I can’t comment on this without getting a warning.
People in this thread think that you have no experience of human culture because of the way you argue in this thread: you are talking like somebody who has never experienced teenagers or adults having sex; who has no knowledge of biology of human mind and body; who has never experienced anything about humans different from you.
And yes, that includes not only your personal experiences, but also what you experience through books or other media.
Why didn’t you ask those questions right from the start instead of a completly different question, wasting everybodys time?
I remember reading about the trial(s) of Oscar Wilde. He spoke in glowing terms of the love between artists sharing the joy of their common love of art, how ethereal, yada yada, blah blah. Then the evidence showed he was the gay equivalent of a dirty old man - regularly picking up teen male hookers and having bung-hole orgies with like-minded “artistes”. All this proves is that gays are human too…
To the OP, IMHO - first, in patriarchal societies, generally the female role was considered subservient to the male role, so a male taking the female role basically meant he was abandoning that which made males dominant - including the warrior role, the agressor, the dominant one, etc. It seems to me that the more war-like and agressive a society is, the more it promotes “male” values, where not just being the receptor in buggery, so to speak, is considered bad but so also are other “womanly” traits like allowing emotion to show, being compassionate, etc. (Not sure how the Greeks got away from this attitude)
One other thing I read was that the pharaohs of Egypt, for example, used anal sex performed on their captured enemy as the final insult and expression of victory and dominance. That atttitude certainly does not make such behaviour socially acceptable in normal social situations.
Another item - there was a discussion on the spread of AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa that mentioned that warnings about gay sex dangers and collecting statistics failed because in many cultures those giving anal sex did not consider that they were “gay”; only the receptor was considered as doing something wrong.
However, I would agree the biggest drive is the ascetic, puritan tendencies of most modern religions - indulgent behaviour, whether it be gluttony, avarice, sloth, envy, or especially lust, would contribute to bad moral character and social breakdown. To be “true to God” one had to shun these behaviours. Thus, something that confuses the God-appointed roles of society and is done for self-indulgent pleasure certainly ends up high on the list of things to be forbidden.
The earliest Christians believed that Jesus would return very soon. Getting married was pointless. People gave up their property and lived in communes. After a short while this had an unintended side effect: People were shacking up without getting married. The letters of Paul addressed this several times, and he advised getting married if you just couldn’t wait. The married state was the respected norm in Mediterranean cultures, and Paul was somewhat of an old lady in his social outlook (Actually he was a monomaniac before and after his conversion). Fast forward a hundred years - communal life was gone. Marriage was still the accepted state for most, but many still opted for celibacy (see quote above). Basically, you needed to carry on daily life (and someone had to feed the anchorites), but it was seen as unimportant when you STILL half expected to see Jesus come to town.
The attitude that sex and private life was comparatively unimportant morphed into doctrine. Those who spent too much time on private life were deemed to be backsliders, and later, sinners. IMHO.
I thought I read a comment many years ago that Paul also had a very classical Greek attitude that women were a lesser form of life to be endured; and since he organized much of the church in the early eastern Mediterranean, this attitude took hold as the prevalent attitude toward women in the church. This explained their lesser role, the emphasis on celibacy especially for the priesthood, the distaste for sex in all aspects but especially except for procreation, etc.
Pretty much the same reason that sodomy is considered bad for society in modern times. Fudge packing is a nasty job and causes some serious diseases (HIV) that have no cure. You have to admit, that’s pretty bad for society. Sheesh, even the ancients knew that.
Amazing. This is wrong medically and, for many people, as a simple matter of taste. Did you not read any of the above posts?
I think you mean Gnosticism. According to your own link, Mani, the founder of Manichaeism (hence the name) lived from c. 216–276 AD, long after St Paul and other early Christians had firmly concluded that sex (especially if not for procreation) is bad. Manicheaism was a form of gnosticism (or, at least, drew heavily on gnostic ideas), but in other forms gnosticism was around in the earliest Christian times, and there was certainly much intellectual cross fertilization before Christianity got itself sufficiently institutionally together so as to be able to effectively declare (excessively) gnostic versions of the faith heretical.
