not just fess up? These are all forms of sodomy, I am sure you know, but as an atheist, that’s all the more reason to do them. Are you proud of who you are and what you do?
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April 13th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Ben said:
What a pervert!
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April 13th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Ben said:
So basically the only thing that is standing between you and satisfying your obviously perverted appetites, is your faith. Well, well.
“Human nature sublimates the impulses it thwarts, / a healthy sex life mitigates lusts of other sorts”
-Piet Hine
I’m an atheist, and I’m about as straight up as they come in most moral areas, in particular sex. However I will draw your attention to the fact that a hotbed of sexual deviation is simmering in the Roman Catholic church, who are if anything else, by no means atheists.
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April 13th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Ben said:
Oh if only I were gay/bi. Then I could have more sex! (/sarcasm)
I think DrBuzz0 was quite clear before that he has no issues with one’s sexual orientation and that he himself was apparently interested only in women. Your argument is entirely based on the premise that homosexuality is somehow wrong, a stance that will sway very few opinions here.
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April 13th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Ben said:
Ben doth protest too much, methinks…
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April 13th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
I actually got around to watching the video just now. I lasted about 30 seconds and I just couldn’t take any more. What a load of tripe.
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April 13th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Whatever we might think of Ben’s attitudes toward sex and religion, can we not agree that at least he has fine typing skills? He’s included all necessary capitals and most needed punctuation. That’s not easy to do with one hand.
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April 13th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
Dude, I think you need to watch the whole thing.
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April 13th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
I’ve always really liked the rock strata argument. It was one of the first pieces of evidence that got scientists (though they weren’t called scientists in those days) thinking that maybe the Earth was a wee bit older than 6,000 years. The actual first (as far as I can tell) was related: cinder cones. The cones accumulate at a certain rate. Therefore, the size of a cone can tell you how old it is. And some are quite definitely in excess of 6,000 years.
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April 13th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Finrod said:
Hmm… I quite agree Finrod. What a lovely departure from the childish scrawl that usually demands that we do more research.
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April 14th, 2010 at 1:59 am
Ben said:
I’m not “Pro-homosexuality.” I just don’t use it as an excuse to hate people. I’m neutral on the subject. If someone is gay or not, fine.
And no, I’m not homosexual. I’m totally straight.
Ben said:
No I didn’t. I’m straight as an arrow. I’ve never had any desire to be anything other than straight. That’s how I am wired.
Ben said:
To put it simply, my sex life is considerably more boring than I think you’d ever imagine it possibly could be.
Also, I don’t condone child abuse in any way shape or form. Sex with someone too young to have informed consent is never acceptable and is amongst the most revolting crimes.
Ben said:
Well I’m not really one with a huge ego, but I guess you could say so. There are plenty of things I’ve done I am proud of and I have no problem with myself.
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April 14th, 2010 at 2:36 am
I think the only way Ben could have thought that Doc hadn’t answered his question previously is if he didn’t bother checking to see if it had been answered after he asked it.
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April 14th, 2010 at 4:18 am
Ben: Morality can exist without a belief in a god. Morality, even christian morality, is basically a set of rules that are (or, in some cases, once were) practical.
Put the top scholars of all major religions, along with atheists, and ask them all the same question: How should a good person behave? You’d see that the answers would be very similar.
Equating morality with belief in god is a common mistake among the religious people, and also a ****load of hybris.
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April 14th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Atheists love the fact that by denying a belief of god and any faith they get to make up their own morals. Nobody can tell them they are wrong. They don’t actually just deny god, they worship themselves as god because they like to think they can decide what is right and wrong and nobody can say no. They get to do whatever they want, and they can have any kind of sex they want and surely will drawn to the very perverted.
As an atheist, don’t you feel the need to constantly prove to everyone how far out you can go? To show the church and the silly believers you are unbound by moral values of good and how you need to have no restraint.
As an atheist, you can worship yourself and your own pleasure because you deny heaven. Only pleasure you can achieve is to not have grace and holiness but the opposite and to insult others who are achieving something higher.
As an atheist, is the sex you have ever perverted enough or far away from morality enough or do you always need to see something further to push it? Homosexuality makes sense to atheists because it allows them a whole new group for sex and also makes for more acts that are not normal and are sodomy. You have to condone homosexuality to have moire than one partner at once. There are only two sexes, so if you want to have multiple people all engaged in communal sex, there must be homosexuality involved.
