Guess I will also need the fire-suit after this one however...
Regardless of what you see in the malls and on television in the U.S., we remain one of the most puritanical countries on the face of the earth. So if we are so puritanical and go to such great extent to protect our children from such “filth” why is it the U.S. has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world? Same goes for alcohol. We think we are doing such a great thing by keep the legal drinking age at 21, yet constantly we see cases of teenage binge drinking and resultant deaths.
There seems to be no understanding that children will invariably succumb to the “forbidden fruit” syndrome. That which you try to shield them from will be that which they seek out. Education and open explanation about sex and alcohol are the key to protecting children and ensuring a normal development. Kids are not stupid, they can handle the truth.
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting with my wife in a pizza place here in Moldova (a former Soviet Republic). Three boys, none of which could have been a day over 15 came in, ordered a pizza and each had a beer. They sat there, talked, laughed, ate the pizza and drank their beer, paid, and left. The uncle of my wife is an Orthodox priest in a small village, we were there this weekend and I asked him about the attitude here regarding young people and alcohol, and told him about the kids in the pizza place. He said he has seen families in his village who absolutely forbade their children from any alcohol, and that the rate of alcoholism in those families was terrible.
The advertising here is much more open and revealing than in the U.S. regarding nudity, yet there are virtually no sex crimes. I am constantly amazed that small children here can safely put on their little back-pack and walk to school with no worry they will be bothered by “chester the molester”. In the states 12 and 14 year old kids have been abducted by perverts while walking alone to school, where here 7 year old kids walk a mile to school by themselves with no worry.
I am at this point convinced that the Puritanical attitudes, hiding the truth, and the creation of a “guilt complex” regarding the human body and sex by the religous community in the U.S. has created the monster it was seeking to prevent.
You said — “I am at this point convinced that the Puritanical attitudes, hiding the truth, and the creation of a “guilt complex” regarding the human body and sex by the religous community in the U.S. has created the monster it was seeking to prevent.”
No, it’s the “split culture” that is causing it, not the part that wants us to follow the moral guidelines of the Bible, God’s Word. The ones trying to bring us “back to God” are not the problems in what is going on.
It’s the other half of that “split culture” that is causing the problems, in that anything goes, even little kids, because if we simply came from lower forms of life and/or other kinds of species of animals (and we have “thrown out God”) — then certainly it’s not a problem to “act like animals” (of course, it’s “survival of the fittest”, isn’t it...).
So, don’t blame the *wrong half* of the culture for these problems.
You might as well blame the police departments for arresting criminals, as the cause for having jails. If we didn’t have police, we could do away with the jails, couldn’t we... LOL...