Catholic condom ban helping AIDS spread in Latin America: U.N.

Original story

Off topic: The original headline used the term Latam for "Latin America". Is this a common abbreviation?

 

This really comes as no surprise. In the late 80's, as AIDs was reaching epidemic proportions in Africa, the Vatican released an announcement to african catholic leaders that condoms were manufactured with "tiny holes" in them, thereby promoting the consensus among the people of "why bother using them if they wont prevent AIDS/pregnancy".

I'm a devout athiest, but have read a lot of books on the arguments and contradictions of religions. In my opinion, all religions, and especially the catholic church, have a lot to answer for regarding the historical and ongoing suffering and destruction of humanity.

 

I prefer to blame all of that on human stupidity in general. People will always find a reason to bash eachothers' heads in (nicer cave than me, etc), ban things (well... look at the UK), or say or do stupid things. You don't need religion for that.

What I do wonder though - if these people are such good Catholics they hang on the Vatican's every word, how come AIDS spreads? I highly doubt they are all raped. It's like that Simpsons episode, where Bart runs off with the pregnant teen: "I can't tell my parents I'm pregnant, we're very religious"...

 

Unfortunately, that train of illogic exists. I knew a girl in college who was sleeping with her boyfriend, but wouldn't use birth control for religious reasons. The rest of us (who were similarly religious) all but threw condoms at her, and basically pointed and laughed when she wound up pregnant.

 

New to me

The headline is a bad joke if you ask me. What spreads AIDS isn't lack of condoms. What spreads AIDS is sex with more than one partner.

It seems odd to me that people would follow the RC church's teachings in not wearing condoms (a point on which I disagree with that church) but then ignore the greater teaching of not having sex outside of marriage (which would almost instantly stop the spread of AIDS). To me this looks like people blaming the RC church (and thus religion) because others follow some of its teachings when those teachings should actually help solve the problem.

 

typical catholic church ********, lets promote not using condoms and then complain when pregnancy/abortions raise,

 

Alternatively, people who claim or believe themselves to be such good Catholics that they refuse to use condoms/other birth control could maybe stick to the other, equally if not more important rules of that Church, as in "no f'ing until you're married", of which you can also derive "no f'ing around" - ultimately leading to AIDS not being spread because everyone is only interlocked with one partner.

If you want to "get around", use common sense and henceforth protection. If you want to use neither, you shouldn't "get around".

 

I agree, never underestimate the stupidity of people! But you can't deny the violent and destructive histories of religions the world over, every one of which has been scientifically disproven, and are ultimately "man-made".

As I said, I'm an athiest, and always have been, but am interested in the phenomenon of religious belief. I accept that everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, and have never disregarded, or looked down upon anybody based on whatever faith they may have, but I do admit to getting angry about the influence that religions have, considering we are now in the 21st century. The power and influence that the RC church exerts throughout the world is downright scary.

Both my parents are protestant, but never raised me with a religious upbringing, prefering to allow me to make my own choice at a time that suited me. During primary school, I received the belt twice for refusing to "lower my head and close my eyes" when the assembly was asked to pray - that was at a non-denominational school; I have heard much worse from friends who attended catholic schools. In secondary, one of the most influencial teachers I ever met was forced to resign over his refusal to teach "creationism" as an alternative theory to evolutionary biology, again in a non-denomination school. Today it infuriates me that there are movements to teach "Creationism" as part of a scientific curriculum - in all honesty, is there anybody here that can state that they believe that the Earth is only six thousand years old?

Rant over - I'm going to get my valium

 

This is a big part of the reason that I consider the catholic church and it's senior hierarchy to be a morally corrupt organisation. And the pope, as far as I'm concerned, is hellspawn responsable for the deaths of millions.

Millions of stupid people, albeit, but millions nonetheless.

 

Not quite. But I'll get back to that.

It is not as simple. You know as well as I that people will say one thing and do the other. How many forum members do you think occasionally browse for porn? How many will publicly admit they do? Well then.

