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Sex and Freedom of Speech

Content Warning: This journal essay talks about child sexuality and pedophilia from a research perspective.

So last week,

neokat

posted a sketch that mused how it's interesting that porn is a battleground for freedom of speech. It inspired me to write this journal, because there's a lot I have to say about the subject.

Porn, I would argue, is the ultimate expression of free speech because sex has always historically been suppressed by the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestants, Lutheranism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. etc. etc) which in turn gave rise to a powerful sex-negative culture that has lasted for a great many centuries. It's always worth remembering that the foundation of this country was by a sect so extreme that they thought color was a gateway to Satan.

-- The Social Culture of Sex --

Sex is of course one of the most natural things in the world. All creatures that do it that haven't evolved to do it asexually have their own unique behaviors and social rituals that surround it. Among all animals, however, none are nearly as complex as humanity's, as we are more motivated by social relationships instead of seasonal estrus. As a result, our relationship with sex is far more varied and complex than any other animal.

Another part of our social culture is religion. Religion, at its innermost core, dictates rules and rituals for us to live by. Naturally, most religions have rules and rituals surrounding sex. This, of course, includes the Abrahamic faiths and is the most relevant to this conversation due to the cultural influence of the Western World on the rest of the world over the past 500+ years.

The Abrahamic faith is, at its core, an extremely sex-negative culture. Sex-negativity is the idea that sex is an inherently evil and forbidden concept that must be hidden or approached only under stringent and limited circumstances.

The other side of that is sex-positivity, which among many things, sees sex as a natural and healthy part of the human experience and can be openly discussed, be it between close acquaintances or family or as part of our education system. This also includes exploring and discussing nonconventional sexual orientations and attractions.

Inevitably, this includes the relationship and relevance between children and sex, which should not be surprising. Children are humans as well, and it is the height of foolishness to assume that they are completely asexual until they reach a certain biological age in which they are suddenly and magically imbued with all the knowledge about sex. Children will more than likely, one way or another, be introduced to the concept of sex and adjacent themes well before either their parents or society as it exists now deems them ready or mentally equipped to handle it.

-- Age of Consent, Innocence, & Purity --

Sex and masturbation have always been taboo under the Abrahamic faiths, but the mythos around sexual purity encompasses far more cultures than what I can cover in this journal. For the sake of the point I'm making and to stay relevant to the primary topic, here, this is specific to the Abrahamic faiths.

There has, for the longest time, been this mythos, and that's the best way to describe it, that revolves around the virginity of girls. That their virginity has some sort of extrinsic, intrinsic, moral and monetary value, and if they lose it before marriage, that they are effectively used or damaged goods.

Their virginity has been removed from the box and has lost their collector’s value. NRFB!

I jest, but this is a serious case worldwide for girls who have been sexually assaulted, raped, or otherwise tore their hymen in nonsexual activities like horseback riding or gymnastics. Girls are expected to save their virginity for marriage, and those who don't are cast out of polite society, disowned from their families, or even killed.

Sometimes this also applies to boys, but most especially to girls because of our patriarchal culture, and how “easy” it is to test if a girl has had sex before. For boys, sex is more likely to be considered a rite of passage that they must engage in before they are considered a man.

The modern mythos of sexual purity began in the tail end of the 1800s, when activists pushed for an age of consent law. This was an effort to preserve the sexual purity of girls until they were married, because their virginity was still considered the most or even only valuable thing about them. Girls who lost their virginity before marriage were deemed worthless, ineligible to be married, and forced into a life of prostitution (as it was illegal for girls to hold most kinds of jobs at that time). It wasn’t until far later that the concept of innocence was introduced into the narrative.

The idea of childhood innocence was introduced in the 1950s and 60s and was largely tied to an anti-homosexual campaign at the time before it made the jump to general pedophilia hysteria in the late 70s that continues to today.

