Benjamin McGuire

No, you didn't appeal to a broad range of cultural facts. Cultural facts are not created by state law. Cultural facts are created by reality. For example, regardless of what the state law says, the average age of first marriage for a woman in 1840 would have been somewhere between 20 and 21. Marriage of 14 year olds was not at all common in that time period. I think that you are fabricating societal norms. Romeo and Juliette? We do have Romeo and Juliette laws which generally prevent prosecution when children who are similar in age engage in consensual intimacy. But that's a different issue. I will spell out the problem I have with you specifically though (well the narrow one involved in this discussion). Your argument is that we are "infantilizing" young people - giving them an unnecessary adolescence. You are arguing that if it wasn't for our modernist preference for delaying marriage, that we would (and perhaps should) still be marrying off children to older men. These views are wrong. The evidence for the value of adolescence isn't simply anecdotal. It isn't based on modernist trends. It is based on our growing understanding of human development (both biological and neurological). Our societal desire to restrict the age of marriage is coupled with a recognition that we need to protect children's autonomy, and that we need to limit child abuse, and that we need to have some protections for their health. These are not factors that have somehow mysteriously changed over time. Individuals do not finish their neurological or biological development any faster in the past than they do in the present. You want to ignore all of this. You are ignoring everything I am saying aren't you. Probably because it doesn't really fit with what you are saying. I am not passing judgment on anyone. I am passing judgment on practices. It is immoral to have 14 year old girls get married. It doesn't matter what the context is. I can say this because I believe in the notion of human rights - that there are things which people morally should have - regardless of the context. This is different from saying that those in the past were immoral for violating human rights. You may not be able to recognize the distinction, but it is there. If you cannot recognize the distinction, then, as I suggested above, you are entirely in a world of moral relativism - where moralism is based on the whims of society and there is no underlying moral framework to start from. I don't think that there is anyone here who would ever believe that I am a fundamentalist. Do you think that it is moral for children to be place into arranged marriages with old men? That is a question that I would like you to answer. It doesn't have to be a historically consistent answer. You might think that it is immoral now, and not immoral in the past. How your belief is parsed isn't so important as to have you produce it. See, this is simply wrong. We aren't treating teens as babies. We don't make them wear diapers. We don't feed them in high chairs (because they can't do it themselves). Your hyperbole is part of the problem here. I am not misunderstanding the concept. I am disagreeing with it (as do most people and professionals today). The idea that we are infantilizing children by giving them an adolescence is a fringe belief - not a normative belief. And the reality is that most children I am aware of have real chores to do - most get jobs. The thing is, though, we tend to put limits on the types of chores (and jobs) that adolescents are allowed to have. One of the things that we do not believe that young teenagers are ready to do is to be married and raising children. There is a certain sense of irony in your comments when you talk about the idea of it being sexual - and then use as examples Romeo and Juliette, or King Josiah (who had a child at the age of 13). This is the idea that sex is included here. And you are the one bringing it in to the picture. Sex isn't abhorrent. But coerced sex between a 14 year old girl getting married to a much older man through a marriage arranged by her parents - that is abhorrent. And part of our abhorrence is the violation of the human rights that most of us accept. Perhaps you don't value those human rights. Perhaps in your perspective, this is all about modernism (and post-modernism) corrupting those pre-modern values that we should return to. I am not interested in going there. And yet you are failing to respond to the issues. Let's keep at it. I asked a specific question, perhaps you would be kind enough to answer it.

And now we get a claim of cognitive dissonance from someone who has no idea what the term means.

This is why presentism is a challenge. In fact, to avoid presentism you avoid discussing both what is "bad" and what is "good" in the other context. An anthropologist avoids making all judgments of this sort in their work. Robert F. Smith, as I recall (and perhaps incorrectly) is himself opposed to the idea that the study of religions needs to be done outside of a position of belief. The academy often implicitly believes that a religious believer cannot avoid a presentist perspective in their approach to the study of belief. This split on the idea is the reason why, when someone raises the specter of presentism in a discussion, they are almost always engaging in it themselves. Why? Because they are trying to pass judgment in one way or another. Most discussions don't occur within that anthropological framework, disinterested in truth or morality. And the reason why this is important is that we are generally going to be discussing the past (or discussing other cultures) in a context that doesn't require this sort of strict neutralism. This is especially true in a religious context. We aren't having a history of religions discussion about Mormonism here. We aren't engaging in an anthropological approach to religion. So there isn't this need for some sort of strict presentism. And this is why I was pointing out that in the context of a discussion like this, the only real effect of arguing that your opponent is engaging in presentism is in fact to make an argument for a moral relativism. And while there are and can be a range of views on the place and importance of moral relativism, most of the time, my experience has been that those who are arguing that presentism is going on are in fact at least moderately opposed to the idea of moral relativism. The claim of presentism is a way to try and shut down the argument rather than a way of furthering the discussion.