Sacred Cows

We Americans often think of ourselves as so advanced and modern, with it and hip, and yet we have sacred cows that are accepted without question. There are ideas out there that every one really does know can’t be true at all, and yet, almost everyone acts like they are true and mouths the same idea all the time as though it were true. These are sacred cows – something everyone with an ounce of sense should know isn’t true but they go on pretending it is true. You seemingly CAN fool all the people if you get them to accept the sacred cow. There develops a complete disconnect between reality and belief.

In America, the idea of teenager is a very pertinent example. The sacred cow is teens are children. What? That 6’3 hulk weighing 235 pounds with sandpaper cheeks is a child? This is a completely manufactured idea and it is just because we have a funny numbering system, twelve, then this long string of teen numbers, then twenty. See, there’s something funny about those numbers. The people that age must be different. But let’s look scientifically at this sacred cow. Scientists classify all primates into three life stages: Infant, juvenile, then adult. That’s it – three stages of life. At sexual maturity all primates, including the human primate, are adults. There is no teenager stage in any other primate and there is no teenager stage in people other than this artificial construct. Oh, but people are unique and different. Right, even though we share 98% of our DNA with the Bonobo we are special. Why this weird perversion? It is really because our Victorian influenced society wants to stop young adults from having sex. Adults have sex. So we create this lie that they are children. Children don’t have sex, only adults have sex. Then we pretend ‘teens’ are children and believe they won’t have sex just because we now call them children! That’s how we get the sacred cow, a belief no one is allowed to touch or question. In fact, questioning a sacred cow gets you pilloried as a molester. The fact that the average age of first intercourse is 13.8 years or the more obvious evidence of a million teens having kids each year does nothing to change the belief in that sacred cow. I just don't understand where all these babies are coming from, teens are children...

Let’s look at the obvious facts that should be known by anyone who can read. Study after study has shown that half of teenage girls have had sex by their fourteenth birthday. Teenage pregnancy and STD frequency is rampant so even if you don’t believe the studies you can’t ignore the health statistics. Children don’t get pregnant, only adults can get pregnant. Hell, it’s the definition of adult in every speices, the ability to reproduce, and despite the obvious fact of reproduction we buy into the sacred cow, and justify it with ‘children having children.’ It’s a lie, children can’t biologically have children. These 'children' have sex hormones marinating their brains 24 hours a day, actually reshaping the pathways in their brains to think about sex, prepare them for sex, make them desire sex. They are inexperienced young adults and unless medicine finds a way to cancel that incredible flood of hormones that happens early in the teen years they are never again going to be children. But we pretend anyway.

Here’s one fact I find fascinating, all those girls who are promising to be sexually true to their daddies, I (Name) pledge my purity to my father, (and doesn’t that incestuous promise make your skin crawl), and the hillbilly Daddy gives his girl an engagement ring, oops, ‘promise ring’ to seal their incestuous promise. In a wonderful case of irony those promisers are more likely to come down with an STD than the normal population of girls. These ‘promises’ don’t actually prevent girls from having sex, of course as it is a natural and powerful desire for all adults including teen adults, but they do goad girls into refusing to be prepared for real life and carry condoms because that would make them a promise breaker. Those stupid promises don’t stop sex because these girls are adults, they are sexually mature and their bodies respond sexually just like any adult. They wind up at the drive-in with their boyfriend and his hand slides down and in and those hormones overpower her and bang, she gets the clap because carrying condoms would have made her a promise breaker. The silly promise, silly because it goes against reality, leaves them unprepared for real life situations and the girls get STDs or get pregnant instead. Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. I read that one out of six girls who make those promises actually keep them which it turns out is about the same percent as girls that haven’t promised. That just shows how powerful the normal adult impulses are in teens, a lot stronger than incestuous promises with daddy.

There’s the sacred cow at work. Our society has this weird idea we should keep other people from having sex. Schools can’t hand out condoms because then girls would have sex. Too late. Sex education waits till high school when more than half of the students have already started having sex. Too late. You hear it on talk shows, ‘How do we keep kids from having sex?’ You can’t, only adults can have sex. Then we arrest teens for ‘sexting.’ We throw teens in jail for completely normal behavior – behavior we would accept and even expect in any other adult. We put ‘Do not read’ warnings on story sites when we all know it attracts teens like pollen attracts bees, or maybe I ought to say it attracts teens just like it does all the other adults. Too many people pretend that this harebrained idea is right when the dumbest yokel could tell you it ain't true. That’s the sacred cow – an idea we all pretend is true when we should all see it isn’t.

