There’s ample evidence in a slightly different direction. Historically, there have been lots of arguments that people with certain rare sexual preferences don’t have healthy relationships–whether it’s people who are gay, people who are poly, people who are kinky, or whatever. Historically, those arguments haven’t actually borne much fruit or had much evidence to support them.
So I’m gonna say that rotisseriespitters get to do their thing, just like anyone else with an unusual fetish, and I’m not gonna cast stones. The spitters with healthy relationships? Great. Those without? Separate issue.
If everyone did, yes. If an occasional person does, no.
Do you think it’s harmful to society if some people choose to be celibate?
People with unhealthy relationships, sexual or otherwise? That’s a problem. People with no relationships, sexual or otherwise? That’s nearly always a problem, but mostly for the people themselves. People with no sexual relationships, but healthy non-sexual ones? That is not a problem. Sure, it would be if it were everybody; but for some people to be like that is no problem at all.
– I think there’s a place for modern society to respect peoples’ sacred places. And, very likely, for us to create and preserve spaces that are the equivalent of sacred in a secular sense.
But phrasing it as “purity” makes me queasy; because that concept has so often been used to call people “impure” and to punish them for it; whether the supposed “impurity” is in having a form of consensual sex that’s disapproved of, or in being a member of a religion that’s disapproved of, or in having a child with a member of a group defined as “other”, or in being such a child.
Agreeing with this. Loyalty’s an excellent thing – provided that one’s careful who one’s loyal to, and in what fashion.
Respect for legitimate authority is a good thing. Knee-jerk respect for any authority no matter what they’re doing is a terrible thing.
Not destroying somebody’s sacred places to build a highway or dig up some coal, and either behaving respectfully at or staying out of somebody’s religious service, are good things. Declaring that your kid’s “impure” because they’re gay is a terrible thing.
So I’d argue these kinds of arguments (which are absolutely trotted out against gay rights, etc.) are a measure of how “sanctity” no longer really exists as a moral foundation in modern western society.
Not too long ago (in my adult lifetime definitely) people who opposed gay rights could just rely the fact that cishet people found the idea of gay sex repulsive. Any further justification wasn’t needed beyond that kind of “impurity” (as in, just a visceral feeling that “erg thats disgusting”)
That’s is much less true nowadays. People tend to understand that just because they personally find something repulsive, that doesn’t make it objectively “wrong” in any sense. So you find these kind of spurious arguments (“the libs are turning our children gay so they don’t have babies and the white race will become extinct!”) about the “harm” the behavior causes.
I’m not sure I agree with your last point. (The rest I agree with). For some people repulsiveness is linked to what God wants. Those with gods who had no problem with it also had no problem with it. We saw this in the gay marriage controversy. Aside from some easily refuted arguments about how allowing SSM would destroy traditional marriage, it all came down to god hates it.
Think of how shocking a modern beach would be to a Victorian. And think of how a picture would be less repulsive to some of these people if you Photoshopped a woman’s head for a man’s.
I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t see much evidence for failing to take care of the poor and treating immigrants poorly invoking a repulsiveness response, and there is far more in the bible about that homosexuality
I’m not denying that people do good things because of what god wants. But everyone is quite selective in what parts of the Bible they follow. They get worked up about stuff that isn’t very important based on the number of references to it, but are just dandy with Sabbath violation.
All morals are individual atheistic morals in that each person chooses how to filter what their supposed god says.
I think this can be true. But this doesn’t fully explain religious believers who follow edicts they don’t particularly like or agree with, because they believe that God wills it. I have a minister friend who has made it quite clear that he doesn’t like a lot of what God says. And there are many Biblical stories about people’s desires conflicting with God’s will, right down to Jesus Christ himself.
I’m not sure how to explain this as an individual subjective standard of ethics - which is to say, I’m not sure that much choice is involved when it comes to what one believes.
I would argue that’s strange and cruel to the chicken. But if you have to go to chicken fucking to find inherent correctness in our citizenry I’d ask what is the apparent danger to society here? What is it people are afraid others will do if they are allowed? What do I need to categorically be against to be accepted in society and what is the sticking point exactly?
I am going to put aside this shiny word ‘sanctity’ and ask people what they are really on about and what I now have to do.
I think a lot of people have a problem admitting that some or most of the people is just wrong, since that knocks the legs out of the faith that is important to them. But they still have their individual moral sense, thanks to our still mostly secular society, that things are wrong.
This same thing, in the extreme, leads to creationism and flat earthism. What parts of the Bible are metaphor? I’ve never found anyone who can give a good metric for this, except for the few that say none of it is metaphor except for obvious things like parable. They even accept Job, which is clearly a story and not history.
My personal morality resembles something I read in an old computer book. (At first I thought it was the Unix philosophy, but some googling tells me I’m misremembering that.) It is worded something like “Be liberal in what you accept as input, but conservative about what you release as output”. The idea, in the computer world, is that you have no idea what random and nefarious data might be input into your program, so you need to be prepared for anything someone might throw at it. While other programs rely on your documentation and formatting rules to interpret your output, so you need to make sure it strictly follows those rules to avoid any confusion or errors.