The idea that you refer to, that the body (and matter in general) is evil, but the soul/spirit is good, and that spiritual enlightenment and salvation depends upon denial of the demands of the flesh, is the fundamental gnostic idea (gnosticism took many various forms but this is the common thread), and it did find its way into Christianity, early on, in a watered down form. It was not specific to (though it was shared by) the later movement of Manicheaism. The specifically Manichean idea is usually taken to be the notion that God and Satan are comparable in their powers, so that the universe (and the human soul) is an arena of constant struggle between these two powers of good and evil respectively. (This idea probably derived from the much older Persian, Zoroastrian tradition, Mani being a Persian.)
Manicheaism certainly influenced many Christians at one time, and Manichean ideas came to be declared as heretical, but the negative Christian view of non-procreative sex was already firmly in place before that.
Paul’s getting a bad rap in this thread. I don’t think there’s really any support for the idea that sex is bad in the writings of Paul (as found in the New Testament; we don’t have any writings of Paul that aren’t in the NT, and most scholars agree that not everything in the NT that’s attributed to Paul was actually written by Paul himself).
Here’s what I see as Paul’s attitude toward sex: It’s better (at least in the context in which Paul lived and wrote) to be single and celibate, if you can handle it; but not everybody can. Those who are married should be having sex with their spouses. See I Corinthians 7:1-9 and notice the quotation marks (which are not in the King James Version). Unfortunately, Paul didn’t use VB QUOTE tags properly in his writing, so what looks like his words is sometimes a quote of an earlier poster to which he’s replying.
It was some of the Early Church Fathers who came a bit later who really promoted the idea that sex is bad: here’s one cite.
I think you just contradicted yourself. Paul may not have been so strongly and explicitly anti-sex as some slightly later Christians were, but he still clearly regarded it as an unfortunate thing. I am not saying Paul was to blame for this - he may well have been trying to moderate the more extreme (unrecorded) views of other early Christians - but he bought into it and he passed it on. The anti-sex attitude is apparent in the earliest known Christian writings (i.e., Paul’s). Your link in no way says otherwise: it just fails to mention Paul.
Anyway, Justin Martyr (who is cited in your link as an anti-sex Christian) still pre-dates Mani by about a century.
Right. I think I forgot about religion in my original post. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray for class, and when the quarter was over, I didn’t stop there. I did my own reading and borrowed the censored version, newly published. It was filled with annotations about the novel, and it was a very helpful guide in understanding the novel. One of things I noticed was that the characters seemed to be parallels of the author’s life, as if the author had put himself in it. Oscar Wilde’s quotes were exactly the same quotes that Lord Henry Wotton used. Some references to Oscar Wilde’s other works and most notably his trial were used in the annotations. One phrase that I learned was “sodomitic vice”. Sodomy, according to Wikipedia, was anal sex, oral sex, and sex with animals. I noticed that there were Christian references to sodomy on Wikipedia, but I didn’t know whether or not that I could apply these Christian references of sodomy, as if sodomy was completely influenced by Christians or several other religions or atheists. I wasn’t completely sure whether or not Victorian society was a Christian society or how deep Christianity influenced this society. As I recall, the teacher didn’t say that the Victorians objected to homosexuality because they followed Christian values. The teacher said that the Victorians at that time did not understand homosexuality, which gave quite a different impression.
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I don’t know how reliable Larry Gonick is, and I don’t usually refer to Cartoon Guides, but to studies based on thousands of people.
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I read many books by Larry Gonick: Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, Genetics, History, and for the most part, his contributions have been rather useful. He does his research quite well and he often converses with professors and experts when he writes his books. He himself graduated university with a degree in Mathematics, so he also has written a book on Calculus. So, undoubtedly, I trust Larry Gonick and his co-authors. The book about sex was co-authored, and even Larry Gonick himself learned a thing or two about sex that he had never learned before! The book was published in 1999, so it might not reflect current studies. So yeah, I would say that it might not be very up-to-date on the research. I have read about studies in the social sciences before (newspaper articles in the New York Times and peer-reviewed journals). Half of me agree with what it says, and the other half is questioning whether or not the protocol is accurate enough to measure what the researcher wants to measure. I am actually quite wary of studies based on surveys. I have taken a Statistics class before, and one of the things I have learned is that opinions can change in the midst of the survey, if the question is worded differently. Some questions can be worded a certain way to get those doubtful testers to choose or respond what the sampler wants them to respond. Therefore, it is rather important to consider what the initial questions are. A study based on “thousands of people” may not be reliable enough, if the questions in the study are by itself biased. It’s also important to note that statisticians require the p-value to determine whether or not the results are statistically significant or insignificant. It’s easy to lie with statistics, and since statistics are considered “rational” because they deal with numbers, naive, uninformed, and unscientific readers can draw false or inappropriate conclusions from scientific data. See Zohnerism.