The real problem is that this particular sacred cow keeps us from actually addressing and solving problems like teen pregnancy. If we pretend that young adults are children and they don’t have sex because they are children, we can’t solve the real world situation in which most teens are already having sex. The sacred cow - Children don’t need condoms. Real world, teens need condoms to stop pregnancies and STDs. The sacred cow – children don’t need to learn about sex. Real world – teens need to know about real world sexual issues, not silly ‘just say no’ campaigns. Teens are young adults – inexperienced perhaps, socially inept certainly but adult, that is sexually mature, the biological definition of adult. Until enough people start to challenge the sacred cow it will continue to stand in the way of solving real problems.

To give a real world example of just how easy it would be to make this better, in Germany any girl can go to her doctor and get birth control and condoms. Her parents can’t be notified; it is between the girl and her doctor. Gee, guess what? They don’t have the same STD and teenage pregnancy problems we have. All we would have to do is admit the truth about teens and we could cut the problem back to manageable levels. Will we?

How many other sacred cows are out there in our society? If you got here through my Serious Discussion page you just saw a whole bunch of sacred cows. Nearly all of those topics are off limits to many people. You challenge the orthodoxy at your own risk on those topics.

I'll tell you one I am seeing right now and will include it even though it is probably going to be old hat in a couple years - gay marriage. Several states worried that the courts will force them to treat all people the same are passing laws that allow people to discriminate against gays on 'sincere' religious grounds. If they are sincere bigots because of their Cracker God's will, then bigotry is okay.

Now what if that cracker feels it is God's will to discriminate against Jews, or blacks, or Catholics, or whoever? Once you return discrimination back to individual choice you can't stop it anymore. Stupid.

And the argument for why this is needed? Because a child needs a mommy and a daddy. Really? They why do those same same states allow 50% of straight marriages to end in divorce if it so important to have a mommy and daddy? If those states really thought it so important to have a mommy and daddy in the home why don't they require the parents to finish their parental duties before they get the divorce?

Our belief in monogamy is another such topic. People are monogamous. Really? They are? Someone isn’t paying any attention or more accurately they are ignoring the facts which so completely blast that idea. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of The Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce states it succinctly, "The bottom line is that the human animal is promiscuous, and it lies about sex." And if you don’t like what Ms. Fisher so plainly said, read Barash and Lipton, the authors of The Myth of Monogamy. After spending their entire book showing that monogamy simply doesn't exist in humans, Barash and Lipton spend a paragraph arguing for monogamy. Their argument is along these lines: Monogamy is not natural to humans. There is no evidence that society is better off when monogamy is the sole accepted pattern. In fact, most societies have permitted polygamy and they seem happier. But, since our society has decided monogamy is better, [ed. our sacred cow] and civilization is the process of overcoming our brutish behaviors (They make no argument to show why non-monogamy is brutish. This is thrown in without proof and in contradiction to all of the evidence already presented in the book) then we should just accept it and be monogamous. What an exemplar of logic that argument is... It is the sacred cow at work. It saddens me that even scientists would fall victim to a sacred cow belief, but it shows the power of the sacred cow. There is one scientist honest enough to say what was obvious. Einstein, who usually spent his time looking at stars and electrons, could see how wrong our society was when it comes to sex, “You must be aware that most men (and also not only a few women) are by nature not monogamous. This nature makes itself even more forceful when tradition and circumstance stand in an individual’s way. A forced faithfulness is a bitter fruit for all concerned.” The only mistake he made is he should have said all instead of most. The rest just lie about it.

Another sacred cow in our society is religion, where the term is most apt. After all the term refers to the Hindu practice of revering certain cows to absurd lengths and where you could be beaten for violating the taboo. We are all taught to respect all religions as if they all are true. Each of those thousand religions all promises a monopoly on the truth out of those thousands. Just speaking statistically you know that each one only has a Lottery’s chance of being right but we all pretend that these religious are right and deserve respect. Phooey. They are all amalgams of fantasy and lies mixed with greed. The sacred cow, we all pretend it’s true but we all know a thousand conflicting religions can’t be true. Respect others right to believe but let’s tell the truth here. They can’t all be true. In fact, the most likely chance is that none of them are true. The more you study one you find the less chance there is that it is true.

