A double standard

Okay, Norris--Erin seemed disinclined to go another round, so I didn t discuss the predictive value of Humanae Vitae, but I can. First, some basics. I m sure you know all this, but possibly not everyone does. For if A, then B to have PREDICTIVE value, it s not enough that first thing A happens and then thing B happens as well. One must show an effective means of causation between A and B. Thus, I declare that it is morally wrong that men shave their beards, and if they continue to do so, the stock market will go down. All over American, men get up and shave, and behold, the stock market eventually goes down. That doesn t make me a prophet. This is the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. Paul VI predicted three things--as I interpret the document. One: moral standards would be lowered, by which he meant that marital infidelity and teenage sex would become more prevalent. Two: Men would lose respect for women. Three: Governments might enforce birth control on the people. Bear in mind that even if one could show that all three of these things happened just as he said, that still wouldn t mean he had correctly predicted that birth control caused them. It would only show that birth control became widely used at the same time that these other events happened. Correlation is not causation. In addition, to prove the Pope right, you d have to establish some baseline criteria for all the events under discussion, so you could show that they had in fact increased as a result of increased use of birth control. You d have to know how much marital infidelity there was before the sixties, and whether it was increasing for other reasons at an earlier time, and then you d also have to have good measures of how much there really is now. You have to know all these things--and more--before you can draw any meaningful conclusions about what changes can be attributed to birth control in an objectively valid way.
Similarly for the Pope s second point--you d have to first establish some measurable criteria to determine what it would mean if men respected women. Then you d have to show that at some time in the past, these criteria were met--that man rarely or never treated woman as a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires until after the invention of effective birth control. And then you d have to determine that men started disrespecting women because the women had access to birth control, and not for some other reason. His third point--that if birth control technology exists, governments may seek to use it for their own purposes--is more acceptable as a prediction, but somewhat irrelevant, because it is so obvious. Governments always consider using whatever technology is available. However, the Pope s implication that permission for ordinary Catholics to use birth control would result in widespread government coercion has not been substantiated at all. The fact that a Catholic couple from Dubuque chooses to have 4 children rather than 14 has exactly zero causative power relative to Mao s one-child policy. China--the only government I know of so far that has actually used coercive birth control measures as a government policy--did so without reference to the Pope s opinion. I don t believe that you, Erin, or the Pope has good enough data to discuss the Pope s predictive ability in any meaningful way. You can, of course, trade unsubstantiated opinions.

What church is that that teaches married women to keep their legs together" even when they are married? So married people are not supposed to have sex either? Is that Church teaching? According to the Catholic Church, if a married couple are not at least *willing* to having a child, then, no, they should not be having sex.

What does Church doctrine teach is the consequence for a married couple that ends up childless? Would the Catholic Church then renig on a marriage between two of its members who ended up childless? How does the RCC put into practice this policy of chastising sex between married couples that does not produce offspring? Do the Protestant religions have the same doctrine?