http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7951839.stm

Never mind the millions of orphans or the thousands who will die then!

This old duffer is dangerous. His ultra-conservative stance is a good thing – makes people realise how stupid Roman Catholicism really is.

Religion – always trouble!

Down with dogma!!

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/put-a-bible-over-your-penis%2c-says-pope-200903181648/

Because he must’ve been castrated.

“Evvvverrry sperm is sacred…. evvverry sperm is gooood…”

Coming from a family where half are Catholic, This just reinforces my utter disdain, not only over Catholicism, but over all religion.

The whole lot has to be removed from Human civilisation.

Pope says

the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids”.

FFS

Traditional teaching is actually the best way, but human nature is the problem. If there was no sex outside marriage etc, how would it spread?

but human nature is the problem

Thats terrible us humans behaving like humans, you couldn’t make it up(unlike Religion)

the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids

Yup – works for paedophilia too.

He’s just f***ing bitter. If he’s not getting any action he wants anyone who does to suffer the consequences.

Wrap it up.

I’ve had to study the diseases and handle samples from warts to see what type of virus the patient had etc.

Chlamydia Genital herpes Genital warts Gonorrhea Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C & Syphilis.

Funny how my mate who sleeps around and with hookers is crapping himself about HIV etc especially now his wife wants a baby…

Testing time…

The Pope said the “cruel epidemic” should be tackled through fidelity and abstinence rather than condoms

This is not a fundamentally silly remark. HIV spreads so readily in Africa partly as a result of male migrant working populations making massive use of prostitutes. You have an economy in much of southern africa where the blokes set off somewhere (mines near Jo’burg, say, or to a war in the Congo) where they end up living purely among other young blokes with no family structures. Prostitution is everywhere and you have blokes from all over the continent using the same infected prostitutes and then going home to their wives. African truck-stops and trading towns again spread it around through prostitution, as does the huge incidence of rape as a weapon in the ridiculously lengthy and enormous Congolese war.

All of this takes place in societies where the idea that it is a woman’s duty to have sex with her husband on demand is not widely regarded as absurd.

Abstinence and fidelity are good things, viewed from the point of view of a substantial proportion of the female population of Africa. When I was in south africa a few years ago, all the government health service condom use adverts were aimed at women, and were trying to get across the message that they could say “no” to having sex with men who weren’t using condoms. For that to work, you have to get across to both men and women the idea that saying no to sex is an option for women at all. For that, you have to preach the possibility of at least occasional abstinence to the men.

If you work on the assumption that all sex carries on as normal as long as there are condoms present then you don’t attack the underlying attitude which allows so much infection.

I am absolutely not against condom use. But pretending that abstinence (when actually practised rather than just preached) doesn’t prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease is silly, and suggesting somehow that africans are inevitably sexually incontinent so abstinence is impossible for them is not a nice position to be in either. Abstinence and fidelity are not, in practice, impossible for most of us. There was little enthusiasm for among any of us for using prostitutes in a recent thread, andf the girls agreed they would not want to go out with men who had.

Teaching men abstinence is an important part of encouraging sexual equality, which tends to reduce birth rates and raise living standards as additional benefits. Just hurling huge truckloads of condoms at black people isn’t a total solution by any means.

Also, I hesitate to tell the supposedly 20% of africans who are catholic that adherence to their faith in the hope of a better life next time around is stupid. Too many of them do not have anything to look forward to this time around. Belittling their superstitious hopes on this point may make us feel all very superior, but that is in part a reflection of the fact that we have what we want in this life, and the charge that we achieve this by taking it from them cannot be thrown out for lack of a case to answer.

🙂

But pretending that abstinence (when actually practised rather than just preached) doesn’t prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease is silly, and suggesting somehow that africans are inevitably sexually incontinent so abstinence is impossible for them is not a nice position to be in either.

Suggesting fighting against a basic human urge, on the basis of feeling guilty about it because some magic man in the sky thinks its bad, is even more silly. Nothing to do with them being africans.

Well, you could abstain from having sex with people other than a long term partner on the basis that it would help to contain the spread of a deadly disease that was decimating the population of your continent and dragging it into economic backwardness more reliably than anything since the slave trade. How would that be?

Condom use prevents sexually trransmitted disease if you have a condom. Abstinence prevents it if you do not. Do you have sex with strangers when you don’t have a condom? I don’t. I don’t think god cares either way, but I do not want the clap or babies. Hence the abstinence when rubber supplies are unavailable.