-- The Social Culture of Pornography --

Pornography has been a part of our overall culture for as long as we have been making art, predating modern civilization by at least several ten thousand years. Fertility idols and Venus figurines are technically pornography with the purpose of inciting sexual arousal and encouraging procreation.

The censorship and criminalization of pornography is a relatively recent development in human history, with the oldest laws censoring or criminalizing it being only a few hundred years old and largely a result of the sex-negative culture of the Abrahamic faiths. Despite this, and despite the spread of the Western faiths and beliefs and continued attempts to broadly criminalize it, art and pornography are more abundant than ever due to the advent of technology and less need for people to hold essential jobs like farming.

Even more recent is the criminalization of child pornography, made illegal in the US in 1977 after several years of intense outcry by moral guardians and the feminist movements at the time. It is worth noting that the move made to ban it was not to protect children, but rather to use it as a stepping stone in a broader attempt to ban all pornography.

I recently read a law journal published about it in 1989; it might as well have been published last week. Literally everything in it, between the claims of Satanic child rape cults to multibillion dollar international, underground, child trafficking cartels personally involving a Rogue’s Gallery of the most public faces, started here and are perpetuated, almost verbatim, to this day.

After the child porn ban was instated, a new campaign immediately started that tried to tie adult pornography to child porn and tried to ban everything even vaguely pornographic ("All porn is child porn" was a campaign slogan at the time), and they were very nearly successful. Part of this was to "satisfy" the moral crusaders who wanted to reshape the country into an ad hoc theocracy, and part of this was picked up by law enforcement agencies who got a massive increase to their annual funding to tackle this perceived boogeyman. The mission afterwards then turned to maximizing public hysteria around this "issue" to keep up the funding for huge invasive operations around the country, even to the point of threatening and abusing children themselves, to force them to lie in testimonies in favor of this agenda.

– The Battle for Sex Positivity –

Despite how much this country is obsessed with porn, despite it rivaling the income of sports leagues or the film industry, even at this age it continues to be a dark, guilty indulgence due to the continued pressures and influences by moral guardians. Parents continue, on the whole, to avoid “The Talk” with their kids, leaving them to have to learn it from an atrophied and gutted sex education class, and that’s just for the ones lucky enough to get the class. And even among those, more often than not they're taught lies based on Abrahamic values.

It is scientifically and statistically proven that Abstinence-Only education does not work. Not only does it not work, but the lessons taught also have a psychologically damaging effect on kids who are victims of sexual assault or rape. This has been known for decades, but the moral guardians who have enforced this revision of sexual education continue to do so solely to appeal to their own twisted ideology, even at the detriment of the kids they claim to protect.

Sex education begins early within the child’s life, even before they enter a classroom. Everything is a learned behavior, and their perception and reaction to sex and masturbation will reflect that of the parents. Any pediatrician worth their salt will tell you that it is both natural and common for children to be curious about their own body and others. Some even begin masturbating at an extremely early age, taking a break for a few years before puberty kicks in.

It is inherent in our culture, even at this hour, to assume that any sexual encounter, no matter the context, is a predatory or even harmful transaction by nature, usually at the expense of the female and always causing unimaginable trauma and damage to a child that even brushes loosely against it. The Abrahamic faiths twist this even further and try to frame sex as a deleterious aspect of humanity that must be limited exclusively to procreation, lest one is cursed with a myriad of physical and mental diseases or even commits suicide out of sheer insanity.

A few parents these days have taken a more progressive approach to their childrens’ sexual behavior and not only have more open discussions about sex in a positive light as opposed to the mainstream attitude, but even buy them sex toys and vibrators so they can use a proper object and not injure themselves with improvised toys, as is common even among adults.

-- The Battle for Freedom of Speech --

The function of the First Amendment is to protect individuals from government prosecution for speech representatives of that government don’t approve of. This includes the creation of pornography, although for a brief period of time it was illegal to send it through the mail.

