religion, always finishes second but gets the gold medal

For the last few days I've been trying to reconcile fundamentalist Christian views with scientific progress. More specifically the question of what is natural and what is not, in terms of sex.

If we look back through the years, it has always taken the Church and its more ardant supporters a long time to embrace scientific discovery. Although science is not mentioned often in the Bible, somehow the the church was able to establish its own acceptable explanations for unknown phenomena; everything revolved around the Earth, the world is flat, sickness is bad humours in the body or the devil manifesting himself through you, and the list goes on and on.

This policy seems rather familiar if you pay attention to the daily news and politics. Come up with a definitive answer now, prove or disprove later, but try your hardest to defend your original claim. The lag between claiming and proving are those people hoping to apply their moral relativism in a way that is no hypocritical to their faith, to not blur doctrinal lines, to maintain that one book has all of the answers.

The hardest thing for me to understand is fundamentalist views on sex. The policy advocated by the President as well as the Church is abstinence before marriage. The extreme being, that such things as birth-control, condoms, etc. are not to be used and are unnatural and not the way god intended for man and woman... or man and man, woman and woman for that matter, to have sex. I am not sure where this extrapolation comes from as I don't believe there is a chapter in the Bible called Sex Education 1:1.

The Bible never mentions birth control and sexual protection because... well it didn't exist at the time. What is natural? The human body was designed to repopulate the earth, post-... 'other species like dinosaurs' time. Over-population wasn't a concern as much as repopulating was, how many examples are there in the Bible of kings having at least a dozen children? The conditions and culture they lived in was best accomodated by reproducing as frequently as possible, to maintain the status quo of the rich and to preserve the family legacy.

The Bible is not the US Constitution, it is not persay a living document as much as it is a representation of the moral and ethical values of the time and people it was written for. As a religion however, it must be able to adapt, a strict reading gives too many oppportunities for clashing with modern day values.

As humans built upon the technology of each previous generation, we arrived at where we are now. We have arrived at a junction point where many have began to create a societal backlash against the progressiveness of the new era. God they say, did not intend for us to hinder the miracle of life with rubbers and latex, pills that regulate hormone cycles. How can we operate on the premise that human technology and progress is not normal, when our daily lives and pragmatic morals are deviations from the "normal" that is presented in the Bible. One cannot expect to be living 2000 years in the past, that is what is unnatural.

Jesus did not deal with overpopulation. People died in natural manners, disease, poor hygiene, infection, etc. all things that modern man has learned to combat (save overpopulation). Through science that lifespan of man has increased by at least 30-40 years. Disease is treatable, soap is plentiful, and overpopulation can be controlled by sexual protection. Sex and orgasm is pleasureful because it was meant to be done as much as possible, spreading the seed is the goal, from single cell organisms to the spores on a dandeliion and to man, we reproduce, that's our thing. But there is always a trade off. Disease is natural, in exchange for having the science to ward off disease, nature's natural overpopulation control has been trumped in a sense. The only thing that nature may rely on is death from aging as humans struggle to live longer and die less frequently. Without disease weeding out the weak like the occasional wild brush fire clearing out the forest, we continue to push on at a rabid pace. To control overpopulation we as a species must rely on what got us in this situation in the first place, science, ingenuity, and a bit of judicious behaviour.

For 'moral' pharmacists, who will not only not dispense the morning after pill, but not dispense simple birth control pills, they are doing the world a disservice. If we are to live the "natural" god intended life than we should do away with processed foods, we should do away with vaccines, we should do away with organ transplants and muscular reconstructions. To claim unnatural you must be willing to accept the entirety of the picture, the scope of your statement, I don't know of many that are willing to take that leap. If say god invented plaque, who are you to brush it away, to remove the natural decay that was intended for you? You can't pick and choose how fundamentalist you want to be, if you want to live in the world you must adapt to that world.

With this sort of attitude, you may be thinking that you could justify just about anything like this. A lot of people would be at odds with how do you apply science like abortion, are we able to just kill fetuses at whim for the sake of population control? Morality has always been a product of society, not of the Bible. In the end, it is science that drives morality forward as new invention always strains the question of is this acceptable, are we ok with this.

The fallacy... no no... difficulty lies in the belief in a soul. Through science you can draw a line, however grey between what is and what isn't a person. At one stage the developing bundle of cells is nothing more than a bundle of disorganized cells, comparable to a finger nail that you nervously chew off as you go about your day. During the first trimester and before the second, organ systems begin to form, there is a semblance of a brain, by the second trimester a discernable brain can be seen and perhaps neural activity. In my opinion you could call this too much of a person to abort. However, before? There is room to abort a blob of cells. But, if you introduce the wild card of a soul, you are forever without an answer.

The other day, there was a comment on www.huffingtonpost.com where a man wrote in saying that many pro-lifers would be willing to cross the line to pro-choice if science was able to withold some facts and answers about person-hood. The fact is science yields many answers that you could base your viewpoint on, the difficulty is the soul. If the soul is within the 'baby' at consumation, then you're stuck. To my best knowledge, soul=person. Until people are willing to put faith into sciences hands, while maintaining natural society created morality than science will be forever at odds with religion. Religion forever playing a game of catch up, trying to dig out morality and immorality at every turn. Fundamentalism is a hinderance on any sort of progress.