[quote]LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) – Since Tony Alamo’s start as a California street preacher more than 40 years ago, the self-styled evangelist’s story has been colorful and checkered… Alamo was charged but not convicted of other crimes, including child abuse. Now the 74-year-old is accused by former church members of abusing children and running an organization in which girls who just reached puberty can marry. Agents raided his southwest Arkansas compound Saturday and placed six girls in state custody.
On Monday, Alamo spoke of the allegations with a mix of denial and defiance, saying that he never promoted sexual abuse but that he believes there’s a mandate from the Bible for young girls to marry.
“In the Bible, it happened. But girls today, I don’t marry 'em if they want to at 14, 15 years old. Because we won’t do it, even though I believe it’s OK,” Alamo said.
On Saturday, he had said that for girls having sex, “consent is puberty.”[/quote]
Here is where people begin to have issues with religion when you have such nut cases using the Bible to excuse or justify their behavior.
I was struck also by how increbibly gullible (ie., stupid) people can be when following “spiritual leaders”, that they would actually believe THIS guy is a Man of God and would turn over their children to his custody and care.
I mean, come on. Does he look like a spiritual leader to you? Would you trust your kids with him? I wouldn’t buy a used car from him.
HERE’s a whole bunch of good info on him if you’re interested.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]I read that quote yesterday and was struck by it.
I was struck also by how increbibly gullible (ie., stupid) people can be when following “spiritual leaders”, that they would actually believe THIS guy is a Man of God and would turn over their children to his custody and care.
I mean, come on. Does he look like a spiritual leader to you? Would you trust your kids with him? I wouldn’t buy a used car from him.
HERE’s a whole bunch of good info on him if you’re interested.[/quote]
When you’re in the dark night or desperate to hold on to some sort of faith and hope then you will believe, especially if you have had some religious exposure. One thing I’ve found in my experiences with religion is that there is a correlation with education and the depth of faith of the follower. It’s all unscientific but I’ve noticed that those with limited education tend to be more “gullible” to these types of people.
[quote=“Namahottie”]Evangelist: ‘Puberty’ is age of sexual consent
[/quote]
If you go to this Australian forum, with around 100,000 members, you will find that this is a remarkably common secular view there. It is defended repeatedly whenever the issue of ‘age of consent’ arises. You will be hard pressed to find dissent from this view, other than among the secular conservatives and religiously inclined.
The fact is, many kids these days are having sex in their early teens and society is getting used to it. The age of consent in Australia is generally 16, but younger teens who have sex aren’t prosecuted or anything. It’s just natural, right?
It’s about the age of consent, based on a bunch of studies of development
He proposes three boundary ages
12 - when you can physically have sex - when women reach puberty
16 - when you’re intellectually mature - people under 16 score quite badly on intelligence tests
25 - when you have some kind of emotional maturity - people under that age don’t have proper self regulatory systems
Which is a bit like a boot sequence when you think of it - I particularly like the way there’s ten years between 16 and 25 where you’re smart but clueless.
As he puts it -
[quote]I’d draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I’d lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I’d come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you’re 35, “she’s legal” isn’t good enough.
What I wouldn’t do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12.[/quote]
He makes a good case for an age of consent which is at least 16, and preferably 18 or even 21. It doesn’t help that the onset of puberty now takes place far earlier than before, and the exposure of immature minds to sexual content has increased dramatically. That’s a bad combination.
12 - when you can physically have sex - when women reach puberty
16 - when you’re intellectually mature - people under 16 score quite badly on intelligence tests
25 - when you have some kind of emotional maturity - people under that age don’t have proper self regulatory systems[/quote]
50 - when you have the money it requires to raise a child.
why is puberty occurring earlier? it’s because of the constant sexualisation of the media and teen culture.
OTOH, why should sex be out of bounds for kids (amongst each other of similar ages) as long as birth control including but not limited to condoms is freely available to them. there are many legal precedents in Australia (and i am sure other countries) for turning a blind eye to sexual liaisons between 14 and 16 year olds, for example.
it’s really only a problem with unnecessary (ie too early) pregnancies and in cases of coercion from older people, almost always (but not universally) men in positions of ‘authority’ like these recent few pastor fellows.
