"However sex is not a commodity like drugs or alcohol – it is a binding together of two lives, in what the Bible calls a one flesh male female relationship, open to children, a most wonderful glorious thing."

What sex is to you, does not mean it applies to everyone else
David! You are free to live your life by your definitions.
Please respect that others might agree to disagree and choose
to live their lives differently.

Over the years, I have had some wonderful sexual experiences with
close friends, the memories of which I will always cherish. They
were filled with emotion and love. The bible had nothing to do
with it, for to me and the marority of others its irrelevant.

The bible says that I should kill my neighbour for working on the
sabbath, I happen to like me neighbour, so refuse to comply.

Fact is that sometimes we want different things from life, so no
matter how much we love somebody, we want to follow our dreams.
That certainly does not make the sex wrong, it just means that
we don't see the world through your narrow Xtian glasses.

Unless you Xtians learn a bit of tolerance, the feuding will go
on forever. The difference is that now we secular people can
express ourselves, unlike a few hundred years ago, when the
Xtians used to burn people like us at the stake! So much
for the "Jesus loves you" story.

Obviously David Palmer has never heard of Alfred Kinsey. While his data may not have been perfect it has certainly shown that David's view of sex is not a reality in society at large.

And Yabby, I believe that you are incorrect, Jesus does love you it's just the Christians that don't.

Mr Gerrit,
You seem to have a big and loving heart. I only hope that you showed love when your daughter had an abortion. For whatever reason a woman decides to have an abortion, it’s her personal reason.

Col and Yabby,
I have to agree, from that perspective abortion figures are no one else’s business.

Lev,
You’re correct- a foetus or embryo is not a person and rights pertain only to an actual human being, not to a potential one.

David Palmer,
You have a good point that the input of women’s partners may influence her decision. I can imagine that some women don’t want to continue their pregnancy without the support of a partner.
Are you suggesting that her partner should be able to get advice and support also, to put him in a better position to support his pregnant partner if she chooses to continue her pregnancy?

I would agree that pregnant women should have access to an unbiased counselor who would show her all her options. After consideration, her decision should then be respected.
David, but how did Crespigny and Savulescu arrive at these numbers when accurate data haven’t been kept by Medicare and hospitals?

Sex ed aint sex ed! In the Netherlands, sex education is excellent- I know because I went to school there. My children at Australian schools have received laughable sex ed. Also, when I came to Australia I was surprised that I had to pay for contraception!
I wondered if students had that kind of money?

To be continued

“no sex outside marriage!”
That’s a bit unrealistic, even my grandmother and almost all of her female friends got pregnant before marrying the boyfriends!
Except her older sister, she had an abortion by her boyfriend’s father who was a GP and didn’t want his church to know! This was in the early 1920’s.

I lived with my husband for about 4 years before getting married and starting a family.
Did I have sex during these four years? Of course!
Did I get pregnant? No, we used contraception wisely.

Why is sex before marriage wrong- it’s just one other aspect of getting to know someone.
In a relationship, partners try to find out many things about each other, and sexual expression is just part of it all. It’s natural.
I'd hate to marry someone only to find out that we were sexually incompatible.

The latest stats show that Christians have higher divorce rates than atheists; perhaps that’s because they don’t try before they buy, who knows. Divorce is unfortunate but necessary- why stay together if partners don’t love each other?

Yabby
You are not a very good Christian that you don’t kill your neighbours for mowing the lawn on the Sabbath!
This is an excellent example of how Christians just pick and choose what they want to accept from the Bible and ignore the rest.
Perhaps one of the differences between Christians and atheists is that Christians ignore some things the Bible instructs them to do and atheists ignore the rest as well.

Celivia, I am neither pro or anti life, so to say, just that I value the life of any unborn child but do accept that in special circumstances an abortion may be needed, such as to safe the life of the mother, like in emergency operations. With my daughter who had the Abortion, I had no contact with her due to the divorce with her mother, and the first contact was when I was called to the hospital as she had been given less then 24 hour to live. She had the abortion and complications and given up the will to live. I then, so to say, lectured her that no man is worth to risk her life for and she better get over it and a man who went as far as to force her in the circumstances to have an abortion wasn’t worth to have. My daughter was initial upset about this but later admitted that she was glad I spoke to her as she realised I was right. She is now happily married (Not to the coward, who claimed not being allowed to have children before marriage because of his religion- to me a nonsense as it is more likely not to have sex before marriage!). but the price she is paying she can never conceived children and that is to her a burden as she would like to have children.
As for my daughter who didn’t abort, she knows that she herself was the product of rape, where as a man I was in fact raped by her mother (Yes, this does happen also, strange but true) but it never affected my parental care to my daughter! I did bring her up as a single father and I view it was one of the best parts of my life. My personal view is that no married woman should be forced having to go to work for financial reasons as the income of the husband should be sufficient, as the care of children is far to important to leave it to others. I-cared-at-one-stage-full-time-for-up-to-5-of-my-children, with-two-teenagers-having-been-home-schooled-by-me! They-are-all-adults-now,-but-no-one-can-rob-me-of-the-years-of-enjoying-parenting.

Bugsy wrote:
"Obviously David Palmer has never heard of Alfred Kinsey."

It seems that Bugsy also has not heard of Kinsey otherwise he/she would know that he has been largely discredited in recent years for scientific fraud and criminally derived data involving child sexual abuse. For example, Kinsey's research into human sexuality included gathering data about sexual arousal in infants, toddlers and children, which involved prolonged sexual stimulation of same. As Kinsey associate Paul Gebhard revealed in an interview, in some cases the data was gathered by nursery school personnel.

One of Kinsey's most prominent disciples was Dr.John Money, a leading sexologist at Johns Hopkins University. He wrote of the need to legalize sex with children in the "Journal of Paedophilia"