Why the Protestant Church Needs Another Ninety-Five Theses

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Do you want to suggest that I want women to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen? Well, if they don't start getting serious about that second item, we are toast. They can have all the shoes Imelda Marcos had, they can order in delivery every night, but please, please, have some babies, dammit! 🙂

Who is “we”?

[Calm]

17 minutes ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Strawman + hyperbole 

Not a good look.

Stargazer simplifies the problematic causes of the current reproductive situation in the (developed? because in places like Somalia and DR of Congo, they are still popping out 6 babies or more per woman with a maternal death rate of around 6 per 1000 live births) world to feminism and hedonistic tendencies and I am the one hyperbolicly playing with straw men?

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Peacefully]

10 minutes ago, Calm said:

Stargazer simplifies the problematic causes of the current reproductive situation in the (developed? because in places like Somalia and DR of Congo, they are still popping out 6 babies or more per woman with a maternal death rate of around 6 per 1000 live births) world to feminism and hedonistic tendencies and I am the one hyperbolicly playing with straw men?

Stargazer’s rhetoric puts me in mind of some lyrics by a modern day poet, Brandi Carlile:

You get discouraged, don't you, girl?
It's your brother's world for a while longer
We gotta dance with the devil on a river
To beat the stream
Call it living the dream, call it kicking the ladder
They come to kick dirt in your face
To call you weak and then displace you
After carrying your baby on your back across the desert
I saw your eyes behind your hair
And you're looking tired, but you don't look scared

Let 'em laugh while they can
Let 'em spin, let 'em scatter in the wind
I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends
And the joke's on them

 

[Calm]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

So a couple needs two incomes to survive and they won’t realistically have any time to parent any children since both parents are basically never home and would have difficulty housing and educating those children if they did have them.

They have a show in Japan on the first time a kid gets sent to the local store to pick up stuff for Mom or Dad.  It’s apparently a fond memory, a rite of passage there.  

The kids often forget items as they are simply told by parents and we all know how well toddlers remember instructions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!

Then there are the Korean kids in elementary school (and this isn’t just 5th or 6th graders) that get themselves up and off to school because mom and dad have had to leave for work.  This includes taking the train or other forms of public transportation across town at times.  

Thankfully kidnapping is pretty rare.

I am not saying early independence is a bad thing (when it’s safe), but I find it problematic when it’s not a parental choice, but forced by the need for parents to be absent so they can afford to raise the child(ren).

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Chum]

20 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Monogamy? In this economy?

I hadn't considered that we're in Group Marriage Economy. An unlike monogamy, group marriages are a good fit for every economy.

[ZealouslyStriving]

27 minutes ago, Calm said:

Stargazer simplifies the problematic causes of the current reproductive situation in the (developed? because in places like Somalia and DR of Congo, they are still popping out 6 babies or more per woman with a maternal death rate of around 6 per 1000 live births) world to feminism and hedonistic tendencies and I am the one hyperbolicly playing with straw men?

Implying that @Stargazer doesn't care if women die as long as they are "popping" out babies... Yes.

Why are  first world programs directed at Africa more concerned with easily available free access to abortion and preventing pregnancy, than a full frontal attack on maternal mortality?

Edited March 9 by ZealouslyStriving

[Calm]

1 hour ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Early Utah pioneer women seemed to do OK without the modern version of feminism.

Utah did do better in terms of infant mortality rate according to the few stats I could find than much of the US. This is likely due to the close communities and the support for women.  My great great grandmother was called (as in church calling) to be a midwife and after she had received training, she was set apart as she would be if a teacher or leader today.

Brigham Young and other church leaders’ attitudes towards women’s education was unusual for the time, though it tended to be focused on the more domestic sciences.

Still they were hardly receiving education at the level of the men nor were they as independent and able to choose to be single if they desired as men were able to.  

Plural marriage partner choice was in part driven by women looking to better their economic status (poorer immigrant women arriving in Utah were much more likely to get married polygamously and faster than the more family supported locals who more often chose monogamy).

https://utahwomenshistory.org/2019/08/19th-century-utah-womens-education-and-careers/#:~:text=Utah—like other territories and,women%2C departing Utah in 1878.

”Even in the more progressive Utah context, women’s participation in the medical field trailed: by 1910, there were 55 female physicians and surgeons in the state of Utah, compared to 481 men.” 

And Utah women were certainly involved in the feminist cause of their time, women’s suffrage.

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Calm]

13 minutes ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Why are  first world programs directed at Africa more concerned with easily available free access to abortion and preventing pregnancy, than a full frontal attack on maternal mortality?

