Holy Christ. That is one hell of a post Fence. Here here!

[quote1237719959=𝄢 Fence 𝄇]
But we should have a proclivity not to act in a way that will cause us harm. Therefore those that reject the Pope's teachings on sex due to human nature, should also reject his teachings on wearing condoms for the same reason.

You seem to be confused about the capacity for a difference between a person's professed beliefs, their social and personal identity, and their actions in real life. That is, you seem to think there cannot be such a difference; you equate extramarital sex with a rejection of catholic dogma.

Going and buying some condoms (assuming they're available at all) is a very public, very pre-meditated act. It is very explicit. In a milieu where condoms are equated with promiscuity, it amounts to a declaration that you are a promiscuous person. It certainly amounts to such a declaration to yourself.
Having sex with someone outside of marriage is not necessarily public at all. Sex is an exceptionally easy thing to get carried away into even if one does not explicitly go out seeking it. "One thing leads to another". Because it is, or can be, private, and because of the ease of falling into it, one can minimize its impact on one's identity and consider it a one-time thing or a fit of passion. Moreover, in the Catholic frame, one can just go ahead and repent for it.

Here is a good example of cognitive dissonance in action, since you don't seem to include it in your picture of human nature:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_on_the_DL
Ask a guy who subscribes to that if he is 'gay', since, after all, he has sex with men. The answer will likely be a resounding no. He may even harbour and freely share plenty of derogatory beliefs about homosexual males. He may even be, say, a very pious Pentecostal churchgoer (perhaps extra pious, in order to reduce that dissonance). He probably doesn't go ask his doctor about how best to protect himself against STDs when having sex with other men.

You also misunderstand the way people assess risk in reality. Do you really think someone embroiled in a sexual encounter is likely to consider the risk of HIV transmission with perfect clarity of mind, relative to the ever-heightening appeal of the encounter itself? Maybe our 'natural proclivity to avoid harm' would come fully into play if HIV manifested itself as a giant spike that whips out and stabs you in the genitals, but it does not. It's an invisible, and much-mythologized and lied-about virus which you only stand a chance of contracting from one encounter, assuming your partner really has it, and anyway they look pretty healthy and they say they don't, and ok it'll just be this one time, etc. How do you think unwanted pregnancies occur?? HIV is especially terrible for our natural risk-detection because it can not manifest as an outward illness for years; you can easily not know your partner has it, and you can easily not know (and furthermore be unprepared/afraid to believe, "It wouldn't happen to me") that you have it.


[/quote1237719959]

Condensing the above, you are saying that people can know or accept that something is wrong or forbidden by doctrine and yet still fail to live up to that standard, and that I don't understand that. But of course I understand that. A person who calls himself a Catholic, but gives into temptation at the office party, can still be a Catholic, since they can still accept Catholic doctrine but simply have failed to live up to it's standards. But the responsibility for failing to meet this standard is not the Pope's but the individual in question, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that the Pope should moderate his teachings on extra martial sex just to accommodate human frailty, which it seems to me you are implying the Catholic church should do at least with regard to condom use. As John the Baddest has said, if the Pope was preaching don't use condoms, but feel free to screw around then he would rightly be condemned for irresponsibility, but he isn't doing that. He is advocating a strategy of sex only within marriage which if adopted widely would be successful in containing and reducing HIV infection. If people choose to follow only some of what the Pope is preaching but not all his teachings due to some aspect of their nature, then the responsibility for harm this might cause is theirs, not the Pope's.

[quote1237719959=𝄢 Fence 𝄇]

You have just accused the entire human race of being morons.
How many perfectly consistent individuals do you know?
Your psychology is all moralizing and no psychology.

[/quote1237719959]