I know I’m going to step on toes here but… The single biggest sacred cow in the west is Christianity. Anyone who has honestly studied the Bible knows it isn’t ‘true,’ true in the sense of factual. That bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” is an admission of monumental ignorance, an exclamation of proud ignorance – Don’t confuse me with facts because I believe in the Bible as absolute fact. The Bible wasn’t written by the authors as a factual account. The author of John, whoever he really was since it is certain he wasn't the apostle, even said he was writing to convince people to believe, in other words, he knew he was writing propaganda, not facts. John admits he was writing fiction to persuade, not facts to inform. Read Gospel Fictions by Randell Helms. It shows how the New Testament was written as fiction and where all of those famous gospel stories people cite as facts about Jesus actually came from. All those Gospel stories were made up by people who never knew the real man or anyone who did know the real man and who didn’t even speak his language. And if you are saying to yourself, that’s just a bunch of nonsense from atheistic haters. No it isn’t. This is what Biblical scholars now accept as truth about the Gospels, they are stories, usually taken from the Old Testament in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, and applied to Jesus, not history. These authors ‘believed’ Jesus was God so taking stories from the Old Testament and changing them to show Jesus as God was a welcome practice to convince unbelievers though having nothing to do with historical facts.

Any intelligent reader has to notice that the Gospels contradict each other so much they can’t be true in any factual sense. Of course with the authors making up the stories it is not surprising they would never be true in a historical sense. He was born when Herod was king. No, he was born ten years later when Quirinius was Governor. Jesus’ family went straight to Egypt. No they didn’t, they went straight to Galilee. The last supper was a Passover Seder. No it wasn’t, it was the day before. No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t close. Story after story the stories are always changed or made up to support that authors theological views. This isn’t controversial anti-Christian rhetoric. This is the accepted view of sincere Biblical scholars today. Again to quote that great mind, “Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories in the Bible could not be true.” - Einstein. Maybe all this points to a ‘higher’ truth as some scholars like to point out. I’m just not sure how a bunch of Religious fairy tales can point to a higher truth any more than Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. But to demand people believe all these obvious fictions as the undisputed truth, well that’s how it gets to be a sacred cow.

I find it interesting that all religions seem to need the sacred cow. I think it is the nature of religion and people. The boundary between science and religion is that which can be known. Science deals with everything that can be known with certainty. Religion with all the rest. Any time we gain an understanding of a subject and can prove it, it moves out of the occult and into the orbit of science. Religion once burned people at the stake for their views on the heavens. Now astronomy is a science and no longer controversial because of that. By its nature then, religion deals with the questions for which we do not currently have answers. But our perverse natures demand certainty even when none is possible. As Voltaire said, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.” So we avoid the unpleasant condition by accepting the absurd one. Then we need the sacred cow to help us avoid noticing the absurdity of our beliefs. As Michel de Montaigne wrote, "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." God, the supreme creator of the myriad of Universes, powerful beyond understanding, larger than creation itself, allowed himself to be lashed and crucified like a common criminal. Oh, Please. How can priests say that with a straight face? Only if we all accept the sacred cow.

I must apologize to any believing Christians I have offended in this discussion. Nah! I just looked at the Constitution and there isn’t a single word about your right not to be offended. Where the hell did this bogus right come from? Sacred cow! We have been witnessing the growth of a sacred cow over the past ten years, the right not to be offended. ‘Oh, I’m offended.’ Stick it your ass! That’s what we should be telling these oh so easily offended people. Grow up. Act like an adult. Instead we are writing it into law. No one is allowed to challenge the very idea itself. It is to be accepted as a universal truth. That’s where the sacred cow comes from. Ask someone who supports this prohibition where this ‘right’ comes from. They won’t have a rational answer because there never has been such a right. In fact, real political discussion requires a new idea to offend some entrenched group. It always will. This is a way of locking in the current orthodoxy. You can’t say something I disagree with, I’m offended. Therefore, you can never say anything which challenges my comfortable beliefs.

There is something in human nature that appreciates the sacred cow. It allows us to avoid those unpleasant confrontations with the truth. We don't have to think, to judge. But the truth is still out there, behind those sacred cows. All you need to do is think critically and the edifice of the sacred cow crumbles like a sand castle in a wave.

Just because you disagree about some issue doesn’t make it a sacred cow. The Republicans are not all hiding behind a sacred cow. The Democrats are not all hiding behind their sacred cows. Okay, all politicians are liars and do try to hornswoggle people with various sacred cows but that’s a different kind of lying. That is knowingly lying using the sacred cows we as a people have come to accept. The solution to politicians, beside lining them all up and shipping them to Canada, is to quit accepting the sacred cows and demanding truth from our elected officials. If there are people on either side arguing, it isn’t what I’m talking about. Abortion isn’t a sacred cow as both sides are out there arguing and debating. That sort of issue is being examined and subject to change and that is healthy. I’m talking about those ideas that have wormed their way in and no one is allowed to challenge them, no one examines their validity. Those ideas, the ones no one is allowed to question, those are the sacred cows. Those are the very ideas that need to be toppled in the public squares of the world! And I hope you got offended because that just means you had to think about a topic you had assigned to the untouchable pile.

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