Tag Archives: Morality

News

One third of young women admits regret for the way they lost their virginity

11 Comments

Dina sent me this article from UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

A recent survey of teenage girls conducted by Glasgow University revealed that in Britain — which has the third highest number of sexually active 13 to 15-year-olds in the world (only Denmark and Iceland have more) — more than a third of young women regret their decision to have sex so early.

A worrying 38 per cent of teenage girls regretted losing their virginity, and a fifth said they felt pressured to do so.

[…]…becoming sexually active at an early age can have devastating lifelong consequences, according to clinical psychologist Dr Michael Mantell. ‘It’s a psychological disaster waiting to happen,’ he says. ‘It leads to empty relationships and low self-worth.

‘The experience creates worry, regret, self-recrimination, guilt, loss of self-respect, shaken trust, depression, stunted personal development, damaged relationships and relationship skills. It can also have a negative impact on marriage, should one ever take place.’

[…]‘It has become the norm in our culture to be embarrassed if you have not had sex, as if there is something wrong with you, but, in my view, young people should be discouraged from rushing into it.’

The prospects of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases loom large in underage sex. But psychological damage is just as real a threat, according to Dr Mantell.

‘Having sex carries a sense of “being adult” for teenagers,’ he says. ‘This leads to the notion they can do other things that adults do, which is why data suggests teenagers who begin having sex at a significantly earlier time in their lives than their peers are more likely to engage in delinquent behaviour.’

There are other worries too, says Dr Mantell. ‘Girls who become sexually active in their teens are more than three times as likely to be depressed as those who don’t.

‘A girl’s self-worth is often damaged and she can come to rely on external evaluations of herself — “If I looked better, he would have stayed longer,” or “If I gave better sex, he would have wanted more.”

‘She knows she’s been “used”, which affects her ability to express affection and appreciation, and will always leave her wondering if it’s only about sex, and not her own particular qualities.’

[…]Psychologist Dr Mantell says when a girl experiences sex early in life and free of commitment, she learns an erroneous message that sex means nothing. ‘Her experience is that nothing happened as a result of her having sex, which creates the belief that sex and commitment have nothing to do with each other.

‘Later this can be carried into marriage, where the girl may believe that sex is not an important part of marriage when, clearly, it is.’

Dr Mantell says there is a physiological issue here, too. ‘Oxytocin is a chemical released into the system with sexual behaviour and is often linked to pregnancy and breast-feeding. It bonds people, one to another. When a young woman has multiple partners, some studies suggest her level of oxytocin is diminished, which can have longer-lasting effects — such as leading to bonding difficulties in marriage.’

The article has multiple frightening examples of how specific women lost their virginity and then experienced negative outcomes. I really recommend that everyone click through to the story (I linked to the printable version of the story, so no ads) and then read the cases of Kristen and Kimberley.

Related posts

Videos

Friday night movie: King Lear (1971)

Leave a comment

Thanks to the jerk who pulled down the Sandbaggers videos, I must now post a new movie, and here it is:

IMDB mean rating: [7.4/10]

IMDB median rating: [8/10]

Description:

The Shakespeare tragedy that gave us the expression “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” King Lear has not one but two ungrateful children, and it’s especially galling because he turned over his entire kingdom to them. Paul Scofeld is an ancient, imposing shell of a Lear tormented by his too-long life as well as by daughters he calls “untatural hags.” At one point, the king looks his eldest daughter, Goneril (Ireme Worth), straight in the eye and declares, “Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, of embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.” These are the troubles not even the best-trained family counselor could ever hope to resolve.

Happy Friday!

Related posts

News

Sean McDowell reviews Sam Harris’ new book “Free Will”

6 Comments

Jay Watts of LTI tweeted this book review by Sean McDowell.

Excerpt:

After rightly emphasizing the importance of the question of free will, Harris concludes, “Free will is an illusion” (p. 5). According to Harris, we are not the conscious source of our actions and we could not have behaved differently in the past than we did. He says, “I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat” (9). “In physical terms,” says Harris, “we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events” (27).

Harris rightly points out that there are three main approaches to the problem of free will and determinism: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. He then says, “Today, the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist” (16). But if determinism were true, as Harris asserts, why would any position be philosophically unrespectable? After all, people are determined to hold their beliefs—whether compatibilist, libertarian, or determinist—by forces outside of their control. Why would he bother to critique other positions if the people who hold them couldn’t have believed differently? In fact, his critique is just the result of chemicals moving in his brain, so why do they matter? What makes his chemicals more respectable than others?

Later in the book Harris says that giving up free will (and becoming more aware of the background causes of our feelings) allows people to have greater creative control over their lives. “Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings,” says Harris, “can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives” (p. 47). Do you see the contradiction? The idea of “steering” a more intelligent course through life, of course, has no meaning in a deterministic world. On Harris’ view we can’t steer anything! The belief that we can steer our lives is an illusion. All of our beliefs and behavior are entirely the result of forces outside our control. In one breath Harris says all our beliefs are determined, but then in another breath he speaks about steering the course of our lives. Which is it?

[…]He says that dispensing with the idea of free will allows us to focus on things that matter most—assessing risk, protecting the innocent, and deterring crime (p. 53). He seems to be implying that we ought to accept his deterministic views for the betterment of mankind. Yet again, if determinism is true then we can’t change any of our beliefs—we can’t freely follow his logic since our beliefs are already set. The very fact that he argues for his position undermines his stated belief in determinism.

Sean McDowell did a debate a while back in which he argued that morality was not rationally grounded on atheism because atheism denies free will, and free will is necessary for making moral choices. And here is the atheist Lawrence Krauss denying that free will exists. It’s very hard to see how there could be any freedom of the will if humans are just matter in motion, which is the view of humans that fits most naturally with atheism.

Another atheist William Provine also says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.

Like Provine, Krauss also denied that objective morality existed at all in his debate with William Lane Craig. His view is that morality evolves in different times and places arbitrarily, and that whatever evolves in any group is right for them in their time and place. It’s important to understand what the implications of atheism are for things like rationality and morality.

I always thought that the “freethought” name that atheists sometimes apply to themselves was ironic for that reason. Not only are they not free, but they have no non-physical minds to think with, either.