Not from where I'm sitting. Very few people actually go to church here you know. It's very different to the US.

We were a colony founded on scoundrels and prostitutes, although most of the scoundrels were just trying to feed their families, and most of the prostitutes were only doing the same.

Ok, got it. They all just popped-up out of the ground atheists who dislike women who like sex. Clear as a bell.

No rkz, that's not even close to what I said.

I, personally, at one time in my life, became . . . dissatisfied that the number of men I'd been with had been in single digits (i.e., under 10).

So I set out to correct that insufficiency. I was happy when I reached 10! But I kept going . . . :)

Rkz, it's not religion, it's greed. People--both men and women--like to think they have something that no one else has had. The more people who have shared it, the less impressive it is that you have it.

Religion in general does nothing but codify existing human norms. The greed came first.

vice versa...
 

I've asked before whether it is realistic to expect cultural "norms" to have developed in a vacuum, completely isolated from the influence of religion. Is religion incapable of having any effect on society? That would be amazing to me, considering that religion has intimately involved in every aspect of millions of people's lives for all these many years. After all that, it has no effect at all. Incredible.

Religion: the thing that only has good qualities, and no bad ones. Ever.

You're missing the point, Flint. People made religion. Religion has an effect on society, but it is first a symptom of society. Anything in any religion is by definition somebody's desired norm because it had to come from somewhere.

It's not that religion has no bad qualities. It's that people have bad qualities, with or without religion.

No, I'm not missing that point. I titled my last post "vice versa" to indicate that it goes both ways, not just one.

Yes, people can have bad qualities, and codify them as bad aspects of otherwise decent religions. Thereupon, they are deemed the desire of an omnipotent deity, the opinion of which one can only disagree with upon pain of eternal hellfire. People that are roped into whatever the idea is, from that point, aren't getting it from a "human" source. Their understanding is that their "human" desire to disagree with the idea is invalidated.

That's assuming that people are more influenced by their god than their church community, which is arguable.
For example, I know people who tithe to 2 churches; the one they go to, and the one they stopped going to becuase they don't like the new priest or something. They don't want to appear to have stopped tithing to their old church community, they don't want those people talking shit about them behind their backs - even if god knows the truth.

Religion is the tool not the agenda.

I'm not arguing whether religion is a human institution, that's obvious. I'm saying that it has a special leverage to influence people; that it's human origins become obscured by the very nature of what it claims to be: a "voice from above" that directs human endeavor. Whether this is actually the case has no bearing on the perceptions of many people, namely those who adhere to the idea that religion is what it claims it is.

I'm not religious at all, and I am not interested in having sex without love and commitment. I don't want to risk being taken advantage of or treated with disrespect, or doing the same to someone else.

That's not to say that I object to other people having sex with multiple partners. It's just not for me.

It's the "objecting to other people" that rkzenrage was attributing to religion.

Right, but (wow, it's a struggle to phrase this coherently) to say that any objection to other people having promiscuous sex must derive from religion, implies that the only arguments against promiscuous sex are those derived from religion. I was pointing out that there are non-religious reasons to object to promiscuous sex, and that the choice to make that a matter of personal behavior or one of public judgement is more based on personality than anything else.

As to the fact that women are more looked down on for having multiple partners, religion is obviously a factor in that, but I don't believe that it is the only factor.

Who, exactly, is looking down on these women?
Of course we've all heard that, so it must be true... but I gotta say, I'm not seeing it actually happening.

the scene in The Witches of Eastwick where the Red Head is in the grocery store........