Probably because it’s the cheapest route.  The US doesn’t even provide great maternal health care for their own women, probably due to a significant part the high costs of maternal medical care which can be 4 times as much as other developed countries.  AI says cost is almost $9000 per birth in hospital while usually around $2000 elsewhere.

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Chum]

33 minutes ago, Calm said:

They have a show in Japan on the first time a kid gets sent to the local store to pick up stuff for Mom or Dad.  It’s apparently a fond memory, a rite of passage there.  

This is such a contrast with US parenting - where kids are imprisoned at home/school/other adult-created environment under a mandate of 24/7 adulting.

[Chum]

13 minutes ago, Calm said:

The US doesn’t even provide great maternal health care for their own women, probably due to a significant part the high costs of maternal medical care which can be 4 times as much as other developed countries.  AI says cost is almost $9000 per birth in hospital while usually around $2000 elsewhere.

For one data point, our first was born at home in 1991 (near DC). It was a bit under $3000 for everything, inc supplements, prenatal visits, birthing supplies and for the midwife and doula. The traditional route inc hospital started about $15k.

[Calm]

Quote

In 1872, the women leaders of our church published the Women’s Exponent newspaper. While those early issues advocated good housekeeping, polygamy, and loyal church service, they also defined women as independent, assertive and strong. According to Evans, the Women’s Exponent “promoted a wide range of ecclesiastical, secular, and domestic options for women that male church leaders ignored or rejected…”

Quote

Mormon women’s outspoken assertions extended beyond priesthood authority, prophesy, and healing gifts and into the political realm. From 1880 to 1919, Mormon women leaders lobbied for national women’s suffrage, earning attention, friendship, and visits from America’s leading feminists in the east. When the 19th amendment was passed, local Relief Societies held victory parties and the women’s publications rejoiced that women had finally achieved “equal rights before the law, equal opportunities, equal pay for equal work, equal political rights.”

Early Mormon women leaders likewise advocated an expansive social role for women that was not often mirrored in male church leaders’ discourse. Although male church leaders were consistently mandating motherhood for all women, the Exponent in 1873 printed the following: “If there be some women in whom the love of learning extinguishes all other love, then the heaven-appointed sphere of that woman is not the nursery. It may be the library, the laboratory, the observatory.”

Feminism had quite a presence among women in early Utah

https://exponentii.org/blog/the-many-faces-of-mormon-feminism-part-one-the-first-wave/

[Calm]

3 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Implying that @Stargazer doesn't care if women die as long as they are "popping" out babies... Yes.

Just mirroring his simplistic pointing to the pill, feminism, and hedonism as the drivers of low birth rates leading to the end of the world as we know it (“we are toast”)

I am not going to pretend he was willing to invest the few minutes it takes to look up data to get something beyond “non-zero” as a maternal mortality rate while he had no problem looking up fertility rates. 
 

edited due to a double negative that tripped me up

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Stargazer]

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

You are acting like this is some new crisis the world has never faced before.

And you are acting as if it is an old crisis the world has faced over and over. LOL, actually it is a new thing. New since the mid-20th century. The world didn't have effective contraception before. Previously, people had sex and babies were born. 

The crises that were faced before had nothing to do with contraceptive choice resulting in depopulation. The major ones consisted of famine, war, and pestilence. And the occasional natural disaster.

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Again, you are suggesting it is causing all the hedonism.

Hedonism is a standard human propensity that is enabled by prosperity. The cause of hedonism is human imperfection, not voluntary contraception. Voluntary conception is one trigger for hedonistic behavior. There are many others.

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

That is really biased sampling.

Biased sampling? You're kidding, right? I wasn't selecting my data to conform to my theory. And while my sample isn't scientific, and might be anecdotal, it isn't biased or cherry-picked. So, let me expand the sample according to availability in order to test my theory that what you described is not as frequent as you suppose (because if it were common for women to die in childbirth we wouldn't have 7 billion of us here on earth).

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

When the mother died it often meant the child died too even if successfully delivered. The lines that weren’t so fortunate usually never came to exist.

And that, my friend, is an extrapolation of a vague generalization expanded to cover an infinitude. Pitiful.

