Mean New World

Random thoughts some posts I read at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/14/122726.php.

The posts that scoff about the futility of expecting people not to go to bed outside of marriage are denying reality. For ages it was understood in the majority of cultures that sleeping with another person is reserved for marriage(except for the occasional disfunctional cultures dug up by anthropologists like Margaret Mead who were looking for justifications for their own sexual immorality).

Parents used to protect their daughters from unprincipled men that would take their virginity and discard them. Decent fathers used to advise their sons not to take advantage of women by seeking to have the thrill without being willing to give the love and commitment.

Before the sexual revolution, the norms were different than they are now. When something is illegal or recognized as immoral, only those who are on the fringes are likely to do it. Most people live within the values of their society.

Now everything is legal, and the consequences are horrible. I would argue that separating sex from conception and love and that the violence of abortions are root causes behind child abuse, not the lack of available contraception or lack of access to abortion (which some claim). When love and child bearing and any inconveniences on our way to pleasure are perceived in such a negative light, then a child is seen as an object that can be abused when it interferes with our pleasure. Just as other people are seen as objects in the way we live now.

What we do to our children with this Brave New Morality is damage them. Instead of training our children with the age-old morality that physical "knowing" of a member of the opposite sex belongs only in marriage, we encourage our young people not to "repress" themselves. We now teach that people are incapable of self control.

The truth is that people that have sex outside of marriage are playing havoc with their normal feelings. They have to learn how to repress instead a whole other set of associated feelings that come with sexual union without love or commitment.

The hatred of someone who "clings" or is "possessive" is part of that whole mindset. The real crime is to use without love, but in our society the natural feelings of jealousy, along with the desire to want to "own" or keep the other person in our life after we have given ourselves to that person in that most intimate of all acts, these natural feelings are perceived as being evil and we are taught to repress them.

Liberals in these matters give their children permission to freely engage in a heartless coming of age ritual that in many ways is a mutilation of the soul and body that is equivalent to or even worse than genital mutilation.

When a young woman and man have "sex," for the first time, they enter into a physical union that for the health and happiness of them both belongs in a committed relationship. The consequences are harmful psychologically, physically, morally, and spiritually. Breaking up is hard to do.

Learning how to manage the feelings is the rite of passage I'm speaking of, which is wrong because it teaches people to deny their real feelings in pursuit of an imagined freedom, which ironically often leads to slavery.

Women are especially cheated of the full expression of their natural instincts with that kind of relationship. When I was growing up, future thinkers like Hugh Hefner and Isaac Asimov and Isaac Asimov dreamed of a world like we have now, where a person could have intercourse with a stranger without any ties. Women's instincts are for child bearing and love of husband and children, but they are being taught the perversion of their natural instincts is for their good. Abortion, the violation of a woman's natural feelings of love for the fruit of her womb, is for the convenience of people like Hefner, whose vision of freedom is freedom to use women who are always young, never dependent, never fertile, never inconvenient.

Learning how to let go of someone with whom you have the sexual union is painful. Drugs and alcohol and meanness help dull the pain and guilt. Everyone acknowledges that when a "relationship" ends, it is like a little death. It can take six months or often a lifetime to recover from losing a person who is connected to you whether or not you want to admit the connection exists. Our society denies the connection exists, but that does not make it any less real.

The person who is rejected (the dumpee) is always diminished in their sense of their own value. How can that other person have known me so deeply and found me unworthy of love?

A lifetime of making and breaking these bonds has many evil consequences, and one of them is the people who are schooled in immoral sex find it very hard to make real and lasting commitments.

They start with what used to be called love, and don't call it love unless it suits them.

It's like we don't call a baby in the womb a child unless it suits us. A man can be tried for killing an unborn child if he kills a pregnant mother, but society paradoxically says that for a woman to kill a baby in her own womb is not murder.

Words used to deny the reality of love and of life are lies.

Don't laugh at the idea that you can avoid sexual disease and unwanted pregnancies by not having sex until marriage. Don't forget that for ages upon ages humans understood the natural results of intercourse are both a permanent connection with the other person and the creation of new life.

Just because birth control was invented doesn't mean that it is a good thing for the human race. If a pill gets invented that reliably enables people to eat more than they need without the food being converted into bodily nutrition and fat reserves, that won't make gluttony a good thing either.

People bond because they do literally become one flesh, whether or not they even like each other. Separating from that bonding is traumatic, but people accept the pain because it's part of the illusion of freedom that we value so highly. And when the person gets trained into lust separated from love, that person probably learns to be very cavalier about the pain that the pursuit of lust causes in their dealings with other people.

Oh Mean New World that has such values in it.

PS. People often claim that Jesus did not speak out against fornication or homosexual practice, so they claim that Jesus thought it was enough to love our neighbor. Jesus didn't speak against these obvious evils because he didn't have to. Everybody in the Jewish culture of that day understood that fornication and homosexual practice are evil. Jesus didn't speak out against a lot of other bad things like murder or child abuse, but that didn't mean he was saying that we could do these things as long as we were baptized and believed in the Gospel. It was left to the authors of the early Christian epistle to spell these things out, because the epistles were often writing to people from differing cultural backgrounds who may not have been taught God's laws for healthy living. "Shun sexual immorality," St. Paul had to write to the Corinthians, for example, because the Corinthians' culture, like our own, had made sex an object of workship. The Jews had been chastized over the centuries for such practices, and had learned that lesson. At the time of Christ, worship of the True God and expectation of the Messiah was part of the air all the Jews breathed.