Ok EP...I was trying to avoid this particular line of conversation, but it seems you are pressing for it so here it is... Very simply stated, God, in whose image we are created, unto whose likeness we are called...
In a sense, yes. I was pushing for this. I could see it was there, beneath the surface, and I wanted it out in the open where we could all talk about it. Call me manipulative, but your making religious arguments without owning up to your religious biases made the conversation
I'll try, but if you a priori exclude the pool cues you can't expect much of a game of billiards.
This statement is incredibly problematic. By insisting that you need to use principles that we share, rather than insist that we use principles we don't share, I'm making it impossible for you to make your point? Frankly, if you can't make your point using shared principles, you don't deserve to make it.
Let me respond to your metaphor with a metaphor of my own: I'm saying that we should discuss this issue using shared values and methods (rhetoric, language, evidence) and you are saying you can't debate this without resorting to personal and cultural principles (God, culture, religion). I want us to play soccer because we both know and accept the validity of the rules; you want to play curling, even though a lot of people don't understand the game.
This is why I brought up the other cultural views of sex and stressed how my view of sex is clearly different from yours. This is why Scattercat talked about Greek pederasty. If we establish that there are cultures in time and space that don't share your values, what we've just done is invalidated any arguments that treat your values as universal.
Now, if you want to argue your values without falling back on non-universal concepts... well, that's what I've been trying to get you to do all along
.
A valid point, but here's the tricky bit, I don't simply regard this external experience as just happening a long time ago, but rather to be extant, present, and ongoing. The larger question here though is how do you know what sets of purported experience are in fact genuine and authoritative rather either patently false or purely delusional lacking any correlative experience oneself. I'm not sure this is the appropriate sort of forum to explore that question too deeply. If though I may hint where I think an appropriate illustrative analogy abides, it is agricultural...things reproduce according to their own kind, chickens from chickens, figs from figs. What cannot reproduce itself according to its purported root and origin doesn't make a very convincing case of any longer if ever being attached to that root.
I understand what you mean about extant, present, and ongoing revelation (though your stressing that point makes me wonder if you're not just a Christian, but a Mormon - ah, whatever, it's not an important detail). However, I'd argue that by asking how to know if an experience is real you are asking the wrong question.
A special, personal or cultural experience is not something you will ever prove. That's why it makes a poor basis for conversation with people who don't already share your values or background. You can never prove God to me because God, but God's nature, is not something I can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. You can't show me God on a graph or a chart. You can't dial up God and have God talk to me God's self. You can try to convince me of the utility of God, you can share your personal experience of God and hope that I'm touched, moved, and inspired, and I guess - for completeness's sake - you can threaten me until I accept your God. Proving God, though, is not something you or anyone can ever do.
The same way guard rails are useful at keeping you from plunging off a cliff on a mountain road. You can choose to ignore the railing, but you do so knowing you are about to enter territory generally conceded to be dangerous if not deadly.
And here, I actually agree with you, though we take our agreement in two different ways. Yes, we should consider the potential future consequences of our cultural transformations. In fact, that's what some kinds of science fiction are for
. We need to acknowledge when we are headed into dangerous territory so we can proceed with caution, or at least with open eyes.
However, I'd argue that every major cultural transformation we've undergone - including the almost-undeniably good ones, like civil rights, women's rights, and religious freedom - have been fraught with danger and pain. They have been textbook examples of dangerous territory, situations where we could have gone too far, where the stresses could have torn our culture apart. Luckily, they didn't. Also luckily, we didn't let the fact that they were dangerous territory stop us.
The problem with slippery slope arguments, which I didn't make as clear before, is this: they have no logical stopping point. A slippery slope argument says "you can't change this because the change might go to far and something bad might happen." But if you take that to its logical conclusion, nothing should ever change, because every change could potentially lead to something bad. In order to prevent that, you need to allow entirely arbitrary exceptions to your slippery slope argument, places where you decide it's ok to change. Since those exceptions are arbitrary, you need to argue them on their own merits. The slippery slope argument is nothing but a distraction, and you'd save everyone a lot of time (and go easier on your own integrity) if you just made those arbitrary arguments themselves.
So, a slippery slope argument can caution caution, but it isn't enough by itself to determine action.
Again, you eventually need to make an argument that stands on its own merits.
