Remember… marriage is a religious institution. Premarital/extramarital sex is bad because people like having sex and … if you convince everyone that you need to be married to have sex or your going to hell, then the church effectively becomes the arbiter of who can have sex.
Which means all the horny fucks in their congregation follow their rules so they can get married. Also means that the kids will be forced to grow up in the church and gives control of who they happen to start banging… because god is racist and doesn’t like mixed peoples…
I imagine there’s also an aspect of instilling a culture of shame around something that constitutes as a basic human need. That way people will invariably have at least one basic “temptation” to crawl into church to plead forgiveness over before seeking deeper religious indoctrination.
I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn’t readily available.
There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.
There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.
Where there’s incentives, they’ll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.
Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn’t have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.
At the same time as not contraception, infant mortality was ridiculously high. To the point that people that high estimates put the IMR at about 1/3.
There’s a reason people married young historically- they needed to start getting kids popping out. Or at least that was the mentality. More kids meant more stability and safety. Kids were free labor, the first male would inherit most or everything so that wasn’t really a problem. So they popped out a lot because the first five years were… awful.
Remember… marriage is a religious institution. Premarital/extramarital sex is bad because people like having sex and … if you convince everyone that you need to be married to have sex or your going to hell, then the church effectively becomes the arbiter of who can have sex.
Which means all the horny fucks in their congregation follow their rules so they can get married. Also means that the kids will be forced to grow up in the church and gives control of who they happen to start banging… because god is racist and doesn’t like mixed peoples…
I imagine there’s also an aspect of instilling a culture of shame around something that constitutes as a basic human need. That way people will invariably have at least one basic “temptation” to crawl into church to plead forgiveness over before seeking deeper religious indoctrination.
And do that whole confession thing which would surprise me a lot if it turned out was never used for leverage.
don’t forget that people who leave the church don’t tithe
I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn’t readily available.
There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.
There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake™ by getting stuck with The Wrong Person™.
Where there’s incentives, they’ll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.
Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn’t have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.
At the same time as not contraception, infant mortality was ridiculously high. To the point that people that high estimates put the IMR at about 1/3.
There’s a reason people married young historically- they needed to start getting kids popping out. Or at least that was the mentality. More kids meant more stability and safety. Kids were free labor, the first male would inherit most or everything so that wasn’t really a problem. So they popped out a lot because the first five years were… awful.