It has been a particular interest of mine, so I know my own genealogical data quite thoroughly. Because of similar thoroughness, I have my late wife's genealogy back as far as records exist (WW2 caused a lot of destruction of records in Germany). My current wife's "chief genealogist", her unfortunately deceased sister, was likewise thorough about their family. And I have access to my first (ex) wife's line as well. Not having all day to go through all collateral lines, and restricting myself to direct descent, I have scanned 51 direct grandmothers of mine, my wife, and my late wife. These women were all born and died between the 1790s and mid 20th century. These women had a grand total of 306 children. Not one of them died in childbirth. Two occurrences where mother and child died within a month or two apart suggest illness. When I ran back through my ex-wife's genealogy, I found exactly one occurrence of mother-child death on the same day.

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

And why is South Korea’s fertility so low? Let’s see. Exorbitant housing and education costs and a long workday and long workweek. So a couple needs two incomes to survive and they won’t realistically have any time to parent any children since both parents are basically never home and would have difficulty housing and educating those children if they did have them.

United States is following in that same tradition. Maybe going back to the days when having one full-time job was enough to support a household would help? You want to blame it on hedonism when economics is the main driver here. I know several couples who want children but also realize they can’t afford them and have no real prospect of that changing. Fix that before whining about how couples are doing the fiscally responsible thing which you are labelling as hedonism for some reason.

Ah yes, the Great Replacement thing. The idea that Islam will slowly and continuously grow in Europe and cultural factors will keep everything exactly the same as right now in perpetuity and Europe will become majority Muslim in the late 2100s. Sure. Yeah.

So vote in far-right authoritarian regimes to save us. The Kremlin has spoken and must be obeyed. They know how to solve demographic crises.

*looks at Russia*

Oh wait…..ummmm…..hmmmmm…

I've run out of time to address this. And may not get back to it. We'll see. If the thread doesn't get cancelled.

Edited March 9 by Stargazer

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Chum said:

This is such a contrast with US parenting - where kids are imprisoned at home/school/other adult-created environment under a mandate of 24/7 adulting.

Children appear to be safer in Japan (see below, lack of firearms helps), but it’s not like they are running about free, even if parents aren’t transporting them.  Going to and from school can take 2 or more hours for many.  School days are started at 8 and end around 4 with after school activities till 6.  Saturday used to be a half day of school.  Their school year amounts to 240 days vs around 170 the US.  Then there’s the homework, around 3.6 per week, with more hours for high school, sometimes up to 4 or 5 hours per day.

https://interacnetwork.com/school-life-in-japan/#:~:text=Schools in Japan often open,number of required Saturday sessions.

https://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat23/sub150/item830.html#chapter-8

And parents hover when it comes to grades from what I have seen in Asian families in Canada (about a third of my daughter’s elementary class were immigrants from Asia).  One of my son’s best friends was told he was going to have to quit band because his grades weren’t high enough (they were A’s, 92% iirc, they needed to be 95 or above).  I told him to tell his parents Canadian and American universities like a well rounded resume with extracurricular activities counting quite a bit.

“The proportion of deaths caused by unintentional injuries among total deaths in infants aged less than 1 year remained at around the 5% level, and that for children aged 1–14 years showed only a modest decrease from 24.5% in 2000 to 19.6% in 2009. These data suggest that unintentional injuries remain an important cause of death in children in Japan. The proportion of such deaths among children aged 1–14 years in Scotland for the whole 5-year period between 2002 and 2006 was reported to be 20.6% (138 out of a total of 669 deaths) [18], being similar to our present result. By contrast, the proportion of such deaths among children aged 1–14 years in the USA in 2009 was 31.2% (3,155 out of a total of 10,101 deaths) [5], which was higher than both the proportions reported in this study and the proportion in the previous study conducted in Scotland [18].”

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/10/2/528#:~:text=Among the causes of death%2C the majority,infants aged less than 1 year%2C drowning

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Chum]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

These women were all born and died between the 1790s and mid 20th century. These women had a grand total of 306 children. Not one of them died in childbirth. Two occurrences where mother and child died within a month or two apart suggest illness. When I ran back through my ex-wife's genealogy, I found exactly one occurrence of mother-child death on the same day.

FamilySearch says I've added 19,600 people. I've noted lots and lots and lots of childbirth deaths.  First children to first wives are the largest group, then last children to first wives (last child here being shorthand for not-first child).

It was a real risk and these deaths were routine announcements in local news. 

Regarding infant deaths on the whole, we only know about a fraction of the total. A large percentage of infant deaths I are not from vital records; they were likely never recorded. For example, the 1900 and 1910 census indicate child deaths (# of children born, # of children living) and that info isn't indexed on FamilySearch or Ancestry. To say that I routinely spot evidence of unknown, deceased children is a strong understatement.

