[shasarak]

That is true; and it's precisely the reason why children need to be exposed to realistic portrayals of sex and its consequences as much as possible.

You really only have to look at the difference between a country like Britain and a country like the Netherlands. Here in Britain we are incredibly uptight about sex, almost as bad as the US; consequently Britain has one of the worst teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, and the US is worse still.

In Holland the rate of teenage pregancy rate is barely a third of what it is in Britain. And it's certainly not because Dutch children are shielded from the evils of sex. On the contrary, the Dutch take sex education very seriously indeed. Children are taught about the realities of sex over and over and over again until it becomes no more fascinating and mysterious than any other aspect of everyday life.

The consequence is that Dutch teenagers start having sex later, and rates of pregancy and STDs are far lower.

It isn't just a lack of knowledge that is dangerous. Children and teenagers are inevitably fascinated by things that are forbidden. Put a child in a room full of toys and say "you can play with any toy you like except that one" and the one forbidden toy will be the only one that holds the slightest interest as soon as your back is turned. If a child has no access to nudity, he'll find a way; children have been playing doctors and nurses for as long there have been doctors and nurses. I was never interested in that as a child because my family were naturists and so I had absolutely no curiosity at all about the naked body: I'd already seen thousands. And thousands of real bodies doing real things too - walking, chatting, swimming - not the odd, half-idealised, half-brutalised images one finds in magazines.

"As officially recognised" surely means "The Official Church of Satan", as established by Anton LaVey. They have a website, naturally:



But I don't really recognise the Official Church of Satan from your description. It isn't really a religion at all, in the conventional sense, in that there is no underlying belief in supernatural phenomena; instead it is a conscious attempt to adopt all of the ceremonies and trappings of a religion for non-religious purposes. In a way it's a worship of humanity. The philosophy is based on the notion that nearly all conventional religions ultimately come down to suppressing and mortifying instinctive desires and behaviour i.e. the goal is to make people as miserable as possible and ban anything fun. But most religions have some kind of opposition deity (Satan in the Christian religion) who espouses the idea of self-gratification. So LaVey's version of "Satanism" is all about doing what you actually want to do and what actually makes you happy rather than trying to deny your true nature. And the ceremonies have the form of religion but the goal of them is rooted in LaVey's somewhat unconventional take on Psychology.

Then again, what would have happened if no one had ever taken a stand against Senator Joe McCarthy because they were too frightened of the consequences?