Who else has argued that Gehenna is a place of historical judgment? I see one hand hesitantly raised

We are indeed defining deviancy downward in terms of consensual extra-marital sex, I will admit, but the deviancy limit only got as high as it got due to a long period of defining sexual deviancy up. In pretty much all the west prior to the last two hundred years, publicly available brothels existed. Now Johns are treated as deviants. We are defining deviancy down in terms of the viewing of pornography, but we have ratcheted the incest taboo in modern times up to dizzying proportions (most people in the US today would consider sex with a second cousin disgusting, while anyone who has mapped out their family tree more than two or three generations, or spent a significant amount of time with Amish people, can see that it was not always so.) We have also defined upward the deviancy of sexual relationships seen as exploitative: throughout much of history, and much of the world, a financially successful forty-year-old man could marry a sixteen-year-old girl or keep a couple as mistresses. Today, he is considered a pervert.

When syphilis arrived in the Spain in 1492/3, it spread with lightning quickness and reached China in less than ten years, despite bringing disfiguring death within a few months. I’m not sure promiscuity in the Western world has increased since 1500 since everything is added up.

Even if we concede that we have defined non-violent sexual deviancy downward historically, there are other classes of behavior where we have defined deviancy upward. Children bullying each other is considered a real social disease now, and violence between them is treated with incredible seriousness, even though in the 1950’s or earlier no one would have treated it as a real problem. Similarly, beating children is less acceptable than it has ever been, and rates of violent crimes such as assault, rape, and murder are at incredibly low rates relative to history.

Deviancy goes up; deviancy goes down; and those who search carefully can always find either positive or negative statistics concerning historical trends. My take: I’d rather raise kids today than in my grandfather’s generation. The sheer quantity of physical violence in his hometown during the Great Depression shocks all of us.

(With regard to rates of physical violence, it’s probably easier for me to say some of these things because I’m white. In 2009, for instance, Cincinnati had 49 murders — a particularly good year. Of those, not one was white. Things aren’t so good right now for Non-Asian Minorities in the US, but even so, black-on-black violence is lower than its been in twenty years, and Hispanics are making rapid academic and social gains.)

Mike,

I wasn’t expressing an opinion I was just pointing you in the direction of statistics you may be interested in (if you are not already familiar with them, which it appears you may be given your comments above). My personal opinion is — as I have in the past been personally guilty of more than one of the above — as none of these surveys (or any others I have seen) asked questions about whether these events happened pre — or post conversion, or whether the guilty parties repented afterwards and have not committed repeat offences, they say very little, if anything about the morality of believers. Furthermore, perhaps the focus should be on encouraging each other to do the good things we ought to do and don’t, you know, give up our possessions for the poor, share our shirts with those that don’t have one, invite criminals, prostitutes, social rejects into our homes… Regarding your latter point about homosexuality, the rest of the world thinks Christians are obsessed with it, whereas, despite widespread homosexual practice in the roman empire, if Tertullian is to be believed, the early church was known by the Romans for the love it’s members showed one another. Perhaps it is time to change the record.