Also, we have accepted for many years that neither we nor godf think it is a woman’s duty to have sex if she doesn’t much want to. We accept that “natural urges” can be suppressed if you don’t have a willing partner, otherwise you go to prison. You, me and most of the contributors to this thread have a lot less sex than we would like, and with far fewer people than we fancy. We regard this as normal. It is all abstinence and/or fidelity.

Fidelity is all good as far as I am concerned (though of course the Pope only thinks this will stop you going to hell if you are married).

Abstinence is stupid though.

p.s. You edited just after I responded:

If the pope was preaching that abstinence was advisable when condoms weren’t available then I would say bravo!

Sorry, I was editing while you were posting. I don’ think the pope thinks abstinence on this context is lifelong. We would not regard an unmarried person having a series of one-night stands as being unfaithful to anyone. But such a person could be spreadfing an awful lot of infection if they did not have access to condoms. If you get through to that operson that they might maybe abstain unless thwey hjad condoms, or just have sex with people they really quite liked you cut down your infection rates. Abstinence need be neither permanent nor total to be moderately effective.

Believing that it’s NEVER ok to have sex unless you are married, and if you do you will GO TO HELL – is not the same thing as not pulling as much as you might like.

So in that case, we have the pope saying, to the 20% of the african population who regard him as an authority

“you have this ghastly disease doing the rounds. You get it by bonking. Don’t bonk just anybody. Only bonk special people. God doesn’t like you using condoms, please don’t”

The only area where what he is saying is daft is the idea that god opposes condoms. Reducing the number of sexual partners and the amount of sex outside stable relationships that happens is clearly not a bad option when you have an epidemic. If the other 80% of people who aren’t catholics are doing a combination of abstinence, fidelity and seagulls wellies then that really looks like progress. 100% just relying on using a condom when they’ve got one without reducing the numbers of partners or amount of sex would not, I suspect, work any better.

Hopefully, one day, africa will be wealthier, happier, more equal and far more of its people will have realistic chances of doing whatever they want, much as I do and all this will sound very quaint…

🙂

My only question is: Does the Vatican have a Comic Relief day?

Yes. They all come to work in dresses and funny hats and put £1 in a tin.

The thing is though, there are many reasons for the breakdown of african societies, families etc – and having some **** in a massive poncy castle in Italy tell you that it would all be fine if only you could control yourselves, is missing the point and counter-productive.

Bigdummy

The Pope disproves of Condom use even amongst married couples.

I am aware of that. I’m not very keen on the things, albeit for non-denominational reasons. I also however operate in a marriage where I only get to have sex when she’s in the mood, and we’d probably ease off it if one of us had a deadly communicable disease anyway. Also, I would get my nuts torn off if I buried them in a diseased whore.

😉

Your argument is flawed. It assumes nobody has sex before marriage and nobody leaves long term relationships.

It isn’t so much that the argument is flawed but I agree the policy is not fool-proof. I agree that, to work, abstinence has to actually happen. Whether it does is a matter of free choice.

Suggesting that people would not get as many STDs if they had sex with fewer partners is true. Whether they have fewer partners is up to them. If in fact they do not then clearly the policy will fail.

However, to be effective, condom use has to be fairly consistent. Clearly, it works pretty well when people are using the condoms. But whether they use them is a matter of their choice, and if they do not then again, the policy fails.

My view is that condom use alone, without a fair amount of abstinence, will not do to control the present HIV epidemic in africa. Ideally people would do both, and the vatican would shut up. But it won’t shut up. On balance I prefer the vatican’s focus on sexual behaviour to a pure focus on using protection with no attempt to change behaviour.

I had better do some work. 🙂

Abstinence?

The urge to get your end away is one of the strongest drives within nature!

Advice on sexual health from the **** Pope? This reactionary clown?

Will I insult anyone on this forum by stating what I really think of organised religion…?

Seriously, I want to know.

If the popes advice came from someone not claiming to be religious he would not be listend to, regarded as idiotic and if they carried the weight of authority he does, probably locked up for instigating dangerous life threatening behaviour.

If you can jail people for causing a riot, why not jail the pope for his very danagerous advice.

I find it amazing that someone so out of touch with life in gereral, let along life in Africa, can propse that we dont use condoms.

We really need to educate religion out of the world.