I don't know any perfectly consistent individuals Fence, and just to show that my comments weren't meant as holier than thou, I myself am not perfectly consistent by any means.
Based on what scientists tell me, I know that being overweight is bad for me, but still I have a bit of a gut. Does the fact I know overeating is bad, but I still overeat make me a moron? Well perhaps it does, although many might say that's a bit over the top. But I was reserving the word "moron" for a behavior that I see as being of a different order...a kind of hypocrisy that I dislike intensely. The only analogy I come up with is this. Knowing overweight is bad for you but still overeating is one thing, but suppose you went to a gym regularly, declaring to the world I am a guy who looks after his health, then while on treadmill, the sweat pouring from your brow, you light up a cigarette and smoke it. If you saw that in a movie you would laugh and no doubt be quite happy to call the person a moron...that's the movie's joke after all. It's one thing for a Catholic to fail to meet the standards of their faith, but to engage in sex outside marriage, and yet piously refuse to wear condoms just because the Pope says you shouldn't seems to me a special order of stupidity. But let us not get bogged down in my use of invective. The important point is that just as I am responsible for any ill health that follows my failing to meet recommended health standards, Catholics who fail to meet the Pope's standards or only pick and choose what he's saying are responsible for the ill consequences of their actions....not the Pope.

[quote1237719959=𝄢 Fence 𝄇]

When an individual scientist gains religious dictatorial power and the status of the revered speaker for God to a billion people, and announces to those people and the countries that subscribe to him what God says their moral values should be, this will be a persuasive analogy.

[/quote1237719959]

You don't seem to have understood the point of my analogy. If the Pope was to advocate that sex outside marriage should be made illegal, or the state should ban the use of condoms, then I will quite happily condemn what he is saying. But if the Pope just says that it is wrong to have sex out marriage and a politician decides to use this to create a law making such sex outside marriage illegal then condemn the politician not the Pope. You seem intent on making the Pope responsible for other people's actions. And incidentally, if an eminent scientist makes a pronouncement on some topic, then given the massive influence science has on the billions of people world wide I am sure his pronouncement will be hugely influential. So I really don't know why you don't find my analogy persuasive.

Condensing the above, you are saying that people can know or accept that something is wrong or forbidden by doctrine and yet still fail to live up to that standard, and that I don't understand that. But of course I understand that. A person who calls himself a Catholic, but gives into temptation at the office party, can still be a Catholic, since they can still accept Catholic doctrine but simply have failed to live up to it's standards. But the responsibility for failing to meet this standard is not the Pope's but the individual in question, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that the Pope should moderate his teachings on extra martial sex just to accommodate human frailty, which it seems to me you are implying the Catholic church should do at least with regard to condom use.

Yes. This is exactly what he should do.
More specifically: I'm not claiming he should moderate the ideal regarding sex and say "Well, you can have a little sex outside of marriage, 'cause it's gonna happen anyway"; I'm claiming that he shouldn't be opposed to condoms or to making them available, just because it is going to happen, no matter how hard he preaches against it. The prohibition on condom use makes no sense in reality; it makes sense only in Catholic Utopia. His "strategy of sex only within marriage" isn't and has never been a very successful one in reality. It would be like advocating as a strategy for the elimination of chickenpox that all people should enter isolation and not come within ten feet of any other human beings for a few months until the virus dies out. Strictly, theoretically, it makes sense; realistically, it's insane.

Or let's say the ground isn't very good for crops, and there's a really nice plot of land across a gorge that would make life better for the people, so the pope tells all catholics to jump across the gorge. If 98% of them die because they can't make the jump, is the pope not to blame because he isn't responsible for their human frailty? He was only advocating a flawless solution to a problem that some catholics who suck at gorge-jumping, sadly, were too flawed and weak to live up to.

My point isn't even that having extramarital sex is as little a matter of control as being bad at jumping a gorge; I'm trying to show how the pope, as I said before, is accountable for the obvious outcomes of his policies even if they sound good in theory, and even if they only fail (consistently and predictably) because the human beings the policies involve are not perfectly consistent.

[blockquote]If people choose to follow only some of what the Pope is preaching but not all his teachings due to some aspect of their nature, then the responsibility for harm this might cause is theirs, not the Pope's.[/blockquote]

I think we've gone over this already: Declaring it a 'choice to follow only some of what the Pope is preaching' is disingenuous; I suspect there are relatively few who subscribe to catholicism but pick a few pieces of doctrine that they just don't agree with. This is like calling heroin addicts people who make the choice to keep being heroin addicts. Well, in some sense they do plan their actions such that they acquire and shoot more heroin...but in an important sense, it's not really a choice; it's a foreseeable weakness.

