We have all heard it before, religious folks pointing to the signs of “moral decay” in our society as an indication of things to come. Most often, these folks are foreshadowing the end of our world, and the return of Christ to save the believers and to damn the non-believers.

For the non-believers, when they ask how these folks are so certain of our impending doom, they are responded to with biblical prophecies. Some come from Isaiah and some come from Revelation, but the general tone is almost always the same. It consists of the believer damning the ways of the non-believers as morally corrosive, and also offering the ultimate solution, accepting Christ as your lord and savior. This is an automatic ticket into the heaven that all believers are guaranteed to experience after death.

We are lectured about the biblical significance of the increase of sexual immorality in our culture. We are warned about abortions, the “cashless” society predicted in Revelation, the “200 million man army” from the “Far East” and many more scary predictions made by the bible that are definitely going to be fulfilled. There is no way they cannot be fulfilled, after all, the bible is the “infallible word of God.”

I was even told by a dear friend, who happens to be Christian, that President Bush’s seeming inability to be articulate did not bother her, “Because God is on his side, and God is so much bigger than him.”

But how do we know god is on his side? How are they so certain that his stance on certain social and cultural issues bring god to his side?

My answer is that they do not know. They just THINK they know, and such is their stance on the implications of sex in our culture.

Why was the “Abstinence” agenda pushed so zealously by George W. Bush viewed by so many as the moral high-ground? Is it morally superior to teach young people to deny themselves of the desires of their raging hormones when we could instead be teaching them to indulge their raging hormones safely?

Does anyone ever wonder if the biblical predictions that have so much influence on our society were written in a manner vague enough to always SEEM valid and true based on societal conditions?

Have Christians always believed we were in the “end times?”

Is fear not a common tactic used by people who want to control the masses?

There are many questions that should be examined regarding religious predictions. When examined objectively, the verdict becomes quite clear: interpretations of religious predictions by religious folks are very often incorrect. I will provide specific examples.

“Sexual promiscuity is on the rise, and sex is generally treated as less sacred than in the past,” we so often hear. This claim is simply untrue. As early as two-hundred years ago, most women did not have a genuine choice when it came to who they slept with. Sex was simply an experience in which the man sought gratification, and the woman complied with the man’s wishes, and maybe she was lucky and enjoyed it. Women were extremely vulnerable to STDs, as many men slept with multiple women, unprotected. Now when we go even farther back into history, women were raped as a law of war, with the women of the losing side suffering horrible sexual mistreatment at the hands of their conquerors. Many of these women were forcefully impregnated and abandoned by barbarous war-mongers. Does anyone still think there is more sexual deviancy in our contemporary world? For those who do, I offer some statistics:

All statistics in this piece have been taken from The New York Times article titled “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity.”

“Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as
of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1
percent in 1991.”

“A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex
than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and
Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had
experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the
percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent
from 43 percent.”

‘“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really
significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate
professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of
“Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage”
(University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not
because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids
aren’t using contraception.”’

That last statistic is of particular importance, because religious folks generally promote the omission of contraceptives. “Abstinence is the most effective way” to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancies, they say.

But the topic of teen pregnancies is very important, because it was common practice in the past for men to pursue much younger girls with the intention of impregnating them as soon as they became acceptably fertile. In this type of atmosphere, why are we to believe that teen pregnancy is a new phenomenon?

How many people honestly believed that young people would be having sex in greater numbers now when compared to fourteen years ago?

There will be a part two to this article, in which I discuss in detail several specific examples that prove Christians believed we have been in the “end times” during many different periods throughout history.

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