As an atheist, what can you not like about the idea of an orgy? The Green and Romans who also worshiped themselves as gods and tried to destroy the Christians were part of the world of orgies and now it has come back. Atheists see no reason why not to have a room full of people engaging in acts that pertake of the flesh of eachother. It is a stew of immoral pleasure and so why not push it further? If an atheist makes their own morals they can say anything is fine and add to homosexuality anything else like children, animals, dead bodies or putting it on a tape and publishing it to the internet or bondage and modifying their bodies.
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April 14th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Hmm. Are there many fundamentalists in the US who think like Ben, or is his particular brand of hate speech too much even for them?
Honestly, I’ve never seen a case of projection as blatent as this before. Given his obvious obsessions, a case might be made to have this guy placed under surveillance, or put in compulsory therapy. If the fear of God is the only thing he has keeping him in line, what’s going to happen to anyone vulnerable around him if he ever should lose his faith?
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April 14th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
As an atheist, don’t you feel the need to constantly prove to everyone how far out you can go? To show the church and the silly believers you are unbound by moral values of good and how you need to have no restraint.
Normal people are capable of distinguishing moral alternatives, and generally act for the percieved good. Christian doctine opens the psychological door to all sorts of immorality for believers should they wish it, as it gives them a free get-out-of-gaol card in the form of God’s forgiveness. Christians know that if they are suitably contrite, God shall make it as if their sins had never been, so they can indulge in any immoral activity they please free of the self-loathing which would be their lot if they thought that the responsibility for their actions applied to them.
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April 14th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Moral Affirmations of Secular Humanism
* We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence
* We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.
* We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
* We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
* We are engaged by the arts no less than the sciences.
* We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
* We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.
We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfil their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise their reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health care, and to die with dignity.
* We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
* We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.
From here: http://atheism.about.com/library/weekly/aa061099b.htm
Ben knows nothing about Atheism and confuses it with Amoralism, They are two very different things.
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April 14th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
God is the only imaginary friend you can refer to in a debate and not be thought mentally unstable by all participants.
Ben is not only assuming that god exists, for no good reason, he is assuming that he is privy to special knowledge of gods desires. He is also clearly not looking to the bible for his morals, which after all condones sexual oppression, genocide, stoning disobedient children to death, slavery and all manner of other horrors; he is projecting his morals onto god.
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April 14th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Finrod said:
They’re not all as out-there as Ben. When they get vocal, they draw a lot of attention, and that makes them seem more prominent. I suppose Ben is probably a lot like Fred Phelps. He’ll try to use shock value to get attention for himself and gather followers who are drawn to strong messages, much like Greenpeace.
Finrod said:
I appreciate your use of irony to turn Ben’s insulting words around on him, and kudos on that. But let me add a disclaimer that in reality that is no more true for mainstream Christians (crying televangelists notwithstanding) than Ben’s assertions that atheists are perverts and that there is no morality without religion.
Ben’s method of representing Christianity smacks of trying to catch flies with vinegar. I can’t imagine that he thinks it’s effective evangelism, so he must have another motive, and my best guess is that beating other people over the head with a Bible is his method of trying to bolster his own weak faith.
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April 14th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Finrod said:
Christianity devalues human life. This life is just a perverse kind of test, a selection process where those who are sufficiently adulatory and happen to pick the correct god get to join god in his celestial north korea where as those who are not or pick the wrong god get to be tortured forever.
It’s all too easy to accept evil behaviour without doing anything to stop or punish it because they’re going to be punished in hell anyway and all those who were harmed by it don’t really hurt their chances of going to heaven or hell, it just makes this life a little more trying.
I’m not suggesting christian moderates believe this; christian moderates are almost indistinguishable from atheists except for the fact that they attend church and a handful of other things.
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April 14th, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Buzzo have you seen this totally awesome musical parody of Ted Haggard? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZmHC75FDqQ
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April 15th, 2010 at 12:03 am
Ben: Thank you for confirming that my earlier statement was correct.
“Equating morality with belief in god is a common mistake among the religious people, and also a ****load of hybris.”
You fit the bill perfectly. Everything you just said proved it.
