...

I don't see the relevance of this data. We are talking about people who DON"T have premarital sex and their pressure to get married. Clearly if you DO have premarital sex then the desire for sex stops being a relevant factor on when to get married and is instead based on the, as you say, huge array (of which I will add the increasing importance of college education which adds time to many peoples life plans). For instance, I had no pressure to marry my wife because I was already having sex. So, for us, we wanted to wait until after we complete our undergraduates. But if I couldn't have had sex al lthat time, there would have been extensive pressures to put us in a situation where we COULD have sex.

First, the data shows that there are very few people who do so, which would mean that their contribution to the age of marriage is essentially irrelevant. Over the period of time in question, virtually everyone has premarital sex and the age of marriage has shifted dramatically. Therefore, asserting that pressure for sex is a driver of a change in the age of marriages is a fairly gross mishandling of the data.

For the last 60 years, people have been having sex outside of marriage. So whatever pressures for young marriage that don't exist today, didn't really exist yesterday. This means that there is no "hence" in your claim.

LOL. Are you really going to try to argue that if you couldn't have sex with your then-girlfriend that you would have proposed in order to get to a point where you *could* have sex? Do you realize how absolutely stupid this sounds?

Did you ever consider that your data doesn't say what you think it does? Have another look at the data, and if you don't see the problem with claiming what you claiming based on that data, I'd be happy to explain it for you if you need.

but we are talking explicitly not about the general public, but about just those who do NOT, for religious reasons, have sex before marriage. I completely agree that for those that do have sex outside marriage, the sexual pressures become irrelevant and thus it is other factors that determine average marriage age and indeed other factors over time that have led to a later marriage age. However, for those that restrain I continue to submit that the inate and very strong desire for sex is going to be a highly nontrivial factor in contributing to when they have marriages.

And yes it is more than a bit stupid. I would encourage young people to make important life decisions independent of sexual drives. But that doesn't mean that the sex drive is not incrediably powerful in influencing an enormous range of behaviors, with marriage undoubtably among them. And I have no need to pretend that my 20 year old self would be magically immune to them.

but we are talking explicitly not about the general public, but about just those who do NOT, for religious reasons, have sex before marriage. I completely agree that for those that do have sex outside marriage, the sexual pressures become irrelevant and thus it is other factors that determine average marriage age and indeed other factors over time that have led to a later marriage age. However, for those that restrain I continue to submit that the inate and very strong desire for sex is going to be a highly nontrivial factor in contributing to when they have marriages.

And yes it is more than a bit stupid. I would encourage young people to make important life decisions independent of sexual drives. But that doesn't mean that the sex drive is not incrediably powerful in influencing an enormous range of behaviors, with marriage undoubtably among them and I think it is safe to say that the nearly decade that my future wife and I were having sex before marriage would not have been that long if we could not have.

Edit: she concurs.

How is there such ridiculousness here?

She should obviously do nothing and get on with her life.



I'm scared of dying too.







EDIT:

I'm ignoring the problems that obviously existed earlier.

That was all pretty easy for the church to accept until the scientific method advanced enough to allow for the observation of phenomena that possibly clashed with it's beliefs.

You've added a qualifier 'that', discounting the objection that you know is coming. Yes I think they do read differently. You've rephrased it so that my objection to your original phrasing seems unreasonable.

Except it's really hard to read what you're saying as "asking for help." It really looks like you're accusing me of making a logical fallacy, and when I tell you that you're wrong, you continue to insist.[/quote]

If they don't apply then I'm wrong but you might be making it and not see it, I'm bound to point it out just as you would with me.

I re-read this, I just don't see what you see.

But I think you're ignoring statements that I've made....

If by 'show you' you mean 'prove that you're right' then I'd accept that I'm wrong. I don't at the moment accept that because I know my state of mind far better than you do and I'm much more willing to accept that I'm wrong than you think, it may be an issue of how I articulate my opinions.

I rushed that last post as I was being called for lunch and accidentally left something you said outside of quotes. It was too late to edit it by the time I realised.

I'm not claiming that they are indistinguishable phrasings. I maintain that the basic emphasis presented with both phrasings is consistent.

Again, you're placing value on speculation and avoiding facts about the situation. If you think I'm committing a logical fallacy, then it's on you to explain what is fallacious about the logic. Simply stating a name of a fallacy and saying "You might be doing this" is not sufficient.

Yes. I'm ignoring you because you're making speculations in the absence of information. Speculations have no value, but you keep acting as if they do.

This is what I mean. I've shown that you've placed value on speculation and ignored data.

Whether you accept it or not is irrelevant to me. However, your inability to accept it creates an opportunity for me to continue to point it out. I can accept that you're making errors and you don't realize it. I can also accept that you believe you're not making errors even though you are. But this isn't about a "state of mind." It's about what you do with the words that you use.

Given that up to this point I give you close to zero willingness to accept your errors, this is probable.

I don't think it's a problem with the articulation of your opinions. I think it's that your opinions are not nearly as logically grounded as you think they are, and your inexperience making careful arguments prevents you from recognizing your errors.

Notice that you're just looping back to the issue during the narrow band of time that I had just addressed.

I will remind you of your argument again:

The "people" here refer to a particular class of people, and since that class is "people [who] can have sex outside of marriage" you're NOT talking about "those who do not have sex before marriage."

