They are taught that if they masturbate they are committing a sin 2nd only to murder. Young men living under such teachings are wracked with guilt, as nearly all of them in fact masturbate at that age. Yeah, let's fill our young mens' heads with powerful guilt, that's great.
I find it unendingly interesting that secular humanist liberals, when confronted by a challenge to their facile criticisms of religion, immediately circle the wagons around their own god of eros. The modern cult of eroticism and the totemization of human sexuality explodes from every pore when a straw man is needed to prop up their weak kneed philosophical position. The idea that young men are "wracked with guilt" because of this teaching is bunk-where's your evidence of this? Some may be, some are not going to be. And in any case, all you have to do to avoid the guilt is not commit the sin. Its really quite straight forward. Guilt is a defense mechanism that's trying to tell us something so that we can make needed course corrections. This is just the old, hoary sixties fantasy of human behavior without guilt or any internal control mechanisms delimiting personal desires; an attempt to short circuit the natural mechanisms of moral and spiritual navigation.
Sethbag assumes that masturbation
isn't a sin based upon what criteria we do not know. The idea, however, that sacrificing it (as if, in classic sixties fashion, pumpkins will begin popping up at midnight without it) in return for something far greater (as with, in another vien, the WoW), is hardly startling or shocking. People have been forgoing baser tastes and appatites for thousands of years to attaint something much more worthwhile.
Of course, for the secular humanist liberal,
there is nothing much beyond this, so it is the difference in world view that becomes the major area of concern.
Jason, the flaw in your logic is that none of that bit about Stalin absolves the JW teaching from killing that kid, and none of it absolves religion in general from fostering the kind of attitudes and permissiveness toward whacky ideas in the name of faith, that lead to this kind of thing. At best your argument is a sort of tu quoque, and at worst it's just completely irrelevant.
This is a purely subjective prejudice and anyone with some degree of critical thinking ability should be able to see it. Jason is trying to absolve no one. Where did he attempt to do this? The claim that religion in general fosters such attitudes is easily argued against. Any and all belief systems can, when wielded by specific individuals under specific conditions, create both wacky ideas and malignant behavior.
Seth, in his psychological animus against religion, has allowed his critical thinking abilities to go into dormancy. The fact of the matter is that secular belief systems can and have led to ideas and behavior just as "wacky" and just as malevolent as anything ever witnessed in the history of religion, and the facts of recent history indicate
they have done so on a far vaster scale. The Atheist focus on religion as some kind of unique repository of crazy ideas and behavior, as over against non-religions systems of belief, is a straw dog that's easy to discipline.