I don't deny the importance of sex as very strongly bonding. In fact that's an important reason people should not be sleeping around, because it breaks the emotional bond that's created
Mind you, when people sleep around, they rarely are about long enough to create emotional bonds that are going to last.
It's incredibly difficult, but it has been done. Besides, women don't conceive every time they make love!
I understand that. I was pointing out the absurdity of your statement that began with "Sex without kids is like getting drunk but not having a hangover. It just isn't the natural course of things."
I'm against hookup culture but I don't think you can legislate against those free choices that consenting adults, however young, make.
Yes, of course women don't conceive every time they make love but purely from a logical point of view, there are only so many children most females are going to have or even want but all things being equal, infinitely more times they will make love in a lifetime. So the idea of sex being primarily for procreation is a biological truism, but it's by no means a human/social one.
Even Darwinian atheists will agree that sex exists to support the species
From a perspective of there being no God, one would be hard-pushed to deny it.
That said, I would not dismiss the importance of having kids as being itself a bonding mechanism...
Like many things in life, that is somewhat nuanced. If a couple are moving in the same loving direction, then yes. It can also work out to be totally disastrous.
or the fact that the very thing God commands is, "Be fruitful and multiply"!
Well, this really needs to be put into context. Even to this day, many people within the various Jewish communities believe that they are disobeying God if they don't want {and
∴ don't have children} or if a woman wants a career but not kids. All over the world, communities that have been touched by Christian philosophy or the Bible use that quote of "Multiply, fill the earth" as though God were saying it to them, right now. Logically, if that was a "command" and it still held as a command, when could God ever purpose to wrap all of this up and start over ? No, that is a statement that was given to the first two inhabitants of the earth.
Within it, it carries a resonance for humanity but only up to a certain point. The earth is pretty filled. Which is not to say that people should no longer have children {that would be silly and none of my business !}, rather, that every statement we come across in the Bible needs to be put into its correct context.
In fact when I know for a fact that someone is not Christian, I still have huge respect for them for every kid they have
Blimey, I don't. I've worked with girls that were pregnant at 12. I've known a young lady who had 4 kids by the time she was 20. I have a sort of friend who had child after child, up to 7. She never really took much care of them once they were crawling but kept on having them because "she liked babies." I know many guys who had kids and weren't in the slightest bit interested in contributing to their raising and nurturing. I know enough children who haven't known who their Dads are. Or seen them in more years than they've been alive.
I don't like abortion because I hold life, however it's mandated, as sacred and none of us can tell the future. Yeah, there's a likely possibility that many children born into some situations that we all hold as negative will simply reproduce the negativity that has given rise to their birth in the first place. But not one of us can predict correctly the course of the entirety of an individual's life. In exactly the same way, we don't know what havoc someone from a stable, respectable background will wreak in the future and how many will be affected by their actions and attitude in a negative way. Most of the terrible leaders from whichever part of the world you care to name, that were responsible for untold millions of deaths and the suffering of even more than that, over the last millennia, came from marriages, you know. Many of the more corrupt politicians and law-enforcement practitioners of the last century in the Western world {I won't even begin to get to Africa and Asia} came from marriages, you know.
