SPRT - Science in Pursuit of Religious Truth

A weblog for rational persons of religious faith. Our motto is, "The only thing keeping you from seeing 'SPiRiT' here is two i's." The overall tone of this weblog will (typically) be conservative and/or libertarian. We will address legal, social, political and economic issues, and anything else we feel like discussing.

"It's when they don't attack you that you should worry, because it means you are too insignificant to worry about."
- Malcolm Muggeridge

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Location: midwestern U.S., United States

I am married. I have two sons and a daughter who was born on by birthday! I was blessed to be born into a family of women (my mother, her mother, her sisters) who are fashionable and ladylike and strong-willed and individualistic, and they were and are great role models. I don't think women have great role models anymore, and I also think style is more than clothing, so I created this blog to offer my take on the topic.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey: Cohorts in Depravity

Two of the most depraved individuals whose stain needs to be removed from our culture are Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey.

Today's Townhall.com has a great article by Mike Adams (I confess, one of my favorite columnists there) about Margaret Sanger, the "foundress" and patron taint of Planned Parenthood. As those of us on the pro-life battlefield know, Sanger was no friend of women, blacks, the poor, or children. Her writings rank right up there with the delusional rants of Joseph Goebbels. As with everything they do, Planned Parenthood has sanitized and sterilized Sanger's background and beliefs to make them palatable to the unsuspecting public.

I intend to read the book Adams refers to in his article today.

As far as Alfred Kinsey is concerned, the best resources available that I know of are available through Dr. Judith Reisman's website. You have to read her writings. You will not believe what Kinsey was allowed to get away with. Kinsey's work is even more sordid than Sanger's, and yet he is deified in academic circles. Not to be a plot spoiler, but here's a question that might provoke you into doing a bit of research on your own: didn't anyone wonder or question how Kinsey got information about 2-year-old children allegedly having multiple orgasms in 24 hours???

If you find that question - or its answer - appalling, then you owe it to yourself to check out Reisman's site. And spread the word. Thanks to Reisman's work, as well as a documentary called "Kinsey's Paedophiles" produced by British Television just a few years ago, Indiana University (the site of the Kinsey Institute) is feeling the heat. They have had to resort to claims that any "illegal" research was not done at the Institute. Well, I certainly feel better!

And now a new film about Kinsey starring Liam Neeson in the lead role is in production. You can rest assured that the purpose of the film will be to portray Kinsey as a cultural champion and an intellectual giant, instead of the deviant and fraud that he was.

Anyone with a shred of concern over the education of their children should bring themselves completely up to date on the real works, beliefs and writings of Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey - the stuff that's hard to find. Not the prettied-up, edited versions that Hollywood and Big Media spew out.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Science in support of abstinence

By way of reminder, my position in (and reason for creating) this blog is that science and religion should have an easier alliance, and that the most critical connection between the two is the pursuit of truth.

People of faith are frequently characterized in popular media as being indifferent or even hostile to scientific truths - as if they are inclined to believe things despite their being able to be disproven. As I have mentioned previously, this is not faith, but superstition.

And yet, in my observation, it is often people who purport not to subscribe to any particular religious faith (or, indeed, to have none whatsoever), and who also claim to worship only science, who have the greatest disregard for truth. As in scientifically demonstrable truth.

As I have argued here before (and will again), nowhere is that clearer than in matters of sexuality and popular culture. Abortion is perhaps the most extreme example. A human baby in utero is referred to - even in medical literature! - as a "product of conception" or "uterine contents." In no other context that I can think of is a human being treated like an inanimate object. Even when dead. (Can you imagine a funeral director asking the deceased's grieving family what burial outfit they would like to place on the "coffin's contents"?)

But many issues of sexuality as exalted by our culture are deceptions. And (as is so often the case), science is our ally here.

One could certainly derive the desirability of abstinence until marriage and monogamous fidelity thereafter from looking at medical risks associated with multiple sexual partners. The list of sexually transmitted diseases alone should be enough to prove the point that promiscuity is antithetical to human health. Syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, the 60-plus strains of human papilloma virus (some strains of which manifest as genital warts, and at least two of which are linked to cervical cancer). And then of course, there is HIV/AIDS. In that case, promiscuity is death. Lovely stuff.

Those who advocate the sexually libertine lifestyles manage rarely to discuss this, except in conjunction with the discussion of teaching children to use a condom, or demanding government funding (read: more money from all of us) to find cures for things we wouldn't have in the first place if we weren't sleeping around.

Over 20 years ago, my mother related to me a conversation she had with a pathologist at a clinic in our hometown. He told her that he was seeing shocking numbers of cellular abnormalities in the pap smears of college-aged young women. He said that they had already had multiple partners by the time they were in their 20's, and that this was already causing problems with the cellular development in their cervixes. "The human female body is not made to have large numbers of sexual partners," he asserted. "The body begins to develop antibodies and reject sperm. Many of these young women are going to find it difficult if not impossible to get pregnant. We are going to see an epidemic of infertility in the next ten to fifteen years," he said.

Certainly, there are news articles all the time now about the rise in infertility. Some is no doubt attributable to women waiting until later in life to try to get pregnant. But how much? Is there a correlation between promiscuity and infertility? Is anyone even talking about it?

In this vein, there is an excellent article in the Spring 2004 issue of the Human Life Review. In his article, "The Supreme Court and the Assault on Marriage," Donald DeMarco (Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at St. Jerome's University, Waterloo, Ontario) uses immunology in support of his argument that marriage (and sex) is meant to be between one man and one woman, and that the expression "the two shall become one flesh" is not merely a theological statement, but also a biological expression of a scientific truth. The article is available online, but I want to excerpt a passage from his article here:

The contributions of immunology on the nature of two-in-one-flesh warrants further elaboration. Our immune system, certainly one of the great marvels of nature, equips us with 100 billion (100,000,000,000) immunological receptors. Each of these tiny receptors has the uncanny ability to distinguish the self from the non-self. Consequently, they are able to immunize or protect our bodies against the invasion of foreign substances that could be harmful to us.

Marvelous as nature is, it is never extremist. From a purely immunological point of view (from the standpoint of an all-out defensive strategy), a woman's body would reject the oncoming sperm, recognizing it as a foreign substance. But this is precisely the point at which nature, we might say, becomes wise. If our immune system regards sperm as a potential enemy, then fertilization would never take place, and the human race would have come to an early demise with the passing of Adam and Eve.

But something extraordinary occurs, which makes fertilization and the continuation of the human race possible. Traveling alongside the sperm in the male's seminal fluid is a mild immunosuppressant. Immunologists refer to it as consisting of "immunoregulatory macromolecules." This immunosuppressant is a chemical signal to the woman's body that allows it to recognize the sperm not as a non-self, but as part of its self. It makes possible, despite the immune system's usual preoccupation with building an airtight defence system, a "two-in-one-flesh" intimacy.

Isn't it plausible that a woman's receipt of immunosuppressant molecules from 5, 10, 20, 50 men would affect her immune system's ability to distinguish "self" from "non-self"? Isn't it possible that years of sexual activity with many sexual partners could render a woman either immunologically compromised, or else incapable of receiving a man's sperm once she decides she actually wants to conceive?

Yes, this is dense and complex stuff. It is difficult to understand. But it is the truth. And I don't hear about anyone adding this to the public school's "health" curriculum.