How I see childbirth deaths manifested is I see a child born every 18-24mos and after a gap, the mom dies.  I might eventually find evidence of her final childbirth - but I usually don't. I'm guessing bereft fathers aren't eager to travel all the way to the county seat just to record that. 

If genealogy has taught us anything about infant mortality, we're undercounting these souls by a lot. It's so common that I often wonder what our Deity's plans are to address it.

Edited March 9 by Chum

[Chum]

33 minutes ago, Calm said:

Children appear to be safer in Japan (see below, lack of firearms helps), but it’s not like they are running about free, even if parents aren’t transporting them.

The primary risk to roaming children in the US is cars because cars fill the spaces kids would otherwise use to transit. The secondary risk is trespassing charges because forbidden land is ~all the spaces not filled with cars. Between them, they've taken every inch of kids critical leaning space.

What US kids are safe from is stranger kidnapping. Those stats are are comparable to the before years (before kids' forever imprisonment).

edit: my delivery may be terse but that's wholly due to my frustration with US's relentless sabotage of childhood.

Edited March 9 by Chum

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Chum said:

The primary risk to roaming children in the US is cars because cars fill the spaces kids would otherwise use to transit. The secondary risk is trespassing charges because forbidden land is all the spaces not filled with cars. Between them, they've taken every inch of kids critical leaning space.

What children in the US are safe from is stranger kidnapping. Those stats are equitable to that time before we started imprisoning kids.

Pedestrian and cycle deaths are highest for kids in Japan, while passenger deaths are higher iirc in the US.

But I agree there isn’t a lot of safe space for kids to play in the US even in semi rural towns, at least according to what I have seen over the years.  There may be plenty of parks in an area, but it’s dangerous roads to get there.  There are a lot of roads without sidewalks where I live and I am constantly reading warnings on FB on the community pages about drivers tearing through the neighborhoods, especially at dusk or early morning.  We have been here 20 years and we used to see kids playing out on the roads all the time.  Not anymore and for good reason.

In Canada, our neighborhood was relatively safe. While there was a busy road on the south side of our house, there was a nice greenway along it, though kicking and throwing balls would definitely be out.  And there was a handy stoplight right there to cross the road to get to a park with a duck pond and playground the kids loved.  We were on cul de sac so if there had been more kids around, that likely would have had more playing there, but there were only two houses with kids and the others were preschool while mine were elementary and high school.  The next street over that my kids had to cross to get to school or friends though scared me to death because it was a very wide one as the road curved into the intersection plus it had a divider down the middle…and no stop sign for some odd reason.  It was pretty safe if the kids crossed on the other side as not much traffic went down those roads, but that meant three crossings instead of one and my guess is the kids didn’t care to take the extra time.

I remember getting threatened as a young kid by a neighbour he would call the police if he caught me taking the shortcut to my home behind his after school (5 minute walk vs 15 minute having to go around a loooong block).

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Chum]

16 minutes ago, Calm said:

But I agree there isn’t a lot of safe space for kids to play even in semi rural towns, at least according to what I have seen over the years.  There may be plenty of parks in an area, but it’s dangerous roads to get there.

In my childhood, I could safely walk for miles in nearly every direction.  My kids could walk a few yards before cars became a continuing factor to mitigate. Accepting that, they simply had nowhere to go.

[Calm]

10 minutes ago, Chum said:

In my childhood, I could safely walk for miles in nearly every direction.  My kids could walk a few yards before cars became a continuing factor to mitigate. Accepting that, they simply had nowhere to go.

We lived by busy roads surrounding the neighborhood, but the neighborhoods were quite large and we were always near the school, which had a big park until high school, so space to play and safe roads to bike on for hours.

A huge factor I think is the sheer number of cars.  A lot of families had only one car and that was gone during the day with dad at work.

Edited March 9 by Calm

[Chum]

12 minutes ago, Calm said:

A huge factor I think is the sheer number of cars.  A lot of families had only one car and that was gone during the day with dad at work.

That missing critical growth is what happened in the absence of adults. If a car is involved, so is an adult.

Healthy environments reflect what you shared, where kids left and shopped on their own. 

If we want to nurture future mental health, childhood needs trivial access to so much free range/adult free spaces, that it's more than they could ever get to.

Edited March 9 by Chum

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

And you are acting as if it is an old crisis the world has faced over and over. LOL, actually it is a new thing. New since the mid-20th century. The world didn't have effective contraception before. Previously, people had sex and babies were born.

Curse you chaste unmarried people!