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April 15th, 2010 at 12:19 am
Shafe said:
Ben and Fred Phelps are to religion as Greenpeace is to environmentalism… I like it.
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April 15th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
I am not the perv or the non moral one here.
The whole thing about priests abusing children and other times when religion is made to look bad is just trumped up by the media and in most cases it probably never happened. It is thirty year old claims which they are not always alive to even defend themselves from and a lot of questionable documents and things. Look closer and you see many lawyers and most being jews. It’s a whole big nothing created by mainly jews and atheists alies.
As an atheist, I am sure you are very happy to see this being reported as true in the media. So you say you are not homosexual and that’s fine, but not the fact that you don’t deny other perverse sexual acts. Disgusting sex is the domain of the atheist and you’re clearly okay with anything and even homosexualities.
I am not trying to shock you because what you do is already shocking but I want to bring it to your attention.
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April 15th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Remember, life is temporary and even if you enjoy your orgies it ends eventually and the nasty fun is over. Hell is forever. After millions of years in hell will you really feel so good about what you did?
No matter how you defile and role in the flesh, the fires will burn your sin and burn you every day forever.
Are you ready to burn?
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April 15th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Ben said:
How impertinent! What monumental arrogance!
How dare you presume to accuse any of us of acts of immorality based on your own prejudices. Do you know us? How can you assume that just because we don’t have an imaginary friend threatening us with dire consequences, that we indulge ourselves in these acts?
And how dare you accuse those who were abused as children of lying, in particular when the Church itself admits these events occurred. These cases passed every test of criminal law, and indeed some of the perpetrators confessed. To make a blanket statement that they are untrue is without foundation.
Typically, however I see you are also ready to blame Jews for this, and no, Jews and atheists are not in league – we reject each others position in the matter of a deity as vigorously as with Christians, or any other faith.
Personally, I am saddened to see this business with the priests unfolding. While I rejected their religious teachings, I have nothing but respect for the Jesuits that schooled me. I certainly was never propositioned by any of them, and none of my classmates has ever suggested they were ether. These men were intellectuals and aesthetics, and their only interest was to hone young minds, something they were very good at. I remember them as honorable men. and it appalls me that they will be lumped in with pedophiles, in the public’s mind simply because they were members of the same organization.
Your accusations are unfounded and hollow, and speak more of your own frustrated desires than you might wish. I would be careful what you write, were I you.
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April 15th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Ben, believe it or not, most people are not actually slavering perverted monsters lusting to sexually harass any man, woman, animal, child, corpse, tree or inanimate object they encounter, their perverted passions being held in check only be fear of eternal damnation. Your casual assumption that most people are like that is revealing. You are doing youself no favours advertising this to the world.
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April 15th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Ben said:
But isn’t the human body supposed to be beautiful and pure and created in the image of god? How can having sex in and of itself be an evil act. I mean, you make it sound like any sex is bad, which actually some strict Christians believe – that sex should only occur for the purpose of procreation and having sex primarily for pleasure, even if it might result in pregnancy is wrong.
How can this jive with the idea that the body is in the image of god? In that case, physical pleasure should be fine.
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April 16th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Q said:
Completely tangential and totaly off-topic
==========================
I’ve never figured out how this came about – probably from Paul’s issues with women and sex (given that he basically built the early church), as well as the tradition of the revered ascetic. It’s the only religion I’ve seen that has a flat out sex = evil. I can’t speak to Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or Zoroastrianism but:
Judaism: Sex is a positive thing, as long as it’s within a marital context (which is mainly due to inheritance and marital-contract issues) and women are in fact entitled to demand it from their husbands. It actually gets kind of funny – there is a list of how often each type of profession is legally required to satisfy his wife over the course of a year before she is considered to be abusing her authority (sailors get off easy, since they are away most of the time, but stay at home types like scribes and bricklayers basically have to perform on demand).
Classical Islam (as practiced in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Turkey… the major centers of both population and scholarly thought on the matter): Sex is a powerful force, which can be a great positive in its proper context, or a major negative if in a bad context. Like fire, in a way. Essential, but dangerous.
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April 16th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Matthew said:
Paul is at the root of it alright. The earlier parts of the Bible are less strident on the matter: Ruth’s seduction of Boaz comes to mind, as does the oblique reference to temple prostitutes in Job. As well The Song is borderline pornography.
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