Re: The only thing meaningless is your drivel

That's not the type of maturity we were talking about and you know it.

Estimations of pre-industrial maternal mortality upon birth put it at about 1000-2000 every 100,000. That is more than there is today even in many of the poorest, less developed countries - the exceptions being mostly countries in or just after civil war. But it would still make sense to start young, because, if she (and the child) survived, she had more years to raise her child, and because the husband would have invested, proportionally, less on her than if she started later. But it says little about just how young. There is too young if she is so young that she dies before or upon giving birth.

I can't get either of those pages to load on my computer, but I will take your word for it.

The page includes Javascript. If you have it forbidden, authorizing it might do the trick.

The low bandwidth version of the page regarding the USA might load if the incompatibility is due to something other than Javascript settings:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/countrytemplate_us.html
(Warning: it will probably try to print, so just click "cancel" to the print window and it will not close the page)

Every rankable stat has its world ranking featured. I used Total Fertility Rate and GDP per capita (Purchasing Power Parity). Clicking the ranking number gives you the full lists - the pages you couldn't open.

The development subpoint was to demonstrate that it would've been far less likely for the average male to pursue an adolescent for the purposes of procreation and marriage because they would've been, on average, less physically developed than their modern counterpoints.

But the average male would have been constrained to look for a partner who was his equal in social class status, and thus likely to have experienced the same advantages or misfortunes of birth: nutrition, disease, climate, even ethnic considerations (Jews with Jews, not Gentiles; American Blacks with American Blacks, not American Whites; all the way to the complicated caste system of India, of which even non-Hindus were sort of a part of, by virtue of them not intermarrying with caste Hindus). So even if a poor, undernourished, ill male wanted a wife without the same defects he had and one or more were available in his town, he wouldn't have been able to get her because a richer, better nourished, healthier male would have chosen her first. So, yes, I understand your argument - but not every male was in the same position of choosing; only a privileged minority were.

To a point that is still true, even though far less so in the most advanced societies today. A wealthy, cosmopolitan, graduate educated male (OR female, these days) can choose not to partner with a ghetto 13yo who is poor, malnourished, illiterate, has STDs and does crack and instead look for someone with better prospects. Other ghetto 13yo's who are poor, malnourished, illiterate, have STDs and do crack, though, cannot choose better than that.

I have seen exactly what the power of prayer gets you, which is nothing.

Well, it works for alcoholics but you are not completely wrong; I was certainly exaggerating.

As for the bones of infants around the nunneries, A) do you have proof of that?

Yes, but will have to look for it. I will ping you.

and B) I would think God would hardly give such a favored status of a group of women who routinely murdered their own children.

But they also had more faith than most people outside. The level of brain remapping that some entrancing activities create (prayer is only one of them) can alter the whole body chemistry - and that level of brain remapping is not possible if you "act it out" rather than "believe the part" because the level at which you operate is different. Acting it out is rational, believing the part is/becomes instinctive. You stimulate different parts of the brain with each.

But you also have to consider the diets. The diets of nuns and monks were both much more abundant and much more balanced than everyone else's. Since traditionally they could raise their own food, receive donations and buy in the market, and all of this without being taxed for it like everyone else, they had access to many more and more varied foods than the great majority of people. At the same time, their rules prescribing gluttony prevented diseases of excess that were common in the secular upper class, such as gout or alcoholism diseases. This has been advanced as the hypothesis for explaining the longer and healthier lives of male monks. Given males never gave birth, within OR outside the church life, that one has to be discarded. In principle, even with a gap in pregnancies and births, it seems to me that diets have to be just as important for women as they can be for men.

For some reason, I think this thread had nothing to do with this post.