She had passed out cards for the (paltry) audience to write questions on at the beginning of the presentation. When she collected them and began to address them, she found my list of common treatments we have that stop natural bodily processes: immunosuppresants for transplant patients, anticoagulants, antihistamines, fever reducers, analgesics, and so forth. Her response was...well, it wasn't words, so much as mumblings. Point conceded.

Anyway, that seems to be where a lot of these "natural" arguments end up: sputtering non-responses, because there is no reasonable justification.

StaceyJW:

why do humans have "g-spots" in locations that have nothing to do with creating babies???? (Prostate/clitoris)

To get a little pedantic, Stacey, the term you're probably looking for is "erogenous zone." The term "G-spot" refers to a bundle of nervous tissue located around the female urethra, which roughly corresponds to the male prostate in terms of composition and sensitivity.

Steve Bowen:

Some sort of prohibition against sex, either absolute or under certain circumstances, seems to be a theme of most religions.

I think the reason for this is twofold:

1. It's a brainwashing tactic; like sleep deprivation and fasting, forced celibacy increases stress, making people think less critically and impairing their judgment.

2. The primary method of transmission for religion is (and always has been) through birth. Religious organizations have a vested interest in ensuring that procreation occurs reliably and frequently (hence the need to outlaw non-procreative sex: sodomy, masturbation, homosexual relations) and that it does so within contexts that ensure the children will belong to that religion (so sex is confined to marriage, and marriage is confined to members of the church). The rules have lapsed somewhat (interfaith marriages are less strictly prohibited by most groups now), but I think this represents much of the original rationale.

stuart:

The Clitoris is TOTALLY UNREQUIRED FOR PROCREATION. If it was removed, then a female could still reproduce.If Catholics believe God created everything, then in their terms, why did he create this?

Especially since, according to some saints and church fathers, sex is sinful if you enjoy it, even if you're married. Why make sex pleasurable at all, in that case?

Excellent post as usual, Ebonmuse.

like it spaceman spif!!!

And even if some feature was designed, that does NOT show that some ancestral populations had been poofed into existence by some cosmic superbeing.

It could have been time travelers or visitors from another planet doing genetic engineering, for all we know.

Sorry! Had to!! :)

I take your point, however I am not sure that natural selection would require a population to know the connection between sex and childbirth in order for certain behaviours to develop.

Absolutely correct.

Whatever, I still find the almost universal condemnation of non-procreative sex by religions difficult to understand unless there was some pre-existing social taboo.

There are plenty of those. I was merely saying that in our early evolutionary history it's not likely as far as I see that people understood sex was for children. They likely still felt the same things we do today; jealously, anger, love, protectiveness, and so on.

I was thinking more along the lines of an evolutionary time scale and a conscious understanding of their behavior in regards to the "sex strictly for children" point. From biblical times to now isn't even a blink of the eye in terms of time periods of evolution.

I take your point, however I am not sure that natural selection would require a population to know the connection between sex and childbirth in order for certain behaviours to develop. To use one of Dawkin’s favourite extended phenotype examples, does a beaver” know” that building a dam backs ups the river and improves it’s habitat? Probably not!
In order for (what Alex generously called) my hypothesis to work, there would have to be some selective advantage to possessing a gene for aversion to promiscuity that tended to increase that gene’s frequency in a population. There is an obvious advantage to being procreatively promiscuous, so some kind of Evolutionary Stable Strategy would have to result. As I said you might have to invoke some element of group selection theory, so competing populations that tended to be more sexually conservative flourished at the expense of the liberal in order to arrive (eventually) at a moral consensus. Whatever, I still find the almost universal condemnation of non-procreative sex by religions difficult to understand unless there was some pre-existing social taboo.