Please tell everyone what you think of religon. The more people stand up and tell the world what a crock of shite it is the better. We need to move society forward in a rational scientific manner, not one based on 2000 year old superstition.

Will I insult anyone on this forum by stating what I really think of organised religion…?

No, although it is hardly an original thing to do and I am not sure anyone will really care. 😉

My view is that condom use alone, without a fair amount of abstinence, will not do to control the present HIV epidemic in africa. Ideally people would do both, and the vatican would shut up. But it won’t shut up. On balance I prefer the vatican’s focus on sexual behaviour to a pure focus on using protection with no attempt to change behaviour.

Widespread Condom use would go a long way to eradicating AIDs in Africa. Less widespread use would still improve peoples lives far more than a misguided belief in religion.
Condom use would also assist with unwanted pregnancies unnecesary abortions and the blighted lives of those unwanted children born into poverty and starvation, as well as disease.
Studies on abstinance and virginity pledges prove to extend virginity by months whilst its devotees partake in more oral and anal sex.
To get back to the question the Pope opposes condom use through a misguided Catholic attitude towards sex and the policy is in no way developed to reduce suffering.
The fact that it would be sad to enlighten believers in Africa that their faith is misguided may be true however as George Bernard Shaw wrote
“The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one”

It must be terribly confusing for the poor chaps. Less than 100 years ago, we were busy “enlightening” them by telling them that everything would be OK if they believed in god. 😕

As Desmond Tutu famously remarked:

“When Missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. And when they said “let us pray”, and we dutifully shut our eyes. And when we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible!

Bd said

My view is that condom use alone, without a fair amount of abstinence, will not do to control the present HIV epidemic in africa

Unless you are suggesting AIDS passes via a condom I think you will find that it will WORK alone – as indeed would abstinence if it were possible to achieve.
Clearly abstinence is not going to happen in the real world [has it ever ?] … whether we preach this to Africans or teenagers or married people [even catholics] people will have sex outside of marriage whatever we think. What we must do is manage THAT problem by advising the use of condoms. To try and manage the problem of sex outside marriage by abstinence is short sighted, misguided and foolish. When this message comes from an unmarried virgin opposed to ALL condom use it is cruel. People (men women and children) will die of AIDS because of this message preached by this person … now remind me who is going to go to hell please.

Trouble is Junkyard, total condom use is probably hopeless as well. We can’t persuade our young people to use them all the time, and we have lots of money and plenty of condoms.

At least the pope believes in HIV. Thabo Mbeki was never sure it existed, or was spread by sex. Robert Mugabe thinks it was invented by Ian Smith to persuade black people not to breed. A vast proportion of people in some of the worst affected areas think you can cure it by having sex with a virgin.

Quite agree, people tend to have a fair bit of sex. It’s clearly not correct that social attitudes have no impact on how much they have however. And if the number of partners people have is reduced by social pressure the infection rate of sexually transmitted diseases falls.

If you say to people “have as much sex as you like, just use condoms” they are always going to hear the first bit, and may skimp on the second.

If you say “go easy on the sex, it’s such a special thing it ought to be saved for special people, and don’t have more than one special person at once” that doesn’t seem to be mental.

Best of all would be to say “go easy on the sex, it’s such a special thing it ought to be saved for special people, and don’t have more than one special person at once, and when you do do it, use condoms”. But we aren’t going to get that from the vatican any time soon, so I’ll take their engagement with the issue and their pushing of “go easy on the sex” in the meantime. The church is important for social cohesion in much of africa. I don’t believe much of what is said in churches, but where they are holding societies together to any useful extent I’m not going to call the people in them idiots or evil. 🙂

So an old man wearing a dress, who wears a funny hat in the shape of a phallus, and has not got married, or had kids, is surrounded by similarly dressed men, says that you shouldnt wear a condom and risk the chance of either getting a sexually transmitted disease or a baby, i say get a life, or a girlfreind or a boyfreind.

I’m with the late, great Dave Allen on this issue – “If you don’t play the game, you can’t make the rules”

And is the game in question rumpy-pumpy, or living? 😉

isnt he the same pope that sympathised with the ‘the hollocaust didnt happen’ priest?

says it all really. muppet

The church is important for social cohesion in much of africa

And you were doing so well!! 😉

The church is important for social cohesion in much of africa.

Also used to torture and persecute young children in parts of Nigeria.