This one linked below is not commonly known but horrible nontheless.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22781603/

The death scale is going to be larger than the blood soaked ground of WWII.
This is primarily political, not a religious war. Lions downstream and crocodiles are learning to feast on meat from this war to the degree that they’ll suffer if and when it stops due to their natural prey being more difficult a meal once again. That’s the scale we’re talking.

Reminds me of a scene from Michael Crichton’s Congo, which was about killer gorillas and while on a plane a woman asked him about the safety of having primates in cages on a plane with human passengers. To which the protagnoist of the story says……PEOPLE are dangerous. Not gorillas.

I’d heard about the Tasaday scam. They were supposed to be the world’s most primitive people, until the anthropologists came back a year or so later and found them driving around in cars, which just about shows the problems of anthropological research.

And you’re right, Ilion – people are ’selves’, and not just objects of study. And this is what makes the methodology of the social sciences very different from the rest of the sciences.

This reminds me of the so-called “Taseday people” of the Philipines. Once held to be a primitive, peace-loving tribe, non-material (in the consumer sense) expression of free love, free sex, non-”constrained youth” and other things most often associated with the hippies of Woodstock fame, it is now long known that this whole sordid affair was little more than a big El Fako. False. Completely fabricated by saavy villagers putting on a show for the West. Worse, the subject no doubt of many a doctoral dissertation into the human past of peace and communal co-operation nixed by the avarice, consumerism, and horrors of modern life. I have always figured that not only does nature abhor a vacuum, but nature abhors context-free statements and actions. THERE ARE good critiques of the West. This is not one of them. As it is phony and was used to make some ideological point.

The one I DO have in mind is more closely corroberated by actual brain science and I’ll mention to everyone later after I verify some facts.

In any case to this point, even among HONEST anthropologists there is this tendency they’ll tell you and warn you about in such studies to the effect of “going native.” You find out what you ultimate intentions and “findings” will be—then the natives figure out what you’re looking for and who you that side. Not being akin to easy study like bees and dogs, human beings always present a thorny problem where you have to find non-direct approaches to get honest responses to the kinds of queries you mention above with Mead.

Fascinating.

Actually, I think a course preparing couples for marriage does sound a very good idea. I didn’t know that the Roman Catholic Church actually ran such things, though it doesn’t surprise me. I did read a little while ago that amongst the Lutheran ethnic Germans in Romania – the Siebenburger – traditionally if you wanted a divorce, they locked you up in a tower for half a year with only one item from sets where you normally have two. Thus you’d have a knife, but no fork. After that they’d ask you if you still wanted a divorce. It sounds extreme to me, but I can see that cutting down the divorce rate.

As for Christianity being anti-sex, certainly the early church placed great value on virginity and chastity, and some of the monastic writers of the Middle Ages had an appallingly low view of marriage. However, as you said St. Paul was certainly no misogynist and the sanctity of marriage as an institution is shown by the imagery of the church as the bride of Christ. A lot of cultures have regulations surrounding sex, because of the potential for social disruption from sexual relationships. Some of the supposedly scientific evidence used by the advocates of free love in the 1960s has definitely been shown to be wrong. You mention in your blog that Kinsey was profoundly wrong in his research, quite apart from large chunks of it being unethical and very nasty indeed.

Polynesian society has since the 18th century been the model for natural sexual relationship, unconstrained by marriage. However, one of the main texts supposedly supporting this view, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa , has been subject to severe criticism. Mead herself actually didn’t mean to write a book about Polynesian teenage sexuality. She was really interested in ethnobotany, but anthropology at that time really was obsessed with sex and kinship relationships. So her supervisor told her to research Samoan attitudes to sexuality. The two teenage girls who were her informants were, not unnaturally, perplexed and embarrassed at the prurient interest in sex, and so started making stuff up. The result is that Mead’s book is full of, well, rubbish.

A lot of the arguments for free love were also taken from Marx and Engels. Engels, in his work on the origins of the family, drew on Backhofen’s Das Mutterrecht to argue that originally humanity lived in a state of primitive Communism and sexual promiscuity. Backhofen was an amateur anthropologist whose theories were attacked in his lifetime. Despite strongly influencing C.G. Jung and others in the 19th century volkisch movement, they’ve been thoroughly discredited. Similarly, in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels argued that marriage was giving way amongst the working class to genuine prostitution and free love. Historians of the British working class have found that there’s little evidence of this except in some, very specific localities. Marx and Engels seem to have looked at the rather lax attitudes to sexual morality amongst London costermongers, and turned it into a global statement about working class attitudes to sex, despite the fact that most members of the working class believed very much in marriage. In the 1920s the leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, got a very frosty reception when he gave a speech advocating promiscuity and free love at a meeting of the railwaymen’s union in Paris. Despite the fact that the union was Communist, the railwaymen themselves were happily married with very conservative, bourgeois notions about the bond between husband and wife. They definitely weren’t impressed with Breton’s views, and I got the distinct impression they very much let him know it.