Religion has in part socio-cultural functions (you may argue that is not the true purpose of religion, but it does) --it is as much socio-cultural behaviour as personal philosophical conviction. Therefore many people will go through the motions even though they do not really believe, because that is the socio-culturally expected thing to do. Moreover, many cultures are happy to openly integrate religious beliefs with very un-religious behaviour: it is the most fundamentally "Christian" or "Muslim" cultures that sanction behaviours like beating one's wife or stoning "heathens" of different faiths or ways.

This is because people will encapsulate, split off or just boundary behaviours that are incompatible. We all boundary to some extent, and that is healthy: at work we behave differently than in the privacy of our own home, for instance. During the day, mild-mannered civil servant, but put a paint-ball gun in his hands at the weekend... Birmingham Broad Street on Friday night is full of otherwise "mature" adults letting their hair (and pants) down under the influence of alcohol and peer pressure/pleasure. Some people are more pathological in that as their behaviours are more extreme. They rationalise, they defend, they re-interpret or conveniently "forget". What we can't integrate, we encapsulate.

And whole families and communities can collude with each other in doing that too. Plenty of accounts of how the whole family knows about daddy abusing his little girl, but everyone's in denial, or how the whole community has an unspoken understanding not to leave girls alone with the vicar...

So in Christian/Muslim God-fearing Africa, society thinks nothing of stoning to death a woman accused of adultery (even if she was raped), or of beating disobedient wives. Men sleep around on Saturday night and pray in their Church/Mosque on Sunday. Their wife does not get the option to ask where they last put their penis or whether hubby, in the light of his infidelities, would mind putting on a condom.

Again, not as simple. AIDS can also be transmitted through contaminated blood products and bodily fluids (and we all know how good health care and plumbing is in the developing world), and be passed on from mothers to infants in the womb and through breast feeding. Treatments and strategies to contain the disease require money, expertise and infrastructure that is generally lacking in the Third World (we have all their doctors and nurses, remember? And Big Pharma needs to make its buck-- think of all the stock holders!).

Combine this with very poor understanding amongst the generally quite uneducated and illiterate population of how AIDS is spread and treated (most people don't even know what a virus is), add a sprinkling of superstitious beliefs and a combination of Christian or Muslim doctrine mixed with local witchcraft and you get a lot of people not taking adequate precautions to prevent infection and relying on shamanistic witchcraft to keep them safe, or even actively doing things that make matters worse (for instance one of the superstitions is that sex with a virgin will cure you of AIDS. The result is a lot of under age girls being raped --can't get her young enough to make sure that she's "pure", right?).

The women and children, of course, are the most powerless of all. A wife cannot refuse her husband his conjugal rights, even if she suspects he has been sleeping around and has been infected.

People need to make sense of the world --like people are trying to do in this thread now. You can try and get your head around complex and unforgiving reality, or you can believe in attractively simple and reassuring fairy tales. Guess which people will go for?

 

1) That's a little bit of a reach. It is pretty much impossible to "scientifically disprove" every religion since many of their claims are beyond our science - can you scientifically disprove any chance of there being an afterlife? Besides that, almost any religious person would agree that most other religions are man-made - but what do you do if even only one is right...

2) How many times have the popular beliefs of the people been used for war? Religion is only part of that. Most often it has been a struggle for power or resources that has lead to war - leaders simply use whatever tools they can find to motivate their people to follow them. A look back at history should confirm that. What started WW1? What was there reasoning behind WW2? (I'll admit that Hitler even tried to use religion but it could be argued that The theory of evolution was equally abused in the "science" of eugenics.) It is interesting that the Wikipedia article on the causes off WW1 as well as the article on the Nazis (which needs serious cleanup) both mention social darwinism as part of the causes and ideology behind those wars. Thus it could be argued that the theory of evolution was to blame for those wars - though I don't buy that argument any more than you would - to me it's the same as the "religion is to blame" idea.

Any deeply held world view should effect your life but I'll have to agree with you that the power of the RC church is scary.

True, but what percentage of the spread can be attributed to those causes? What would the numbers look like if you could eliminate sexual transmission (in which case a lack of condoms would not matter)? My point still stands.

I'm out of time so I'll have to get back to the rest later.

 

As a small aside to this, there was a very devout Christian (I didn't catch his name) some kind of pastor IIRC, on channel 4 news, calling for a ban on all abortions in the UK.