What that means to me outside of the computer world is that, while I may hold myself to some pretty high standards, as long as others avoid outright harming people, they can do whatever they want and I won’t object. “Don’t sweat the small stuff, but live and act with integrity,” in so many words. To me, “sanctity” or “purity” would fall squarely in the “morality for me, not for thee” side of the line. I may concern myself with my own purity, but I don’t care about yours, so long as you avoid harming others.
And yet defiling a human corpse is a crime, and, most people would believe, rightly so. I don’t personally believe it’s wrong to fuck a cooked chicken, but I’m having difficulty pinpointing the moral difference. I’d say human beings have rights over their own bodies (even in death) in a way other species don’t, but I’m not sure that’s enough justification. Honestly, as much as I think about morality and concern myself with it, I still don’t have anything like a unified theory that underpins it. Which can make it hard to tease out edge cases.
Well, I think it’s different for every denomination, but at least for my friend, he believes none of it is metaphor. An example of something he doesn’t like would be, bad things happen to people because we all fall short of the glory of God. I don’t think he means that individual people bring tragedy on themselves through bad actions, I think he means that we are all just inherently unworthy of God’s grace and thus we are all universally vulnerable to bad things happening to us.
The inherent unworthiness of all humanity happens to be a tenet of Christianity that I despise, but I think it’s interesting that he doesn’t like it either, yet still believes it.
I think what people view as “Sanctity” is their own disgust response, which may or may not bear any relation to how bad an action is. So I would say I don’t think there’s a place in society for assigning levels of badness to things based on how disgusted they make us. For one thing, we aren’t disgusted by all the same things.
I grew up very religious, surrounding myself with a lot of extremist socially conservative beliefs, even if I didn’t really buy into them myself. I always had doubts about these things. And one issue which eventually led to my complete break with the church was how they viewed homosexuality. When I was a young girl, one of my closest family friends was gay, and it was discussed pretty openly as I got into my teen years, so whereas my friends and church family had extreme disgust responses to homosexuality, mine was nonexistent. I remember attending church camp when I was maybe twelve, and it was a way out there extremist right-wing Bible camp, the sort where they pressure you to throw away your Christian rock CDs because someone might accidentally think you’re playing secular music. So one day during chapel this preacher just starts ranting about the depravity of gay people and how it would make me throw up if I knew what gay people did to each other.
And I didn’t say this aloud, but my immediate response was, “Huh? I thought they just had buttsex. What am I missing here?”
I wasn’t missing anything, obviously. That preacher was. But no, there is no place in society for that guy’s idea of Sanctity, and it’s always going to be someone’s idiosyncratic disgust response driving that notion. Just as racism disgusts me on a visceral level. I’d rather approach things rationally to the extent we can.
Other humans, or at least many of them, get upset if a human corpse is defiled.
To the best of my knowledge, other chickens don’t care what happens to a dead chicken.
To me, at least, that’s the difference.
I can’t really say that I do either. I think it’s OK to cook and eat a chicken or a cow, as long as it was treated decently while it was alive and killed as humanely as possible; but I think it’s an awful thing to do to cook and eat a cat, even if the same criteria were met. I’m well aware that I don’t have rational grounds on which to defend this.
Some of my ethics/morals I can defend rationally, or think that I can. But not all. And of course the underlying basics – it is wrong to hurt any being unnecessarily, all humans matter but it’s wrong to behave as if only humans mattered – pretty much function as axioms: systems get built on them, but they themselves are just embedded too deeply to seriously challenge. The best I can do is to be aware of that.
Alright, let’s try ro respond to some of these posts before the thread gets too far ahead!
This is an excellent post, exactly why I had started this thread. I had some thoughts along these lines as well, but you formulated them exceedingly well.
I think this “protect people from harms they do not understand” function is why taboos and the concept of Sanctity emerged in human society to begin with. Some obviously harmful taboos, like incest, fit the bill.
But I think the issue is that once you have people who are conditioned to obey taboos unthinkingly it is a small step to create taboos that protect existing power structures instead of safeguarding individuals. So the incest taboo protecys us from inbreeding but homophobia entranches the power of the patriarchy.
The problem with Sanctity is that by definition it is beyond investigation. I think that’s wrong. Nothing is beyond investigation.
My initial thought is that I believe that there are a number of ways to derive human rights logically. I’m very partial to John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance thought experiment.
That doesn’t mean that we need to reinvent the moral wheel every time we deal with a moral question; but I think that going so far as to set up sacred rules is too far.
I agree with you in terms of my worldview. But you don’t have to go too far to find examples of people or cultures that disagree. Seppuku is an obvious example. The way the people of Masada chose to go out is another. But history and folklore are full of people falling on their swords or having to take tragic actions because they gave their word when they didn’t have the full context. Even if many of these tales are exaggerated, they would only resonate with cultures and people who view honor (which I think wraps up loyalty and sanctity and possibly ingroup, depending on who and what you’re being honorable about) as an inherent good.
