Religious Teachings On Sex

This graphic on religious teachings and sex is making the social media rounds. The source is questionable and the design is a little iffy, but oh what the heck, it’s Friday. Have a nice weekend all.

[Thanks, Brian]

24 Comments

  • Interesting, but I’d change some squares…

    Greetings from Spain!

  • I’m not Roman Catholic so I could definitely be wrong but there is a form of Catholicism that is “neutral” on homosexuality?

  • Nice coloring of this http://www.religioustolerance.org/sex_chur.htm please at least note your sources…

  • Fascinating and unique depiction of Islam. Fascinating limitation of categories; for example, murder is omitted. Fascinating.

  • I am an Orthodox Jewish and can say that most of this is wrong and so ridiculous/limitating. Visualization can not be so simplified that it creates inaccuracies in the output. I am a reader of this blog due to it’s concern with data. As “Data Scientists” part of our responsibility, which I take seriously, is the accuracy of my data.

    Lets be a little more careful as data folks on the data we show if it’s not accurate. If you don’t know then investigate first. If you don’t have time, don’t show data just to put up content.

    • i’ve covered this topic many times before, but we can learn just as much from poor viz – if not more – than we can from the good. i think just from the comments today, we’ve learned a little bit about design and a little bit about (poor) data.

  • An interesting approach – trying to present such a complex matter in one dimensional scale.

    I think this is a good example of case that would have benefited from dark-light scale instead of “grdient” from red to green. Red has decent connection with “condemned”, but other colors (specially the “greens”) are pretty hard to tell apart.

  • Charlotte July 10, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    A good example of how a wrong level of data renders interpretations irrelevant — even if I agreed with all the colors of the square (which I don’t, but it’s neither my object here nor Nathan’s I daresay), this would be made irrelevant by lumping all “humans” together (i.e. a good number of things might be OK for one gender, but not another, as is the case of divorce in Islam)

  • How come there is no column for Christian? I’m not one, but I know many that would consider most forms of Christianity different from Roman Catholic.

  • Observation..
    Like so many people, the creator of this the “Religious Teachings On Sex” chart is ignorantly comparing a denomination (Roman Catholicism) to three religions. This is so ridiculous!! The best way to do this is go to their source documents… holy books and pull out scriptures, verses, or sayings related to sex. Compare them as condemned to accepted… then score the religion. Otherwise totally totally inaccurate and purely a chart of the creator’s opinion. The basic error of assuming Catholicism is a relgion leads me to believe that the authors perception of religion is from very limited view.

  • Regardless of what the various religious think of sex, there is a special place in Hell reserved for those who pick color schemes without regard for colorblind users.

  • Dude,
    Nice block, but you’re incorrect in several blocks.
    (1) Teen sex, in Islam, I would say the position is unclear/neutral.
    Once a woman has her menstruation, marriage is allowed, it is not uncommon that a women is married once she reached 15-17 years old.
    (2) In Islam, divorce is absolutely allowed though disliked.
    (3) Abortion, in Islam, depends on who you ask, some sekt in Islam would condemn it, some would be neutral.
    (4) I think Roman Catholics is pretty clear that they condemn homosexualism.
    (5) You should also add Protestant, and Hindu. :)

    Anyhow, nice viz, quite interesting to see.

  • As a Notre Dame graduate, I am not at all surprised to find that the Roman Catholic sexualist is afforded the least latitude of the four faiths on the chart.

  • 15921820382 找一夜qing。。。

  • 15921820382 ons

  • Interesting choice — to pick Roman Catholicism and exclude all other forms of Christianity.

    Also, there are plenty of other sexual practices on which religions ethical decisions would be interesting to see — even if all the major religions condemned them.

  • As a practicing Muslim for 20 years, I notice this has some wrong info on Islam, specifically:

    Divorce should be green. Islam permits divorce, it is very clear on this, though it is considered a disliked thing to do.

    Masterbation should be orange. Ask most scholars and they will say it is forbidden.

    Teen sex should be yellow or green. As long as the teens have both reached puberty and are married its fine.