But the only place in the world where abortion is banned is Nicaragua, and that started in November last year and at least 82 deaths (88 according to C4News) have been attributed to it.

 

True, but just like rape, none of those things lay any "blame" on the Catholic Church/Vatican for the spread of AIDS.

If people choose to follow the no-condom rule, OK. But then they should also follow the other rules the same Church preaches - which include not ****ing just about anyone...

Rape etc just aren't relevant in my opinion - only in this particular article, of course - because it is about the Church prohibiting the use of condoms and thus "helping" the spread of AIDS? No, if you follow the Church's rules, you don't get AIDS through your own faults/actions. It really is that easy (in my opinion).



As for the "religion is bad, it's disproven" guy (sorry, I have been drinking): like I said before, we don't need religion to be a bunch of idiots bashing eachother's head in. Whether we use branches, clubs, sharp objects, rifles or smart bombs, we will always and always keep on killing eachother. We don't need religion to be stupid. Mankind IS stupid by default, and nothing is going to change that. If anything, religion may offer some comfort to some good people; and of course incite violence and more idiocy in others. It's a two-edged (or whatever the expression is) knife.

 

Religion helps though. People just need a reason and religion is a great motivator for getting a lot of people together militantly expressing conflicting views and trying to enforce these views on others for their unproven good. *Like* the Church telling people not to use Condom and not to **** when there is no proof that it will save their souls, only that it opens them to risk.

Abstinence isn't an effective contraceptive, especially when everyone around you is ****ing like crazy. It's hard enough sometimes to...with my gf...

Yeah, I'm just going to trail off with that.

Abstinence is fine as a rule, but not when that rule contradicts human nature, societal conventions and a lot of the supposed education that people are given.

Bear in mind also that the church also teaches that children are the best gift man can give to god and that everyone should have as many as possible, etc.

 

Here goes, being brief.

This is exactly what they have set out to achieve (IMO), it runs like a red thread thru out history. I guess that many of you view me as being daft, merely making far fetched statements and deluded connections, well, when they are using their influence in order to kill people (if not by hand, so by denying information, something which can be equally effective, and afterwards hiding behind religious beliefs as to appear innocent and ignorant), than I cant do anything else but call it for what it is, murder; which in my view makes them a bunch of mass murdering scum…period.


A friend of mine told me recently; mate; religion is the greatest destructive force ever to debase humanity. I agree, and sure as heck applies for those sick puppies leading their dearly "loved" children astray, and in this case….killing them. (Include wars and created conflicts into this equation as well.)



Layman analyze (thou, still as good as the next man) a rant ohhhh.


Here the Africans have only received one perception of reality (that of religion) and as a consequence of that they have been denied the room for other possibilities. It’s suppressing information, denying information and controlling information; this occurs in our schools and in our societies at large as well. (it’s by no means restricted to various religions) to name one outside the religious sphere,(that all of us comes in contact with on a daily basis) would be news media (how many human beings have they been responsible for killing, yes I’m dead serious, make no mistake about that, key word; information or lack thereof), so I guess that you as intelligent human beings knows exactly were I’m going with this, and it isn’t pretty. Now; these Africans are far worse off then we are, mainly because they have (at large) little to no education and as such all they know….


… is their perceived reality as firmly based and enforced by religion. More so than based on knowledge in terms of how the decease works (to stay within the educational part, so to speak.). For me it’s obvious that the church wishes them dead, In fact, they appear to be prepared to let these people die without any hesitation what so ever. If not, they would tell “their” dear cheep to use a condom, Granted; the same approach and standpoint is used by the church to a large extent in Europe as well, but you know (as do the church) as do I, that over here we know how aids works and we have also received an education that extends outside the religious sphere. (IMO) that means that the rants conducted by the church from time to time over here, is merely a smokescreen and only done as to keep up their perverted appearance and leave ample room for absolute denial of any wrong doing (in case of Africa) they can fall back on “we are only preaching the "essence" of our religion” (with the “lost” uneducated masses in Africa / type of mentality, amongst others, I’m sure) whereas they in Europe just have to state that “well, what we say to you doesn’t really matter anyway so why not allow us to go on with our preaching’s” /kind of motivation /mentality. However, in Africa it becomes a painful reality for those that don’t know “better”, and it’s (again) done by using suppressed information, controlled information, and information denied, the Church is more than aware of its influence in the region and are (again) using it as a mean to kill people.