Worth noting that roughly half of the falloff in birthrates is less unwed pregnant teenagers so not sure we really want to bring that back.

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

The crises that were faced before had nothing to do with contraceptive choice resulting in depopulation. The major ones consisted of famine, war, and pestilence. And the occasional natural disaster.

This isn’t a disaster.

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

Hedonism is a standard human propensity that is enabled by prosperity. The cause of hedonism is human imperfection, not voluntary contraception. Voluntary conception is one trigger for hedonistic behavior. There are many others.

So we should make sure people are impoverished? The poor can’t be hedonistic? What? That is just not true.

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

Biased sampling? You're kidding, right? I wasn't selecting my data to conform to my theory. And while my sample isn't scientific, and might be anecdotal, it isn't biased or cherry-picked. So, let me expand the sample according to availability in order to test my theory that what you described is not as frequent as you suppose (because if it were common for women to die in childbirth we wouldn't have 7 billion of us here on earth).

It is very biased and very cherry picked. You didn’t do it deliberately though. Every one of your ancestors survived until at least puberty and managed to reproduce. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be an ancestor. It is a very biased selection sample.

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

And that, my friend, is an extrapolation of a vague generalization expanded to cover an infinitude. Pitiful.

No, it is a historically supported phenomenon that has been researched. Is ignorance pitiful?

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

It has been a particular interest of mine, so I know my own genealogical data quite thoroughly. Because of similar thoroughness, I have my late wife's genealogy back as far as records exist (WW2 caused a lot of destruction of records in Germany). My current wife's "chief genealogist", her unfortunately deceased sister, was likewise thorough about their family. And I have access to my first (ex) wife's line as well. Not having all day to go through all collateral lines, and restricting myself to direct descent, I have scanned 51 direct grandmothers of mine, my wife, and my late wife. These women were all born and died between the 1790s and mid 20th century. These women had a grand total of 306 children. Not one of them died in childbirth. Two occurrences where mother and child died within a month or two apart suggest illness. When I ran back through my ex-wife's genealogy, I found exactly one occurrence of mother-child death on the same day.

I've run out of time to address this. And may not get back to it. We'll see. If the thread doesn't get cancelled.

Again, yes, because children whose mothers died were much much much less likely to survive. You could hire a wet nurse if you were wealthy but other than that you would feed them yogurt or mash and hope for the best and infant often died. That assumes that there is another family member to care for the child since dad probably can’t spare that time. We’re back to the sampling bias again.

Your genealogy is not evidence that maternal death rates were lower than were historically established and they were historically dangerously high.

[The Nehor]

40 minutes ago, Chum said:

In my childhood, I could safely walk for miles in nearly every direction.  My kids could walk a few yards before cars became a continuing factor to mitigate. Accepting that, they simply had nowhere to go.

This is a problem for adults and children. We have driven “third spaces” out of our communities. This generally means places that are not home or work to socialize and/or play in with others in the community. Church can sometimes fill this role but only to an extent. Other venues keep growing more expensive which pushes people out of them.

[The Nehor]

3 hours ago, Chum said:

I hadn't considered that we're in Group Marriage Economy. An unlike monogamy, group marriages are a good fit for every economy.

My friends in poly relationships often want to bring in more people to live together to deal with costs. It sounds good in theory but in practice it often destroys the relationships involved to all live together.

[Calm]

2 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Every one of your ancestors survived until at least puberty and managed to reproduce. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be an ancestor. It is a very biased selection sample.

That does make it slanted, but I don’t think that is what he is saying. If there wasn’t child or mother death after his ancestor was born in those families as well as little to no death in the extended families he traced, which is what I think he was referring to, this would be an unusual statistic, I believe. There were a lot of child and infant death and stillbirths in my family records (grandmas paid for professional genealogists plus my mom’s side is Scandinavian so they go back quite a way except for my dad’s dad’s dad’s who was a German Jew, we have the ship he left Germany on and names of his siblings and father and general birthplace location and that’s it).  I don’t remember maternal deaths as well, but quite a few second marriages iirc for the European families.  I know one of the plural wives of my great greats lost a child at birth and almost died, she became an invalid.  I wonder if GGM’s care of her was why she got selected by church leaders as a midwife as supposedly it was legendary (Brigham Young even visited and commented on what an example it was).

[Calm]

10 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

This is a problem for adults and children. We have driven “third spaces” out of our communities. This generally means places that are not home or work to socialize and/or play in with others in the community. Church can sometimes fill this role but only to an extent. Other venues keep growing more expensive which pushes people out of them.

There are always the malls.