Why? Because pre-teen, teen, and even newly post-teen brains are tiny, underdeveloped, and immature. This is why their decision making, forward planning, evaluation, cognitive assessment, judgment, and rational thinking processes are so pathetic, and why if not restrained and guided they make complete disasters of their lives. As much as they hate to hear it, adults do know better and are smarter than teens.
The main problem is that young people have underdeveloped brains in which the key areas concerning forward planning, judgment, careful reasoning, self control, and all the other things I mentioned previously, are still immature. These areas don’t finish developing until after 21 years of age.
This is why no matter how many times they are taught to do the right thing, and no matter how many times you demonstrate to them that certain actions lead to ill consequences, you cannot rely on them to make intelligent, sensible, and maturely considered decisions. Their brains are simply weak in these areas. They’re emotional morons, they’re incredibly bad planners, they can’t think seriously about anything beyond about a week, and their reasoning skills are just atrocious.
You can give them all the sex education you want, they’re still going to sleep around, practice unsafe sex, and have unwanted pregnancies. You can give them all the driver education you want, they’ll still act like idiots on the road. Same with cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. All the education in the world won’t stop them grabbing a ciggy, drinking themselves blind, and shooting up. They’ll do it because they want to, and because their peers tell them to do so. They’re not complete morons, they’re just not in sufficient control of themselves. They’re not completely rational beings, they’re running on hormones.
That’s why we have to keep certain privileges away from them, because they’re incapable of reliably exercising them responsibly. This is also why they are so easily manipulated by the media and their peer groups, and why when they enter university they’re so easily swept up into the local eagerly waiting cult/political/environmental/other lobby groups. Their minds are intellectual putty. Great for messing about with, almost useless for thinking properly.
Teenage girls have been breeding successfully since the dawn of whaddeva. the last hundred years, or so, we have artificially extended childhood by imposing education on all in the west.
Yawn. Society dealing with its fetishisation of youth… Youth is now a commodity like anything else. We can’t buy it, despite the beauty industry, so we try to control it.
I didn’t leave school 'til I was 23. Spent the last ten years, building a career. I am still not particularly solvent, due to my choice of career. Now I have a miniscule window of time before the menopause to attract a mate (a hell of a lot less easy in your 30s than when you are 17, believe me, for all everyone’s talk about teens not being ‘ready’…), and breed. Started to menstruate when I was 11.
I think women get tired of hearing they are too stupid before 25 and too ugly after. That’s always the not particularly subtle subtext.
well, precisely that attitude has done humanity well enough for hundreds of thousands of years. the idea of a ‘legal age of consent’ is a very recent one, and the actual line is purely arbitrary. anyway, if you say that 18 year olds can vote in one country, why can’t they drink there too? why does the age of consent vary so much in different countries? it is arbitrary, and really means very little. let’s pout the age of consent up to 50, because i’m sure we’re all so much wiser at 50.
These days? Sheesh my granmother came home preggers at that age.
It’s not only these days fortigurn it’s been going on for thousands of eyars that teenagers have been promisous. It’s nothing new.[/quote]
I said these days many kids are having sex in their early teens and society is getting used to it. That wasn’t the case in my grandmother’s day, or yours.
Doubtful. I don’t know how old, but it’s doubtful that she was that young. Rabbinical commentaries seem to indicate an older age was common for girls.
I don’t think compulsory education extends childhood. Every society going back tens of thousands of years has had a form of compulsory education.
I think you’ll find that controlling youth is a theme of human societies for about the last 30,000 years. And for extremely good reasons. They need to be controlled. It’s only in the last 10 years or so that we’ve been able to understand scientifically exactly why they need to be controlled, and the extent to which that control needs to be applied.
I think breeding is best done when you’re able to support yourself financially, and you’re mentally and emotionally mature. There’s a wealth of evidence indicating teenage mothers are less than the best choice.
That’s not the subtext here. All kids are ‘stupid’ before 25 (for a given value of ‘stupid’).
Evidence?
You’re right, the idea of a ‘legal age of consent’ is very recently indeed. I think it’s only documented back to about 4,000 years.
