Comment 108 by Ignorant Amos :

Then, as everyone here is well aware, cherry picking is prevalent with the believer.

Yes, exactly.

The Catholic™ church would say that its position is entirely consistent. It preaches that sex outside marriage is a sin and that using contraception is a sin. If believers actually followed this, there would not be a problem with HIV amongst Catholics. All this is entirely true.

You can say that this is a moral position, an immoral position or an amoral position.

But you don't get to cherry-pick your religion, and at the same time claim that you had no choice in the matter. You don't get to claim autonomy over where you stick your penis (or, as the case may be, what you put in your vagina) but not over whether you put anything on it.

I think saying 'some of its sheep' is a bit of an understatement with 1.2 million Africans dying in 2010 from the AIDS epidemic. I'm not suggesting all those that died were Catholics following silly rules, but if even one was, it's one too many...just my opinion.

I don't know how many were Catholics either, but we can say with certainty that most of those who were Catholics were following some of the silly rules. And it is certain that there are a very large number of Africans dying of AIDS who have never given the slightest toss what the RC says.

Therein lies the problem. People infected with HIV having sex with people who are not infected.

It's all very well to trumpet condoms as the solution. But there are three basic problems with condom technology:

(1) it deadens the sexual experience

(2) it deadens the sexual experience

(3) it deadens the sexual experience

This is a website full of educated, intelligent and rational people, and I am prepared to bet that not one poster in 10 can honestly say that he/she has never had unprotected sex with someone with an unknown sexual history. So what exactly are we supposed to say to undereducated Africans?

An alternative approach is to admit that STIs are the price of sexual freedom. This might seem radical, but is it, really? Half a million Americans have died of AIDS - ten times the number who died in the Vietnam war. Vietnam is a byword for idiotic wastefulness, but who ever questions whether sexual freedom was worth half a million lives?

Me, I think it is. I would risk it rather than live somewhere like Iran, or for that matter under the rule of the Vatican. But it seems to me that blaming the worldview of the Pope™ for sexually transmitted diseases makes not a whole lot of sense. It reeks of projection, in fact.