"I fail to see how any person with a conscience can support this (prostitution)."
There you go with that righteousness again.
From: religioustolerance.org
Divorce and remarriage
U.S. divorce rates for various faith
groups, age groups, & geographic areas
"Stuff...
Barna report: Variation in divorce rates among Christian faith groups:
Denomination (in order of decreasing divorce rate)
% who have been divorced
Non-denominational ** 34%
Baptists 29%
Mainline Protestants 25%
Mormons 24%
Catholics 21%
Lutherans 21%
** Barna uses the term "non-denominational" to refer to Evangelical Christian congregations that are not affiliated with a specific denomination. The vast majority are fundamentalist in their theological beliefs. More info.
Barna's results verified findings of earlier polls: that conservative Protestant Christians, on average, have the highest divorce rate, while mainline Christians have a much lower rate. They found some new information as well: that atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate of all. George Barna commented that the results raise "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families." The data challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."
Donald Hughes, author of The Divorce Reality, said:
"In the churches, people have a superstitious view that Christianity will keep them from divorce, but they are subject to the same problems as everyone else, and they include a lack of relationship skills. ...Just being born again is not a rabbit's foot."
Hughes claim that 90% of divorces among born-again couples occur after they have been "saved.
...
Variation in divorce rates by religion:
Religion % have been divorced
Jews 30%
Born-again Christians 27%
Other Christians 24%
Atheists, Agnostics 21%
Ron Barrier, Spokespersonn for American Atheists remarked on these findings with some rather caustic comments against organized religion. He said:
"These findings confirm what I have been saying these last five years. Since Atheist ethics are of a higher caliber than religious morals, it stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage. There is no room in Atheist ethics for the type of 'submissive' nonsense preached by Baptists and other Christian and/or Jewish groups. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage." 2
StopTheReligiousRight.org had some scathing comments as well:
"We hear an awful lot from conservatives in the Bible Belt and on the TV about how we all should be living. Certainly a culture that teaches the conservative religious values of the Christian right must have clean living written all over it. And lots of ripe fruit from their morally superior lives abounding."
"It doesn't. Far from it. People that talk the loudest may be the ones walking the slowest. Joining its history of Biblically correct bigotry and discrimination, it is an area with the highest divorce, murder, STD/HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy, single parent homes, infant mortality, and obesity rates in the nation. As a region, the Bible Belt has the poorest health care systems and the lowest rates of high school graduation."
Now you may ask why I brought this all up? Well you were noting that prostitution is legal in NV (but not in LV or Reno). And then you seem to imply that it leads to moral decrepitude and divorce.
It seems prostitution is also legal in Rhode Island as noted in an earlier board note that links to: en.wikipedia.org
So, I sez to me, "Jeff, what is the divorce rate for Rhode Island?" That turns out to be about 3.0/1000 to 3.2/1000 which placed Rhode Island from 4th to 10th least number of divorces among the states.
Of course you then jump on Nevada as the "den of iniquity" and there are many divorces there.
The highest divorce rate is in Nevada, but did you also consider that people tend to get drunk and married the same night in Nevada? I'm not at all convinced that prostitution leads to higher divorce rates - in fact I don't even think there's a connection. However, there is a high probability that many drunken marriages do ultimately lead to divorce. |
