Antares

Actually, where does the title of this thread come from? It seems to be a fanciful extrapolation from just two tenuously related instances of personal idiosyncrasy. I'm telling you... something is going on inside that OP's head.

And references to a "left/right spectrum" (see JamesHackerMP's post above) don't help, either: they paint a wholly inadequate picture of political values being one-dimensional.

Actually, I wouldn't call that a simple question. But I didn't have an answer for it because I couldn't see how to tie it in to the topic.

One thing I don't understand is why people so often refer to the creation/evolution debate as if it had two incompatible sides: one claiming that the world was created intelligently, the other claiming that biological evolution is going on. There's no logical obstacle to believing that an evolving world was originally created by design.

The very fact that evidence for God is a topic worth discussing implies that the god in question is a pretty poor one. My wife is a mere human being, but I don't need evidence for her existence. So why do we need it for God?

Always in what circumstances, and how far would you take this principle? If it applies to all situations in which a young person is vulnerable to an adult, that would include most parenting. For instance, wouldn't it make it wrong for a parent to take a child to a church service, send them to a school, or submit them to a medical operation? Again, though, you seem to be assuming that all adults have sinister intentions towards young people, while young people have no such intentions towards each other. Is it really worth employing such a blanket generalization (adults are guilty until proven innocent; young people are innocent until proven guilty) for the convenience of not having to assess cases individually?

?Impact, your argument here may be unstated, but it's crystal clear and entirely germane. This post deserved a more respectful response.

But would you consider them capable of withholding consent? Or are they incapable either way, in which case society should consider denial of consent to be the default?

Point taken, although you're using a slightly different sense of 'biologically mature' from the one I originally used. IMO, teenage pregnancy is, on the whole, a disaster. It would be worthwhile to know more about the context of these statistics. For example, are there cultural factors that influence them alongside the biological age? Are all the mothers in question from the same society/culture? Do they have comparable living (and therefore, presumably, health) standards? And, in the expectation that the younger mothers are in their first pregnancy, how many of the older mothers have given birth before?

But we mustn't fall into the trap of assuming that all older people who have sex with younger ones are doing so harmfully, any more than we can assume that all people of the same age are having sex harmlessly.

This is a culture-dependent claim. In modern advanced societies we are keeping our offspring childish for longer than in historical or less-developed ones. I take it that by 'kid' you mean 'child' in the cultural sense, rather than in the biological sense, since most 13-year-olds are sexually mature (in the sense of biologically fertile). We advanced moderns have the luxury of being able to distinguish between these two senses, and I'm afraid people sometimes exploit that by glossing over the distinction. Some 13-year-olds are childish; others are not. I don't think it's useful to use the same label for adults who have sex with them irrespective of their individual level of maturity. Your reference to rape seems to imply that 13-year-olds are incapable of giving consent, which I would disagree with. No, but what would you say if someone claimed to be a non-pervert who'd had sex with a 13-year-old? My guess is that your concept of perversion is, as above, culture-specific: perversion is behaviour that is regarded as unacceptable by most people in your culture. But in the culture of, say, Anglo-Saxon England (which was one of the most advanced of its time in the world), it was perfectly normal for 13-year-old women (which is how they were regarded) to be married and pregnant. Indeed, in prehistoric times it was absolutely necessary for people to be procreating by that age. That's because life expectancy was too low for people to wait any longer if they wanted to raise their kids to adulthood before they died. And we haven't had time since then to evolve significantly different sexual natures, so having sex with the average 13-year-old is certainly not a perversion of nature.

We must be talking at cross purposes. Evidently, you are referring to a genuine scientific theory: one that is falsifiable and makes predictions. I'm not, although both ideas are evidently about the same phenomenon: biological evolution. My original purpose was to point out that evolution in the natural world is something that must be happening, however the world came into being. We can know this without the support of a theory.

But 'evidence' is an odd concept to apply to my understanding of evolution. You take certain facts (not hypotheses) about the natural world and derive logical conclusions from them to discover that evolution is inevitable. No observation (beyond the original observation that established the factual premises) is required, and no testing is possible. My understanding is that there is no such thing as proof in the empirical sciences, since they progress by testing theories (or hypotheses) and failing to 'break' them. A well-tested theory is the best thing we can aspire to in empirical science; proof is not available.

Things that make sense.

Do you mean 'kids who are 13', as opposed to 'young adults who are 13'? Or are you labelling all 13-year-olds as kids? Yes, many people would call it paedophilia, but they probably wouldn't be right. Do you mean 'grownups who are perverts', as opposed to 'grownups who are not perverts'? Or are you labelling all grownups who have sex with 13-year-olds as perverts?