You have made an argument about today with an implicit comparison to yesterday. My point is that your today/yesterday dichotomy fails to provide any insight to your position. Furthermore, the underlying structure of the argument, which is that the age of marrying has gone up as a result of people having sex outside of marriage, is unsupportable by the data.

So my characterization of your position being one that cannot possibly be shown to be wrong is correct.

Dude, I have twice clarified for you that this is NOT my claim:
Perhaps I would have confused you less if I said "allowed for later marrying dates". Eitherway, my position should now be abundantly clear and for you to keep harping on this misinterpretation that I have repeatedly and clearly clarified is...just...so....you.

The point I WAS making, however, is that for those that DO restrain from sex, that there is a sexual pressure for earlier marriage. And you have offered no data to contest this obvious point. How naive are you?

Obviously the first husband gets to have sex with the woman still.

It would be making an entirely different argument if you had said that because that is no longer making a CAUSAL claim. We only need to go back to posts #44 and #45 to see that you were doing this.

I further went on to demonstrate that the HISTORICAL argument you were making ("Today...") doesn't make sense, either.

Changing your position and pretending like you've been arguing the same thing the entire time is...just...

The one who makes the argument is responsible to present the data. Simply calling it "obvious" doesn't count as having presented data.

Naive enough to predict exactly what you would do.

You still seem confused about my position here. I am making a causal claim, namely that if you don't have premarital sex then there are sexual pressures to get married. However, if you DO have premarital sex then any sexual pressures become irrelevant, as I have said many times, and marriage age is determined by other factors. And no, I didn't "change" my opinion, this was always my opinion.

I mean you can't actually believe that sex pressures don't influence human behavior, among them marriage, can you?

No. That would be a clear shift in your claim. Look at how surprised I am!

The effect is people getting married younger, NOT sexual pressures to get married.

Pressure to have sex leads people to have sex. That much you can get away with in the absence of evidence as a general statement of human behavior (pressure to do X leads people to do X).

But as I've said, you've essentially wrapped yourself up in a blanket of cannot-be-wrongness.

I wonder if there is anyone here that is willing to argue in favor of some iteration of the position of the first half. The second half seems to me to be making the correct argument on moral grounds--but I'm not really clear on how marriage as a sacrament works. Does it overrule the moral considerations, which would clearly say she should stay with her family?

No, that comment is entirely consistent with what I have now repeatedly outlined as my position. There are lots of factors, today, leading to later marrying dates and we both gave examples of those factors. When premarital sex is possible one gets these later marrying dates because the sexaul pressure are absent but if no premarital sex is allowed then that sexual pressure leads to earlier marriage.

But who cares. Suppose you were right and this "clear shift" you imagined out of thin air actually happened. Now, there should be no ambiguity in my position and it is quite clear. So respond to what my actual position is as I have no clearly articulated, not how you think at some point my position was some other thing based on your misinterpreting of previous statements.

Correct. Now if they have an anachronistic religion telling them the only possible way they can sex is after marriage, what does this sexual pressure lead to? Surely it would not be the only way they can sex?

I assume you're talking about the first position of the first half. I'll give it a go.

I don't think that leaving the second husband necessitates that she "abandons" the children and the husband. That is, she can still be considered to be financially and emotionally responsible for the care and upbringing of those children. It's just that she won't do that from the position of "wife of husband #2."

There will certainly be a difficult and confusing reckoning in terms of explaining to the children what happened. "I'm your mom, but your dad is not my husband." But this is basically the same thing as a man who remains married to his wife after having a child with another woman.

Arguing that the option could, possibly, work out and might be analogous to other situations is not the same as arguing that she should favour this position.

At first glance it looks like this woman is a complete control freak. She married her 1st husband that was taking over the family business. Once she became unhappy with her marriage she tried to blame him for not conforming to her wishes. She Knew what he and his family did for work before she got married.

She remarried for money and is happy about his job status. Now she has made a conscious decision to withholding sex until he conforms to her religious beliefs. This has nothing to do with if she enjoys sex with him or not. She also knew what his religious beliefs were before they got married.

At 1st it might look like a control issue. Instead I would speculate that she suffers from depression. When she goes through episodes she sees everything wrong with the people closest to her, and blames them for her mental problems. She no longer works and she is not interested in sex. These are two signs of depression. She is using the church to blame for her own issues.

When she is falling in love all the chemicals in her brain are flowing positive. She sees nothing wrong and is happy. Once those chemicals ware off she is back to depression and sees only problems.

The reason I say this is I just finished a 2 year relationship with a woman that pulled the exact same BS on me. Instead of being Catholic it was all New Age BS to cover up her depression, not being able to hold a job, losing interest in sex, getting angry at everyone else for not being up to her standards.

This chick needs meds before she starts wreaking havoc on her poor children...

No, it's not. The claimed causal outcomes are entirely different.

My response is "Present your data."

No. Where is the causal necessity?

Notice that you've needed to start throwing in irrelevant negative characterizations. This indicates the underlying weakness of your position. You need to fall back to negative characterizations as opposed to actual argumentation because you're starting to realize that you don't have an actual argument.

This is a rejection of the position that the morally correct thing to do is "stay with the family." We have an analogous situations in which moral ambiguity allows a man to stay with his original wife while still providing material and emotional support to second woman and child, and not necessarily taking an "immoral" action. By analogy, the proposed position can be morally correct.