Blind Faith or Numbers???

Yesterday there was an article in the paper, on how in essence, we as a society are "free" from the shackles of old fashioned conformism to make choices about our life and relationships.

"If you had said years ago that we would see many more people living together before marriage and double the number of kids being born out of wedlock, moralists would have seen it as proof of the decline of civilisation and the collapse of our moral fibre. But the reality is that the taboos we once thought immovable are completely flexible."

Salt believes such shifts show our maturity. "People are less preoccupied with sexuality and more concerned about discrimination, with sexism and racism and even with sustainability. Who cares if you're gay? Who cares if you live together without getting married?"

Likewise, the significance of marriage has diminished.

"People care less about the actual marriage, so they don't mind having kids outside of it."

I was thinking - it's a little bit of a simplistic presentation - all choices have consequences, where is the truth about those? Choices about sexual lifestyle affects your health - the numbers bear that out. Broken marriages affect people, especially children. But where is the acknowledgement of that???

It is really undergirded by a secular utopian blind faith, that is out of touch with our reality....

And that is what another article today points towards..... We make choices - good and bad and they have consequences.... but then the Bible has been saying the same thing for years - and now the stats show it might have actually known what it was talking about!!!

The three annual surveillance reports, to be presented at the Australasian HIV/AIDS Conference in Brisbane today, show that indigenous people, intravenous drug users and men who have sex with men are increasingly affected by HIV/AIDS, infectious syphilis and viral hepatitis.

Unprotected sex is also linked to an increased risk of cervical, oral and anal cancer and the risk rises with increasing numbers of sexual partners.

A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people who have had more than five oral-sex partners in their lifetime are 250 per cent more likely to have throat cancer than those who do not have oral sex.

It is a challenging area no doubt, especially for certain groups within our society, but unless we are willing to genuinely engage with reality, the stats of lifestyle choices and not a relativists "all choices are good" - how do we expect the situation to improve??

The ready availability of pornography and representations of teen and adult sexuality in advertising and popular culture could negatively influence the way children and teenagers view sex, she said.

''Young people who are not informed or ready for sex education are being inundated with messages encouraging sexual behaviour that they are not ready to process and do not understand the consequences of.''