The Mis-Match Between God's Word and God's World

 So, here's a conundrum: 

• A woman can get pregnant around age 12 (puberty)
• But pregnancy at age 12 is dangerous, as the rest of her body has not necessarily matured enough to make for a relatively problem-free pregnancy. "Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm birth and severe neonatal condition."
• Meanwhile, the brain does not finish maturing until roughly age 25.
• So, our gametes are operational about age 12, pregnancy is optimal between 20-24, and our brains don't finish maturing until age 25

The times don't mesh. For a fertility plan created by God, the obvious question is "why not?"  Remember, for most of human history (up until the 20th century, in fact), it has been legal in every recorded human culture, throughout the world and the centuries, to marry and begin having children by age 10 or 12. Yes, that was true even in the United States, right up through 1885. 

Now, we know that brain plasticity is important to early childhood development. In fact, language learning is much easier in children precisely because their brains are nowhere close to maturation. For most of human history, until the last century, human beings have been married and started having children while still in their teens (or even pre-teens), it is certainly possible that the brain plasticity of the teen years is uniquely adapted to forming those same teens to learn to be parents. 

If this is true, teen pregnancy, far from being a bane to civilization, is the main source for family formation. By having and raising children before age 25, that is, before decreasing brain plasticity closes off ease of learning, men and woman are "formed" by the child-bearing experience into a parental view of the world. Failure to have children prior to the age of 25 means the parents' brains will be much less plastic, much less able to accommodate the new child-care experience. That is, the parents will be much less amenable to being formed into a parental worldview.

We already know that exposure to the "scent of a woman" increases testosterone levels in men. It is quite possible that male sperm counts are dropping, in part, because so many women are on hormonal birth control. But another part of the problem, the learning capacity of the teenage and adult brain, has not been much discussed. Perhaps it is time to start the discussion.

Christians Refusing God's Call

For most of Christian history, the legal age of marriage was 12 for both men and women.

By refusing to allow marriage until age 18, Christians are artificially forcing ALL men and women to be celibate. What if God is actually calling 12 and 14 year olds to be married? 

He did that for dozens of Catholic saints.

Did He stop calling teenagers into sainthood via marriage?

I strongly doubt that He did.

So, we are forcing millions of teens into the equivalent of convents and monasteries when they are not called to that. That cannot be good.

Now you might say, "Perhaps people were ready for marriage back then so it was allowed, but now by and large we are not by then." Perhaps. 

But that's a failure of Christian catechesis, not a failure of God's call. So... why isn't that a focus for bishops and priests? Why aren't Christians working on getting the age of marriage lowered back down to 12? 

If  "the future of the world and of the Church passes through the family" (Familiaris Consortio, #75), why isn't the Church trying to re-establish, in every way possible, the earliest and longest-lasting marriage traditions of the Church? Why isn't the entire Christian world pushing for marriage at age 12?  Arguing that we are no longer eligible for the grace of marriage until we turn 18 is not only a violation of canon law (which currently dictates 14 for women and 16 for men) but it also implies that the path to eternal holiness via the timeless grace of the sacraments is tied to a specific time period. Marriage used to make you holy in the past, but apparently, now, not so much. God stopped handing out grace to 12-year olds via marriage because... well.... reasons. 

And, apparently, God just stopped calling 12-year olds to holiness via marriage within the last century, because that's when the governments of the world were all apparently inspired by God to raise the marriage age to 18... yet God only told the Pope to raise the marriage age to 14 (for women) and 16 (for men), so.... that's confusing. 

 Canon 1083 sets it as 16 years of age for boys and 14 years of age for girls, a standard most recently revised in 1917, where 1917 Code of Canon Law Canon 1067 changed a longstanding law allowing both sexes to marry at twelve years of age. The Church had an opportunity to reconsider marriage age when preparing the 1983 Code of Canon Law, but chose to retain the 1917 standards and add only a provision allowing Bishops to raise local marriage age, as appropriate to regional customs. (link)

Likewise, God primarily inspired Western governments to do this in the late 1800s (age of consent in every US state was either 10 or 12 in 1885, except Delaware, where it was 7).  But, He waited over thirty years to inspire the Catholic Church (Code of Canon Law, 1918) and apparently, He still hasn't begun inspiring non-western governments, like the Islamic governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Or, at least, they haven't been responding. Of course, if their delay is due to their not responding to God's call, then that doesn't speak well to the Catholic Church's decision to wait until 1918 to revise canon law, and it also doesn't speak to the disparity between canon law (14/16 age limit) and secular governments (18 age limit). 

If canon law is the more correct inspiration of God, then why aren't priests and bishops, why isn't the Catholic Church as a whole, working strenously to reduce the age of marriage to 14 and 16 for women and men, respectively? If marriage really, really is the bedrock of secular society and the Church, if marriage and family truly is the future of the Church, then isn't lowering the age of marriage to match that of canon law the single most important fight the Church could wage on behalf of Christ's body?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1265157014545406

Similarly, when we see teens, or any unmarried couple, engaging in sex, engaging in child-creation, outside of marriage, is that because they are trying to respond to God's call to holiness through marriage, but society won't let them, and the Church is deliberately refusing to help them answer this call? Perhaps the crisis of the family is the crisis that the world's cultures, including the Church, no longer prepares 12-year olds to marry. 

Bureaucracy as Code

When you want to "harden" a server, you turn off and uninstall any software programs that are not actively being used. This is called "reducing the attack surface." The less code that is running, the less code that can be hacked.

Bureaucracy is absolutely identical to a computer program. Instead of machines ruthlessly and efficiently running lines of code, bureaucrats "fairly" and efficiently run lines of regulations. In both cases, we want the machines/people to apply the regulations without any emotion or favor to one group over another. In fact, bureaucracies even call the regulations they administer "programs". That is not an accident. "Programs" are meant to be programmatic. Bureaucrats are supposed to be machine-like in their application of program rules, not allowing their personal preferences to interfere with the just implementation of the bureaucratic rule set. 

Bureaucracy is program code that has not been debugged or beta tested. When the system produces what the regulations say, instead of what was intended, the novice bureaucrat/programmers think they can fix it by "adding one more line". But this "code bloat" merely increases the probability of bugs while only marginally adding to the utility of the regulations.

At some point, you have to slash "features" and code in order to reduce the ability of hackers to penetrate and exploit the system.

For the first time in our government's history, that's what DOGE is doing right now. Elon Musk and his team of programmers are "hardening" government against hacking by reducing the attack surface, reducing the number of installed bureaucrats and installed programs. 

Will this reduce the number of "features" that government can offer us? Oh, sure. But those features should never have been part of the code base to begin with. Removing them makes the original code functions much more stable and much more un-hackable. 

That's why 75% of government programs and personnel must be RIF'd. There's too much money in government, too many holes, too many hacker opportunities. Government needs "hardening", and IT tech bros know how to make this work. Their whole lives have been training for this. And, as one might expect, the hackers are outraged.