blondie - "The WTS has weird ideas about sex."
It generally mirrors the attitudes of the rest of fundamentalist Christianity.
I find it interesting that lately, some Biblical scholars are suggesting that the Bible's prohibitions on non-marital sex have less to do with actual sex, and more to do with property ownership; in Biblical times, an unmarried girl was viewed as her father's property, and a married woman her husband's property.
By that logic, for a man to have sex with an unmarried woman may well have been viewed as sampling the merchandise before paying, and adultery may well have been viewed as a more serious form of actual theft (not that I'm condoning the idea that human beings should be viewed as property, of course).
It would explain why there was relatively mild consequences for two unmarried youngsters who'd hooked up and got caught (basically, monetary compensation to the girl's father equaling the cost of a human asset, and a shotgun wedding if a bun was in the oven) but harsher consequences for full-on adultery. Back then, theft could be a matter of life and death for the victim, after all, and the potential "theft" of a man's means of ensuring his heredity would have been viewed really seriously (ancient cultures were much more concerned with heredity and lineage than we are today).
Hmm.
It just occurred to me; we in the civilized Western World consider it completely unethical to view daughters and wives as property. If what I suggested was indeed the case, an argument could be made that the Bible's sexual prohibitions may therefore not neccessarily apply any longer, any more than other Biblical prohibitions that have become - for practical reasons - unneccessary (after all, Jesus never told the Samaritan woman at the well that she had to marry the man she was living with ).
'Course, that'd never happen in fundy religions like the WTS; they'd be too scared that everybody'd immediately throw all restraint into the wind and transform into a freaky-ass, heaving, sweaty mass of writhing bodies...