It is simply this, human beings are malleable. We become like what we expose ourselves to...sort of like food, we are what we eat. What we feed our minds and hearts effects in ways both subtle and gross...there is no avoiding it. If you live on Whoppers absent some miracle of metabolism soon enough you will be whopper yourself.To willingly countenance and take in all manner of visual and literary depictions of sexual activity that reduces sex to an entertainment, and often a warped and wanton entertainment shapes the way one understands and experiences sex, conforming one's perceptions more and more to whatever it is you are feeding that part of your soul. It changes the sort of person you are, and since you are a person, how you are effects the society in which you live and other persons whom you meet and share the world with everyday.
Consider war veterans who live years in life and death combat situations, seeing and dispensing the horror of violent death up close and personal. It effects them deeply. It is hard for many of them to every really adjust to civilian life ever again. Some get depressed, others angry, and others are all but overcome by their demons. The images of friends' bodies shattered don't go away. Crossing a line and killing a kid in a tense situation never goes away. The sound of the torture in the night of a local by insurgents for helping you never goes away. You are shaped by those things in ways you don't just get over. We are malleable. We change. We cannot help but change. The best we can do is to have some say in how we change...how we meet our lives, whatever good or bad they bring to us. Whatever we trivialize, commoditize, whatever part of ourselves we alienate from its natural and highest purpose we trivialize, commoditize and alienate to one degree or another in others. And thus we deny the fulness and dignity of our own humanity.
To think on what is honest, and true, and virtuous, beautiful, and of good report is to actually engage our humanity at its best, in the context of its greatest aspiration, to acknowledge our capacity...our need for change and to make a choice so that our change as we live and grow is constantly for the better.
Aha! Now, this is something I can sink my teeth into. Thank you!
Let me see if I can boil your point down to its barest bones:
- You are what you eat, physically and mentally.
- Some things are bad for you, physically and mentally. Eat enough whoppers and you'll be made of whopper: fat, grease, and bad cholesterol. Eat enough death and violence and you'll be made of death and violence. Eat enough porn and you'll be made of porn.
- The ultimate principle of the above statement: you can be debased by what you consume.
- Food, at its highest nature, is healthy and nutritious fuel for daily life; therefore, unhealthy food is debased food and you should avoid it.
- Sex is, at its highest nature, a beautiful communion between two souls and a way of producing more humans; therefore, low and flagrant sex is debased sex and you should avoid it.
This is actually a very coherent worldview. I'm curious to what degree you live it every day - do you really only eat only healthy food? Avoid all violence and nastiness? Refuse to associate with foul-mouthed and base-minded individuals? - because it seems like it would be difficult, but that's not a question I really want to demand an answer to because it's none of my business (though if you feel like sharing...).
Ultimately, I take a different view. For me, the world is messy and full of bad stuff. I don't believe it's possible to live without consuming some bad stuff now and again. There are ways in which I live on the front lines - I'm a teacher in a very challenged neighborhood - and I don't think I could do my job if I were squeamish about exposing myself to violence, foul language, and depravity.
The more coherent view that has come out of my experience is this: the high, the sacred, and the holy (or, if you prefer, the complex, the intellectual, and the enlightening) are important, but sometimes a little of the bad stuff is fun, and sometimes the happiness it produces is valuable. Think of it this way: sometimes I want a salad and sometimes I want a cheeseburger. The rush of endorphins, the meaty goodness of the cheeseburger, is worth it. I just put the cheeseburger into weight watchers, and consider the consequences of that meal when I make other food choices throughout the week. I don't need to consume nothing but the highest, holiest, and healthiest of food to maintain a balanced lifestyle. The same applies to the books I read and the movies I watch.
But, relative to literature (and possibly a little TMI) is this anecdote: I sometimes look at porn. I like it. Now, to continue the principle above, I like my porn in balance with other sexual and visual experiences. When I start to feel a little overporned, I put the porn away. When I feel underporned, I break out the porn.
I also like my fiancée, and like I've said: sometimes she wants to be treated like a lady and sometimes she wants to be treated like a piece of meat. Ever the conscientious lover, I try to accommodate her desires. And if we feel like our spiritual connection has gotten a little strained by the demands of our lives, we make some time for spiritual and loving sex. And if we feel that our physical connection has faded, we might choose a different kind of sex from our repertoire.
More to the point, (and to totally mix everything up), when I find some porn I particularly like, I send it to my fiancée so we can talk about what's good about it and how we can add the image and actions depicted to our sex life. I view sex and literature in the same light: even the most brutal and unappealing, the most graphic and gross (and wet, bestial, noisy, and nasty) sex scene can add a lot to a story when it's done right - just like porn can add something to my sex life. I've seen it done right.
Well, that does it for me. I think I've expressed my opinion pretty coherently.
