Slippery Slopes and Normal

NPR had a story on the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, settled and populated by the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and Tahitian women. The story concerned the trial in 2005 of several men for rape and child molestation. According to the reporter, a culture had grown up on the island in which essentially all girl children had been raped by the age of 12.

This is a reminder that almost all the rules of sexual behavior developed by religions and civilizations are ultimately conventions chosen by society, and that those who speak of "slippery slopes" when those laws are modified are not entirely crazy. Pitcairn is hardly a freak - we know that rape and child abuse were widely tolerated in ancient Greek and Roman civilization, to name just two.

Nevertheless, this does not suggest to me that we should let God pick our rules of morality, especially when "God" in this case becomes a sentence or two cherry picked from an ancient book that is really more interested in what people eat and how they trim their beards.

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