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A: Because it has been the preferred weapon of modernity, over the past half century.
In opposing Lust, Christians have been dueling the enemy, using a weapon chosen by the enemy.
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Lust is not a major sin in Christianity, not like Pride; but Lust is a major virtue for modernity - and a stalking horse for the other sins.
The gratification of Lust is used to justify more freedom of lifestyle, and this is used to reinforce Pride - which achieves the rest.
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Leftism began by promising the mass of people food and shelter.
When food and shelter had been provided to everybody, albeit by capitalism not Leftism, Leftism shifted to promising the mass of people gratification of their sexual desires.
(Of course the primacy of Lust goes back a couple of hundred years among the classes who already had enough food and shelter.)
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Leftism has emptied human life of all meaning and purpose and left humans isolated and atomized - yet all propaganda is directed against the one and only true solution to this self-created problem.
So distraction has become the primary mode of human existence, and this is where Lust comes in.
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The distracting power of Lust, and its utter un-realism, has been built-up by modernity to a level where the reality of its psychological operations is so vast and encompassing that it is unbelievable when stated clearly.
Or not so much unbelievable, as humiliating.
(Are we really such pathetic creatures as to be led by the nose with ludicrously fabricated fantasies of Lust? Yes we are. Look around.)
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Lust powers the modern world.
In our world as it has become, without Lust nobody would get up in the morning, nobody would talk to others, nobody would work, nobody would buy stuff, nobody would have anything to look-forward-to - people would have nothing to do, no reason for doing anything and - much worse - nothing to think about.
Of course Lust is very seldom actually gratified; yet the merest remote possibility of gratification is the most effective of all distractions.
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Christianity has responded to this tsunami of Lust by trying to hold the line on specific points-of-Law - but with the exponential growth of mass media, mainstream Christianity has been like a pebble rolled by the tide.
Only those devout groups who cut themselves off from the mass media, who are actively hostile to modernity, have resisted.
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So, the primacy of Lust is a consequence of the decadence that ensued from prosperity; since when it has become foundational to modernity as the primary motivator, Lust is that which lies behind most of the carrots offered by contemporary culture.
And mainstream Christians have been utterly unable to resist Lust because they are addicted to modernity.
Only those religious groups who have explicitly rejected modernity have resisted the primary distraction of Lust; and these are precisely the only organized groups which are now thriving, growing.
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The West has been crazed by Lust, because Lust is all that it has.
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14 comments:
Only those religious groups who have explicitly rejected modernity have resisted the primary distraction of Lust; and these are precisely the only organized groups which are now thriving, growing.
For example?
@Gyan - if I wanted to give examples then I would give examples...
"nothing to think about" - exactly.
The West is ageing - it's attention should be shifting to love and laxatives.
"it's": oh dear, I'm ageing too.
The gratification of Lust is used to justify more freedom of lifestyle, and this is used to reinforce Pride - which achieves the rest."
Exactly. They don't call them "gay lust parades"; free lust is an excuse to peddle a bigger sin.
It seems the Amish and other groups living outside modernity as much as possible have done OK. But the draw of modernity has hurt their ranks too. Surveys indicate they are a happy lot.
You are right, and I think that chastity and humility are very important for the modern observant Christian. To the faithful, they are so wildly antithetical to contemporary mores that anyone who experiences the goodness of them first-hand will be further strengthened in his conviction.
To the unsaved, these virtues inspire fear and hatred, and--sometimes, eventually--curiosity. I am not a very good Christian, but we live in such an un-holy society that even the meanest shred of holiness appears bright.
I have always been tempted more by hatred and cruelty than lust. But secular society is quite effective at denouncing, repressing and channeling such feelings.
Thank you for this. You make points which ought to be -- but are not -- obvious, and I needed to have them brought to my attention.
Perhaps also lust is prominent because it connects with our desire to behold beauty, which is originally something good, I take it, though we know it only in as something distorted by our sinfulness.
Many years ago someone -- I think it was Jerry Mander, who wrote a book arguing for the abolition of television -- suggested that modern office spaces are sexually charged places because there is almost nothing interesting to the eye in them except attractive persons (if such there are). So much of our surroundings, if we live or work in typical modern locales, is either boring or ugly. Might this then tend to throw all the greater emphasis on human beauty (if it is there), riveting the attention? And we "want it" in part because it is an escape from those other things?
I live in a small rural town in which people generally dress casually. When I must travel by air, I find myself in the place of converging blandness and ugliness that is a modern airport -- and the attractive women, strikingly dressed, whom I may see stand out against this background. Easy to feel the flicker of illicit desire.
Having said that, though, I am struck by how rarely one sees simply a lovely face. Faces are often masks to some degree at least because of cosmetics, etc. I wouldn't, "puritanically," say that Christians may never use cosmetics, but I wonder if they don't lend themselves to an agitating, lustful kind of awareness of the other person.
Dale makes a good point. It is endlessly striking to me how purposefully ugly and boring the common spaces built by moderns are, and how little anyone seems to care. Only a few internet fringeists or unknowns like Leon Krier even comment on it - and though there is a mass herd vague dislike of the trend, no one dares or has the energy to oppose it. A few alternative right types even seize on that lowbrowness as a reason to deconstruct and wave away objections to modern ugliness. We universally accept it as given, non-contestable.
This is not something easily explained in a deterministic way by mass prosperity and technology; as, say, the proliferation of pornography might be.
@Penda - in Thought Prison I try to explain this in the sense that the Left is anti-Good and the Good is the true, beautiful and virtuous.
So the left inverts these transcendental 'goods': part of which is therefore subversion of the beautiful and then deliberate ugliness.
Why does the Left do this? Partly as a means to destroying what is, in pursuit of what is wanted.
But ultimately because the Left is (more and more with each decade) in service to purposive evil.
@WmJas -
Alert! somebody has hacked into your computer and used it to to post a positive comment on this blog...
;-)
But seriously, thanks.
I wrote, "our desire to behold beauty, which is originally something good, I take it, though we know it only in as something distorted by our sinfulness."
I apologize for the lack of clarity. I meant that our desire for beauty is now something we know only in a form distorted by our sinfulness.
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