You would have to ask the people concerned. But different types of decisions require different forms of judgment, and incur different levels of potential harm. The potential for harm by allowing an 18 year old to vote is considerably less than letting them drink, or drink and drive.
It differs for a range of reasons. But no, it is not always arbitrary, and in many cases it means a great deal.
There’s no need for that. If you read the relevant scholarly literature (and I would advise people participating in this thread to do so, it will mean we’re not simply all airing our personal prejudices), you’ll find the relevant intellectual and emotional maturity is fully formed by 25 at latest.
[quote=“Fortigurn”] I said these days many kids are having sex in their early teens and society is getting used to it. That wasn’t the case in my grandmother’s day, or yours.
Well my granmother and pops certinaly got used to it pretty quickly. So did many of their friends. OK nobody spoke about it so openly but they was all the same thinking about it and doing it. Before our grandmothers there were there mther and grandmothers who were doing to same thing.
As for Mary, many scholars thinks she was in her early teens… but young she was. Just hat God is just as perverted as the rest of humanity.
and you always ask for evidence. what is it with you? how can we get evidence of people having children at the age of puberty, except by an extension of possibility. it is possible at puberty, so it has happened at puberty for a looong time. as long ago as John found that it could actually fit into mary, mary got pregnant as soon as possible. i mean, most cavemen died before 30 so they have to have squeezed out a few before 20 or so or we would not be here.
4,000 years, if true, is an extremely short blink in the history of humanity. unless you believe that it all started 6,000 years ago.
[quote=“Satellite TV”][quote=“Fortigurn”] I said these days many kids are having sex in their early teens and society is getting used to it. That wasn’t the case in my grandmother’s day, or yours.
Well my granmother and pops certinaly got used to it pretty quickly. So did many of their friends. OK nobody spoke about it so openly but they was all the same thinking about it and doing it.[/quote]
I’ve put the important parts in bold. Your grandmother and pops don’t constitute ‘society’, and the fact that ‘nobody spoke about it so openly’ confirms my point.
Yes there were. But nowhere near as many, and nowhere near as accepted.
I don’t think ‘many scholars’ who are actually academically relevant think she was in her early teens.
Well He would have been if He had actually had sex with her, but he didn’t.
I don’t think anyone has suggested 25 years as the age of consent, no.
Sorry, I’m used to discussions on a forum with higher standards. A place where wild speculation and personal prejudices are not considered evidence, where posters are required to make intelligent, rational arguments on the basis of verifiable evidence, and where use of appropriate scholarly literature and recognized academic works is both common and encouraged. It’s a religious forum.
That is not actually what I am asking you for.
That isn’t the point under contention.
What? I have read this several times, but it is completely incongruent with any of the relevant accounts (historical or otherwise). It simply makes no sense at all. What’s this about John getting Mary pregnant as soon as possible? Who’s this ‘John’? Not John the Baptist obviously, and Mary’s husband was Joseph.
This is not being disputed. I’m looking for evidence that ‘that attitude has done humanity well enough for hundreds of thousands of years’, where ‘that attitude’ refers to puberty being the age of consent, and ‘well enough’ means some kind of quantifiable social good which was subsequently lost when a higher age of consent was proposed. But perhaps neither of those are what you meant, in which case I’ve misunderstood you.
If all you meant by ‘well enough’ is ‘humans reproduced’, then I agree. The attitude that puberty is the age of consent is perfectly ok if all we’re interested in is human reproduction. It also has benefits for older men and women interested in having sex with pubescent teens and pre-teens.
It is extremely short in the history of humanity. But in your terms it’s incredibly long. I don’t believe you had 4,000 years in mind when you made your post. Possibly 250.
From these recent posts I think it’s clear that Namahottie’s distaste for the original statement she quoted is a minority opinion these days. As in Australia, it seems that elsewhere in Western society puberty is considered the new age of consent, if only de facto.
I’d keep the UK age of consent, i.e. 16. And I wouldn’t lock people up if the age difference wasn’t too much, i.e. 17 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend.
Why would you do that, Magesty? And please, Sire, don’t post a picture as your response [/quote]
Based on the Slate article I linked to, the studies he quoted, my considerable life experience and my royal infallibility. Shouldn’t you be more snivelling?
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