I’m getting to the point were I'm actually darn close to highly question whether these evil *******s are human! Heck, whilst on the subject (on a role here) I could easily list ex number of questionable characters whom currently are creating mayhem around the world too.

Sometimes one does seriously doubt...




Edit:

People always say; you can’t change human nature. My response is; first define human nature please. So what is human nature? Well, for me the natural state of a human is that of harmony, clarity, brilliance and love. That’s my interoperation as well as belief, all you need to do is to look at a young child and you can see all the four parts working in harmony. That’s for me the natural state of the human being, so when someone tells me that it’s in human nature to kill other human beings, it makes no sense. Makes no sense despite historical events, because somewhere along the line it goes wrong. Where? I don’t know, but wrong it goes and the human’s natural state gets replaced with something else. (my Interpretation)

I don’t believe that mankind is stupid, not at all, look at all that we have created when in balance, whilst in our natural state; this shows on a huge brilliance in my view. That it goes wrong (as previously mentioned) is something that I can’t explain, heck, I even don’t have a theory as to why. But again; killing fellow human beings is not (IMO) within our natural state....


...perhaps Khensu, it's the questions we should be looking for and not the answers? given answers tends to most often end up staring us in the eye and leave us none the wiser.




In case someone seeks to put me in the naughty corner, I’m in my bunker warming up..knock first please.

cheers.

 

Studies have shown where abstinence is taught instead of using contraception and sexual education that the same number of teenagers have sex only difference is the ones who know about contraception and sexual education dont get pregnant or spread STD's as much.

Catholic church hushed up the abuse of children now its just conderming people to death.

 

I read your response to my post regarding (my belief in) the falicy of religion, and fear I have caused offense to you with my remarks, so I would like to apologize for this. The thread appears to be taking a detour from the original post.

As regards your mention of social darwinism, and its progression to the philosophies of utalitarian bio-ethics, I would have to agree that this is of increasing concern (although from a personal point of view, I agree with a couple of the points, based purely upon my own health). I can recommend the book "Culture of Death" by Wesley J. Smith as a truly shocking investigation into the movement. Although I may come across as holding the opinion that religion is the root of all evils, utalitarian bio-ethics (now taught in ivy-league universities) is a product of science and philosophy, and if ever allowed to pass has the potential to cause considerable destruction. Perhaps Huxley and Orwel weren't that far off the mark after all!

 

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay...795&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjqUmuMhTsM

Similar videos:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6605323313778610304
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_dQ5KJ8rgA

Things like this are awfully close to reality in England too. I spent every day and evening of my summer holiday, every sunday day, and every wednesday evening in Catholic camps like this under various names (Bible Summer School, Sunday School, etc) ever since I was born (literally, they have areas for the newborns) and my younger brother and sister were the same. Thankfully, by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I was able to realise what was going on and stop my parents from sending me. My brother and sister did the same and thankfully my other two sisters never got to experience it, though one of them has since become a devout christian.

The church isn't evil, it's just misrepresented in my opinion and, if it were represented truly to everyone and if peoples minds weren't clouded by these beliefs, then the church would lose followers and be investigated by the government. They are detrimental to the future survival of man on so many levels.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bB2rt3IKJc

Brainwashing...complete and utter brainwashing!!!

To me, this amounts to child abuse.

On a side note, I dont think I'll comment any more on this thread in case I get banned or pi$$ off anybody.

 

Whoa there! I take no issue with your sentiment, but your facts are seriously out of whack. Try here. According to UN data for 2001, three countries (El Salvador, Malta and the Vatican) impose an absolute ban. The article you cite (dated 7 Oct 2007) states that the absolute ban applies to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile. But even to state that only these countries "ban" abortion is misleading - while the data in my link is slighly out of date (last updated 2005), it states that abortion is "banned altogether or permitted only to save a mother's life" in 62 countries, with an aggregate population of 1.1bn (17.3% of the World population).