Tuesday 23 February 2016

The cost of the sexual revolution; the price of freedom from Christian morality

There is one thing I’m going to personally reject, and that is the mistake of labeling promiscuity as somehow “freedom.” That that is a freedom. Fourth Nephi has a little scripture and it is right after what happens to the people there after Jesus Christ has visited the Americas and then ascended back into heaven. So this is Fourth Nephi 1:16. And it says:
And there were no envyings, no strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.
And as I studied that scripture, I started asking myself, what would it be like if there were no whoredoms? What would that society be like? So here’s my list:
  • Teenage couples don’t get pregnant and have to get married to the wrong person.
  • Lives don’t get warped and stalled by sexual abuse.
  • There is no fear of rape or violence.
  • There is great security on the streets, there’s no serial killers, there’s no kidnappings.
  • There is no market for prostitutes.
  • There is no sex trade or there is no sexual slavery.
  • Spouses don’t have affairs or commit adultery.
  • Marriages stay intact and children aren’t raised in the insecurity and divided loyalty of divorce.
  • Cities don’t have seedy, creepy neighborhoods that are filled with adult theaters and deviant bookstores.
  • There is no appetite for pornography – it doesn’t degrade the people who make it or who watch it. It doesn’t warp the sexual development of young people and rot the relationship between a husband and a wife.
  • There are no children being raised by a generation of women and painfully wondering where there fathers are.
  • All of the energy and the money that goes into all of those activities above the above, is available for something else.
How is that not more free and not more desirable for women, for men, for children, how is that not?

http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectives/fair-conferences/2014-fairmormon-conference/womans-church

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The way to think about this list of bad things, is not to suppose that Christian morality would eliminate these specific bad things durng the foreseeable span of mortal life; but that Christian morality enables us to know that bad things really are bad - which is something that the modern West utterly lacks.

Our problem is not so much that a lot of bad things happen - but that we have lost the ability to discern good and evil: worse that the loss/ explusion of Christianity from public discourse makes it impssible to believe (or even say) that bad things are bad - and creates the most appalling moral nihilism.

Recently, near to where I live, a man was accidentally (so the court ruled) tortured to death by another man during the course of an extreme sado-masochistic sex session. I cannot bring myself to write the details of what happened - but if you think of the worst tortures you have ever read about that it was not far short. Meanwhile, the killer was sharing his ecstatic torture details with a group of like-minded persons via social media.

The killer claimed in court - with was what apparently an aggressive moral self-righteousness - that it was an innocent mistake, and he defended the right of adults to do whatever they wanted to each other in private so long as there was consent.

Legally, consent was here a problem, since the deceased had been dosed with massive amounts of a drug - but it was ruled that the victim, probably, implicitly consented to this. However, as well as being grossly intoxicated, the victim also had his mouth stuffed and lips stapled together - so he was not in a position to express any change of mind.

The principle on which the defense was based was that the killer had a moral and legal right to torture the victim to within an inch of death by the most horrific means he could devise - so long as there was consent, and so long as he did not actually cross that inch-line and actually kill him. And if, as happened, he did kill the other man, then this was just an unfortunate accident, something regretted all round, and not murder; because there was no intent to kill him but merely to inflict the greatest imaginable extreme of possible human suffering.

Implicitly, all this is both morally and legally permissible; indeed it is now treated as a vital human right; because (and this was mentioned in court) this is a sexual preference of a minority, which should be logically treated, and legally treated, as a personally sexual identity. And we all know how sacred sexual identities are to modernity since the sexual revolution. And that whatever you most want to do sexually just-is your sexual identity; the thwarting of which is to deny a primary human right.

In sum, it is not merely legally and permissible to torture another in the most 'extreme' (favoured word) fashion to within an inch of death for sexual pleasure - but this is a officially (albeit implicitly, at the moment) a positive expression of human rights expressed within a persecuted minority.
My point is that in the reported summary of the judge accepted this framing of the situation. The killer was convicted of manslaughter, but the judge accepted that if the death had not occurred, then there had been no wrongdoing.

The legal situation, as it stands, is that ultimate torture is a protected human right - and cannot be stopped so long as it is done for sexual reasons - unless it can be demonstrated that consent was lacking or imperfect.

If you knew for certain that regular extreme torture to within an inch of life sessions were happening in a neighboring house, or the room next door - you would be breaking the law if you intervened to stop it. After all, almost certainly the authorities know of many instances of such activity going on - and they don't stop it. They can't. It is not now officially regarded as something which should be stopped. It is a human right.

And this incredible (in the literal sense of the word) extremity of moral inversion - of relabelling evil as good - is not imagined for some future dystopia in some outlandish culture - but the law I live under, right now, in the place where I live.

How has this arisen? Because without religion there is no objective morality; and without objective morality we 'cannot say' that torturing another person to almost-death for pleasure is an evil thing as such - but only when it is done without their consent.

If then (and why not? - it could happen, it could happen next year) sexual torture becomes common, if it becomes normalized, if it becomes positively encouraged by government campaigns and taught in schools as a valid lifestyle option - then this is something we must (under dominant modernity) simply accept as the price of sexual freedom and identity.

This - here and now - is the extremity to which we have been brought by leftism and its major strategic weapon: the sexual revolution. But such is the nihilistic poverty of the secular West that we cannot (and do not) even object to the situation we are already in.

We merely, collectively, shrug and say (perhaps with hint of nostalgic regret, a twinge of residual disgust): Why Not?

7 comments:

Leo said...

“...their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations. Wherefore, I write unto my people, unto all those that shall receive hereafter these things which I write, that they may know the judgments of God, that they come upon all nations, according to the word which he hath spoken." 2 Nephi 25:2-3

Anonymous said...

Dr Charlton: "Because without religion there is no objective morality."

Let us suppose that in a revived Christian Britain, in which you are an influential policy maker, what would you suggest should be policy towards sexual deviancy?

I think this is an important point. Christians are required to show love towards fellow human beings, so how would that love be shown?

This seems like a really difficult issue, and I confess I would not know how to start.

Seeker

Bruce Charlton said...

The laws should be in line-with, conistent with, supportive of Christian morality (as defined, say, by the doctrines and teachings of the General Authorities of the CJCLDS).

ONLY Christians are or ever have been required to love 1. God, and 2. Fellow Men above all else (no other religion is based on that, secualrism is not based on anything).

So there is no problem there in principle - Christianity makes up a unit.

Of course we can't all live up to the ideal always - but we know what we ought to be doing, and wise administrators will be approporiately merciful for the inevitable failures so long as they are repented (ie sin must be acknowledge to be sin, failure acknowledged as failure etc) - without in any way abandoning the principles.

Anonymous said...

Dr Charlton: "Of course we can't all live up to the ideal always - but we know what we ought to be doing."

In the past, yes.

I would bet that the average man who has sex with many women does not think he is being sinful at all. In this day and age, he probably just thinks he is 'a bit of a lad', and I should imagine his friends think likewise, and pat him on the back for being so manly.

In the past, similar behaviour would have come with a healthy knowledge of guilt, perhaps leading to remorse and reform.

The guiltometer seems to be permanently on the blink in 2016.

Seeker

Imnobody said...

Bruce, this is one of your bests. I am asking you for permission to use this text (verbatim) in a presentation in my church about political correctnesss (with full credit, of course).

Bruce Charlton said...

@Imn- I'm pleased you find it valuable - since it is in the public domain you don't need my permission to use it, but you have it anyway.

Imnobody said...

Thank you, Bruce. It is valuable to illustrate a point about the difference between reality and the sexual paradise our elites promise us if we follow their degeneracy.