The Pope on birth control and sexual education

Being an atheist, I naturally disagree with most of the Pope's positions. First of all, I do not believe in God's role in people's marriage lives. The Pope said that marriage involves not only the man and woman, but also with God and the spirit. I do not believe in the God or spirit or things like that because I only believe in things/phenomenon that is proven by solid evidence. To me, marriage is mainly the business of the two people, loving and caring each other and wants to live with each other for the rest of their lives. Two people who match each other is the biggest concern. Nowadays not many people still take "marriage" and "relationship" really seriously and many of them would marry the person they love very much at that time, only to find out later that their lifestyle or ambitions are totally different or they just could not get along each other once they live together. Other forms of marriage like political marriage are less seen in modern democracies, but also not rare. Marriages between two magnate families are also common.

The Pope also suggested the marriage is not complete without children. I think most people would agree that they want to have a child by the two of them, raise him/her up and give him/her the best they could. However, the decision of having a child, and having how many children, lies solely on the couple. It should be up to the couple to decide if they really could afford the expenses of raising a child and teach him/her to be a responsible citizen. A small percentage of the population could have hereditary diseases and they may not want they child to suffer from the same pain. They decided not to have any children, and yet they lived a happy life together. In this case it's not ethical to force the couple to have a kid which is highly likely to inherit diseases that are hard to cure. In my opinion this decision should depend on the social and economic conditions of the family. If the family is rich and able to provide good nutrition and education for their children, they are free to have as many children as they want. However, if the family is relatively poor they should consider first what lifestyle they child would be able to obtain. More children mean more burden and less resources for each child. Although we cannot and should not stop the couples to have children, the couples should really make a sensible decision based on the welfare of their future kid. 

The last point I want to talk about is the Pope's point that sexual education should be refrained and total abstinence should be observed before marriage. While this could be true in the old days where transportation and communication is relatively difficult and inefficient, it's very difficult now for people to be convinced of the importance of chaste and abstinence. These qualities now have become more like a personal choice rather than the "common rule". Growing up in a conserved Asian family, my parents refrained from talking about sex and hide their "adult things" far away from me just like many other families around us. Sex is not a topic to be discussed among the unmarried people and would be talked about carefully and minimally among married couples. While I'm lucky to have studied in a quite liberal school and taught about sex from my biology teacher, not many children are as lucky. Children growing up in this kind of environment would be very ignorant of the biological structure of the human body and might be even more curious than other children how "sex" works. Most of them get to know this by talking to elder friends or just Google it from the Internet. However, information obtained randomly from everywhere is seldom all correct. A comprehensive and scientific sexual education will serve this purpose much better. Young adults should be educated the correct mindset and how to control birth in case they don't want it. For example teaching teenagers how to correctly use a condom before they even use it would significantly prevent much of the sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted babies among the young adults.