Thank you for your willingness to learn despite your misgivings about various points the majority here possess. But please consider this.
You noted that it's difficult for people to give up religious beliefs if they have been inculcated with them their entire lives. Well, do consider that cultural beliefs and the paradigms our present society has created to support the current power structures of society are akin to religious beliefs in many ways. To our present day society, people who have lived all of their lives in it have been inundated with the belief that pedophilia--and hebephilia--are "faulty" attractions. This goes hand-in-hand with the conceptions of childhood and even adolescence that we in our present society have had so heavily entrenched in our minds during the course of our education both in and out of school; the concept of "innocence," and the manner in which children personify that concept in the eyes of a society with a powerful love/hate relationship with the natural sexual desires of the human species, and the latter's continued entanglement with Victorian moralism, are as sacrosanct and powerfully entrenched as any particular sacred religious belief. So much so, in fact, that even many people of no religious belief, such as yourself, consider them as sacred and inviolate as a devout Christian sees the Biblical scriptures and teachings of Christ, and every bit as much a universal truth rather than simple beliefs.
Several decades past, it wasn't pedophilia and hebephilia, but rather what we today consider mainstream homosexuality that was considered a "faulty" attraction base due to the attitudes of the time. Homosexuality filled the same societal requirement for a moralizing "bogeyman" connected to our culture's love/hate relationship with sexuality then as pedophilia and hebephilia do today. Need some proof? Then take a gander at this public service announcement from the 1950s uploaded to YouTube that I discovered in the course of some recent research for my latest essay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17u01_sWjRE