Howard Beale
Registered User
- Apr 7, 2010
- 3,285
- 91
I'm not going to get into an ethics debate here, but generally the reason society holds certain behavior as moral or immoral is because of consequences. Drinking and smoking and sex before marriage can have severe consequences which can be avoided by abstaining.
It is obvious to me that he takes his health and his life seriously.
While in many cases true, some of the values and morals stressed in the Bible are ones no longer relevant today, since thousands of years have passed, and the world isn't the same place it was then. As long as people recognize that it's fine, but some religious people take everything written in the Bible to be fact and law, which is where problems arise.
For instance, the consequences of pre-marital sex are completely different now that birth control and condoms have been invented. It once may have been completely immoral, but now that people can have sex with minimal risk of pregnancy (and STDs provided that they use condoms), they can decide for themselves how they want to live, instead of obeying the Bible as law.
Likewise marriage used to be all about producing children to look after you when grow old, and having more hands to help with your work. However now it is no longer imperative that one have children, since we have health care and pensions, in fact many heterosexual couples choose not to. Now marriage is more about spending your life with someone that will make you happy, and as such it no longer makes sense to oppose gay marriage, while in Biblical times it did.