RE: “Stalin, The Gulags and Christianity”

I found BR’s follow up on this interesting. It seems the seeds of problems can trump any ideology, ill intentioned or good. Richard Pipes, in a wonderful book mostly on foreign policy with the old USSR, is a Harvard historian with a fix on old Russia and then the Soviet Union. Though the book was about US-USSR relation and now THAT issue is mostly extinct, I kept the book, Survival Is Not Enough, for reference. Also the author of “Russia Under the Old Regime“, Pipes pointed out something very much related to what BR did. Marx’s notions never fully took a true root in Western Europe, which ironically being highly iindustrialized HE felt was the prime picking for revolution. It didn’t happen that way, and old Russia under the Romanovs was the fertile ground. In Western Europe notion of social change were at the ballot box and tax recepit, not horror and blood. While neither Pipes nor I approve of socialism even in the milkwater version, we know of course two important things here. First, change of some kind was necessary in all of europe, and that while you might disagree with methodology (and still do), it happend for a reason. Things were unpleasant. The further east you went due to the history of middle ages holdover ethics, the worse things got, with the last vestiges of middle ages being the Russian Czar. Pipes points out that often the ground on which seeds might sprout is more important in many cases than an ideology itself. Thus in Russia, non-industrial and peasant worked and ruling class owned, horror was the result of middle ages ethics meeting industrial mindsets. As bad as Old Western Europe was, there was never the Eastern Ethics that said that serfs had absolutely NO rights whatsoever. Even Edward Longshanks had a sense of law and fair play compared to the Czars, who knew nothing of the “rights of man”, the courts, trial by your peers in the village if accused of capital crimes like stealing the kings fish (and not likely they’d convict you!), and punishment for even the nobles upon raping or killing peasants.

Harris and Hitchens can say the church made this worse, but it seems that whatever the faults of the Eastern Church in Russia, it COULD be that they often stayed behind the scenes and their LACK of involvement in the affairs of government might have been the real issue.

Having said all this, Dr. Pipes points out that while Alexander Solzhnitsen is a fine writer and chronicler of events surrounding the persecution of the church, killings of priests, the rise of Stalin, etc. he misses some finer details in all his paens to the “old ways.” Solzhnitsen correctly points out that we in the West certainly have our issues too–and there are many–and that we were horribly naive about old Russia and her ugly stepdaughter, the USSR. Now mercifully extinct due her internal contradiction. He correctly pointed out that the Western mind cannot often comprehend Eastern needs and concerns and goals. We are dogs. They are sly cats who hide emotions and have a more nuanced approach to materialist goals and power. Nevertheless Solzhinitsen came under fire from the more secular writers and dissidents and “refusnick” like Andrei Sakhorov and Vladimiar Bukovsky for his quaint ideas about old Russia. They ask, as does Pipes, if things were so great under the Church and peasantry in Old Russia, why the Revolution? Why the hunger (and not just the continued hunger under the “science” of Marxism”)? Why the Romanovs persistence in power eating sumptious, buttery, fine foods and living in opulence with pampered palaces being served by sword weilding Cosacks—-while the peasantry often ate cabbage, beets, weeds and village rats to stay alive in brutal conditions?

Solzenitsen is a fine man. Or was. His Gulag Archeopelago is a masterpiece that should be required reading in High School onward. But this image of happy peasants trodding in snow smiling at the overflowing markets while listening warming to pealing church bells is just beyond the pale of logic.

It’s not a “common perception” in the sense of anyone actually perceiving it — for, unless one is a pervert, how would one ever perceive one’s friends and neighbors enjoying or not enjoying sexual activity?

True enough. I don’t peep in on people, but the perception is there among some friends of mine. But we need to tell that to Miss Poppy Dixon and some others who run these “Christian Apostate” sites that slam Christianity at every chance and mangle the words of Paul in Romans with the idea that Christians are only to have sex to make babies and that if you can avoid marriage–do so. OR that Paul hated females, etc.

On a site I used to visit over at SLATE magazine, known for Establishment, Manhatten leftist politics, writers are CONSTANTLY criticizing Christian “reliosithy” as we are “anti sex” and we need to “read up on the Song of Solomon more often”, etc. One writer asked “why do Christians hate sex so much—maybe cuz they’re no good at it.

No comment. But that, there’s the perception. In addition to what you said, I think what MIGHT be closer to the truth is that we don’t promote PROMISCUITY among young people, are not thrilled with strangers in the public schools telling our kids that no context of sex is any more moral or better than any other, and that its OK to mess around in Dad’s car in the backseat so long as you use a pack of condoms and understand the basic plumbing. So the fact that many of the more conservative Chrisitans are not happy about what is ACTUALLY the more trivialized version of sex and sex ethics is what annoys the education establishment, which is primarily liberal and leftist and secularist in my country.