I wasn’t trying to argue. An ignorant person should never argue with a well-educated person. An intellectual debate would not be equal, if one side is educated and the other is ignorant. If I were arguing, then I apologize. I was, however, starting a discussion, not an argument, if I am perceiving the word accurately. The word “argument” in Visual Basics is a value or variable assigned to a procedure. In that sense, I think “argument” would mean a “set of claims that are defined”. I don’t think I was defining anything.
Well, at least I can say that I do not have sufficient knowledge on biology of human mind and body. I have finished studying General Biology; I don’t know anything about Psychology or Anatomy or Physiology, because I have not take a course in it (except the basic one in high school) and I am not a Psychology major (I am in fact a Biology major). Now, I know what you are thinking: that I should take those courses soon or start studying on my own time.
Good question. And it deserves a frank, full answer.
It all started when I took that English course that featured that novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book was very interesting and fit the Gothic Victorian theme quite well. I enjoyed the in-class discussions very much, and I frequently talked with my classmates outside of class about the novel. Though, what I found strikingly attractive in the novel was that it was freakishly similar to today’s homophobic stances in the mass media. I wondered whether or not there was a connection. I read about the courtroom case and controversy about Wilde’s novel when it was first published, some declaring it an “immoral book”, which prompted Wilde to comment that there was no such thing as an immoral or moral book; books could only be well-written or badly written. In the beginning chapter, Lord Henry Wotton was talking with Dorian Gray in the garden outside and mentioned the words “sin” and “shame”. And we, as students, wondered what Lord Henry meant by “sin” and “shame”. Was Lord Henry trying to frighten Dorian Gray? Was Lord Henry trying to warn Dorian Gray? Was Lord Henry trying to remind Dorian or lecture Dorian about some moral obligation? So, I was thinking what the quote meant, when a classmate spoke that Lord Henry was referring to homoerotic sex. And then I thought – wait a minute, does that sound familiar? Where I have heard of “sin” and “shame” and “homosexuality”? Ah, the anti-gay movement! I did suspect that the Victorians were Christians. They were not Fundamentalist Christians, because Fundamentalist Christianity, according to Wikipedia, is relatively new – more of a 20th century phenomenon. However, their values, conventional morality, and social norms seem to be very similar to Fundamentalist Christians, both of which treat homosexuals with hostility. The Victorians on Oscar Wilde’s court case and novel. The Fundamentalist Christians in American politics. I wonder if the Fundamentalist Christians were an offshoot of the Victorians. Then again, it seems that the concept of “sin” extends further into history. The Medieval Inquisition would be an example. This is why I used the term, “ancient times”. My knowledge on Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans is actually quite limited. I know of the countless Greek/Roman mythologies and stories, and the some of the most important philosophers that contributed to modern science and mathematics. My knowledge on Greek/Roman life is even less; I am not going to mention how much less.
So, I was more interested in the sodomy case than the actual novel, which, by first glance, did not seem to be about homosexuality at all. There was just this painter guy who somehow got obsessed with the blonde dude and painted the blonde dude, and the blonde dude’s soul got into the painting.
The teacher did recommend us to question whether or not Dorian Gray was an “aesthetic novel” or a “Christian novel”. A Christian novel would contain elements that evil is punished, while an aesthetic novel would mean that the novel is mostly driven by ideals of aestheticism. It is worth noting that Oscar Wilde was a proponent of aestheticism.
The teacher defined “utilitarianism” as " a theory that the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain or the greatest happiness of the greatest number". And then he defined “aestheticism” as “a theory that the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain or the greatest happiness” and omitted the last part, “of the greatest number.”