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Role at Preserving the Moral or Social Values of the Group
Does the Church have a role in preserving the moral values
of the society? If the Church has spurred sometimes some
social changes, it has mostly been reserves about the
social changes brought upon us by the evolution of our
civilization. In matter of social and moral stabilty,
the Church is thus a stronghold.
The Jewish people holds its present existence and its
non-extinction to the unity realized, during secular
periods, around the mosaic law. Christianity has been,,
a few centuries agop an efficient barrier against the
invasion of Europe by the maures, and, more recently,
against the expansion of the international communism.
Muslim has always feared the assimilation of its Middle
East worshipers by the Occidental values. In Haiti, the
social and moral values of the society has often been
an amalgam of Judeo-Christian (European) values and Vodoo
(Afro-Amerindian) values.
The human values have been often characterized by the following antipodes: good and evil, spiritiual and
material, or moral and immoral, for example. To many
Christian Churches, chastity, is one of those good values, a virtue advocated by them. It holds to the principle
of sexual continence among unengaged people and stresses the
monogamic character of the sexual union among the
Christians. Since the AIDS epidemics, it has regained
some steps that it has lost with the advent of the
antibiotics. It has its roots in the immaculate
conception myth and in the story of the virgin Mary.
However, those later spiritual notions are misunderstood
by a lot of Christians who do not attach too much credence
to the myth.
In Haiti, particularly and partly, probably,
because of the amalgam of values, the cult to the Virgin
Mary (known under many names) have often been
accompanied by sexual desinvolture among the polygamic
men who, during the cult period, "hire" the services
of female prostitues or, in the best cases, visit their mistresses.
The Church concretizes thus the values of the society
which it advocates. As Such, it comes to be the
representant in excellence of the socio-moral1 values of this society.
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1
They cannot be separated. Society is the group that sets its own (moral) values. Those values vary among the different human groups.
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