24th November 2010
“The early Christian, Judaic and Graeco/Roman view of sex was that a man placed a seed, a fully formed miniature human being, inside a woman who nurtured it. This idea continued until quite recent times. The woman provided no genetic component and hence the patriarchal view of property and society. To Jews, Christians and Muslims if a man's seed was placed anywhere but inside the woman he was killing his posterity. Therefore any sexual activity that did not involve the chance of procreation was sinful.”
Anon.
November 24th, 2010 at 10:10
Hmm.. Then it’d be a horror story to go back in time and tell them that a man kills millions of sperm every single day, and a woman an egg every month. Cool!
November 24th, 2010 at 19:37
“The early Christian, Judaic and Graeco/Roman view of sex was that a man placed a seed, a fully formed miniature human being, inside a woman who nurtured it. This idea continued until quite recent times.”
Where did this statement come from? How do we know what “The early…view of sex was…” ? I need more information.
November 24th, 2010 at 19:55
WD… I’ve griped before about the problem with having an anonymous “quote”, it could come from anyone, or even no one, with any amount (or no amount) of actual fact-checking. I’ve always thought that the idea behind having a “quote” website is that the quotes come from real, verifiable sources. This could have been mad up today!
One of the philosophies that goes hand-in-hand with atheism is skepticism, but this isn’t a skepticism website, per se. We’re not here to weigh the evidence on whether or not the quote is factual. We’re here to discuss the given quote, and knowing the source is very valuable in understanding the context. An anonymous “quote” might be good for opening up a TOPIC for discussion, but it hardly seems worthy of discussion ITSELF, on its own merits.
November 24th, 2010 at 23:35
Rather than debating the source, I tend to look at quotes like these as an interesting personal theory to the religious thought process. The source itself is either directly from the site owner, or ripped from a forum. Either way, it does hold weight to the fact that the sand people of olden days did not know even the most basic scientific principles of baby making that we do today, and this “quote” points that out perfectly.
November 25th, 2010 at 0:16
Granted, whenever I see an anonymous quote here, I tend to agree with it wholeheartedly, and they DO make good topics for discussion. I just worry that such quotes are useless in a debate with a theist, since there is no source. I might as well quote MYSELF and expect it to carry any weight.
For example, I agree, and could chat about it all day, that religion is a source of some seriously messed up, repressed views about sex, sexuality, and the human body. But, like Wat Duino pointed out, do we KNOW that this was the early view of sex? Did they really believe that a little tiny person squirts out of the father? I’ve never heard that (of course, I don’t know EVERYTHING). But if I tried to pull this in a debate, and my opponent said “They did NOT believe that!”, without any source to fall back on, I would just sound like an ass.
But, this is not my personal site, and I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down TOO hard on anonymous quotes. It would be my choice to repeat them or not, of course. But maybe they should be kept down to a minimum?
November 26th, 2010 at 16:41
Exactly. Without reliable attribution, an “anonymous” quote can be anything that pops into someone’s head. I could post an “anonymous” quote that ancient people believed tiny humans were inserted into the mother’s womb by aliens. Would that make for a topic of discussion? But the Immaculate Conception? That’s another story altogether. There ample documentation up to and including today that people literally believe that story. Now THAT’s a topic for discussion!