[blockquote]I don't know any perfectly consistent individuals Fence, and just to show that my comments weren't meant as holier than thou, I myself am not perfectly consistent by any means.
Based on what scientists tell me, I know that being overweight is bad for me, but still I have a bit of a gut. Does the fact I know overeating is bad, but I still overeat make me a moron? Well perhaps it does, although many might say that's a bit over the top. But I was reserving the word "moron" for a behavior that I see as being of a different order...a kind of hypocrisy that I dislike intensely. The only analogy I come up with is this. Knowing overweight is bad for you but still overeating is one thing, but suppose you went to a gym regularly, declaring to the world I am a guy who looks after his health, then while on treadmill, the sweat pouring from your brow, you light up a cigarette and smoke it. If you saw that in a movie you would laugh and no doubt be quite happy to call the person a moron...that's the movie's joke after all.[/blockquote]

I think this would be a great analogy, if the person just worked out at the gym and then smoked a cigarette at home afterward. I am certain there are many, many people who do just that, or who instead eat fatty food after coming back from the gym, or who find themselves in sexual encounters that they haven't rigorously and explicitly prepared for beforehand.
"Well, I'm a good, pious Catholic, but I have the suspicion that, if I met an attractive woman in private and she showed an interest in me and one thing led to another that I would end up having some crazy, extramarital sex with her, so I guess I should go pick up some condoms." I mean, you can see why that is an unrealistic train of thought, right? Based on what I said before? Even afterward, such a person would probably be racked with good Catholic guilt and resolve explicitly to never do such a thing again. As opposed to going "Well, it looks like I screw around. Better go buy some condoms so I can do it more and safely. Even though my priest said condoms are porous so that HIV shoots straight through, etc."

[blockquote]The important point is that just as I am responsible for any ill health that follows my failing to meet recommended health standards, Catholics who fail to meet the Pope's standards or only pick and choose what he's saying are responsible for the ill consequences of their actions....not the Pope.[/blockquote]
This is just why I accused you of moralizing instead of doing psychology, though.
Take my gorge example. All those Catholics who failed to properly train their long jumping skills are each individually responsible for their failure to meet the pope's vision of ideal humanity...? Maybe, if you like, but the whole issue is that they all, in reality, fell in the frickin' gorge, and they did so because they were, in their already-perfectly-obvious imperfection, ordered to jump it by their religious authorities. I don't really care if they're responsible for that or not; the pope clearly bears responsibility for the overall trend of people dying in a gorge regardless.

[blockquote]You don't seem to have understood the point of my analogy. If the Pope was to advocate that sex outside marriage should be made illegal, or the state should ban the use of condoms, then I will quite happily condemn what he is saying. But if the Pope just says that it is wrong to have sex out marriage and a politician decides to use this to create a law making such sex outside marriage illegal then condemn the politician not the Pope. You seem intent on making the Pope responsible for other people's actions.[/blockquote]

When the Pope says "Marriage exists solely between a man and woman... Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law", is it shocking that states which consider themselves vassals of the catholic church might interpret that as a policy recommendation??
Of course the pope is responsible for other people's actions: insofar as he influences how they act, he is responsible for the foreseeable ways in which he influences people's behaviour, and influence he does.
Here are two foreseeable outcomes of him condemning extramarital sex yet again and also condemning condoms: 1. Extramarital sex continues, as it has done since there has been 'marriage'; 2. Condoms are outlawed or not provided, and condemned and lied about in any country which crafts its policy to match Vatican policy.
He can keep making the same pronouncements and having the exact same disastrous effect on imperfect population after imperfect population; at what point do you think the impact of his pronouncements should get factored into his considerations!? He doesn't seem to think it should, on this matter, because the moral ideal matters more to him than the results.

[blockquote]And incidentally, if an eminent scientist makes a pronouncement on some topic, then given the massive influence science has on the billions of people world wide I am sure his pronouncement will be hugely influential. So I really don't know why you don't find my analogy persuasive.[/blockquote]

Fair enough. This is exactly why there is a huge public outcry when, say, an eminent scientist comes out with some claim that black people are less intelligent than whites: people know that the racist segment of society will leap on any such claim by anyone remotely credible and parade it about as justification for their distorted worldview. The significance of the consequences is exactly why such a scientist is usually called to responsibility and forced to publicly apologize and recant. If there were a subtle worsening of black people's standing in society after such a claim, after everyone had internalized and believed the scientist's claim, we would reasonably find him somewhat responsible for it.

I'll just toss another empirical point out there:
www.iteams.ca/impact_romania.php