Pornography is a perfectly normal thing to indulge in, as sex is part of the human experience, and we are a highly empathic and social species. But pornography ends up being the frontline in the battle for freedom of speech because of the sex-negative culture that has been perpetuated by the Abrahamic faiths and moral guardians. By attempting to suppress it, it becomes more important to defend it, which causes people to emphasize it more, which causes the moral guardians to try and suppress it more. And technology only serves to escalate this invisible war.

There are also those who seek to commodify elements of the human experience in order to have control and power over others. This has always been the case throughout history, be it money, food or sex. The abundance and proliferation of any of these has been a massive thorn in their side, and so they attempt to restrict it to once again hold control over others as their predecessors once did.

Sex is an inherently intimate subject where most emotional and social walls are broken down, allowing for a deeper exploration and expression of the self. In recent years, exploration of the self has been far more heavily emphasized due to a myriad of factors, including the economic collapse and the corporatization of most businesses, creating a barrier between the employee and their job and preventing them from finding purpose in their work, and the economic volatility in the current era make it difficult to raise a family. The suppression of pornography not only serves to bereave people of yet another one of the fundamentals of the human experience, but also stifles the exploration of sexual orientations, gender expressions and paraphilias, as many of the finer details of these subjects cannot be explored through normal media.

This also includes the exploration of subjects that are normally considered taboo or illegal, including, ultimately, pedophilia. Child porn is illegal in just about every country, of course, so alternatively people use drawings and computer-generated artwork to explore this subject.

– The Hysteria Culture of Pedophilia –

This is where I must be very careful. The subjects of pedophilia and child porn are exceptionally volatile, by design and conditioning. There are many who would misconstrue something I say or twist the words to mean whatever they wish it to.

There was once a time when subjects surrounding pedophilia were not as great a concern in the public eye. The most anyone was concerned about when it came to children and sex was whether or not the child was masturbating (in which there were extremely heavy punishments, up to and including nerve severings of the penis and removal of the clitoris). It wasn’t until the child porn ban in 1977 was there suddenly a new industry built around perpetuating the hysteria. Law enforcement agencies exploited it because it granted them ever larger budgets to tackle a threat that was almost completely eradicated within the first few months of the ban. Moral guardians continued to push the broader narrative, trying to equate all porn with child porn, both legally and in the eyes of the public; a fight that continues to this day.

By proxy is the argument of loli/shota content, which may or may not be associated with pedophilia, and considering the volatility of the subject, it is a question best left unanswered until we are better mentally and intellectually equipped and less hysterical about it.

People’s reasons for liking loli/shota are going to vary wildly. Ultimately, I apply the rule of “if you hard, then you hard.” We are not hard-coded by design to only be sexually attracted to someone only once and exactly when they have reached the US legal age of consent, and it is toxic and a result of the conditioning from the hysteria campaigns to assume that anyone who is sexually attracted to a minor has harmful thoughts towards them. Legality and morality are two very separate things,

Good science estimates that the prevalence of pedophilia in the general population is estimated to be anywhere between 1% and 5%, outnumbering the trans population even at the smallest estimate and rivalling at least half of the LGBT population at its greatest. And killing them all, as many express their desire to do so, is not a solution as, among many reasons (not the least of which is it would hurt kids even more), it would lead to a new age of witch hunts built on hysteria and catering to authoritarians looking to strip away people’s rights, and political charlatans weaponizing it against opponents. So basically the exact environment we have right now, but with more immediate and dire consequences.

The worst part of all this is the hysteria culture has sabotaged relationships between legally consenting adults who have an age gap, sometimes as little as a few years, regardless of the age of the couple. I have seen more than too many reports and posts at this point about people who get squeamish or into a screaming hysterical rage over a couple with an age gap, even to the point of a few calling the police on them. This isn’t a healthy way to think, let alone live.

Pornography, real or drawn/computer generated content otherwise, helps to create a safe space for people to either explore these taboo paraphilias or indulge in them. It is scientifically proven that access to porn causes sex-related crimes to fall dramatically, and this also applies to loli/shota content and however it is ultimately associated with pedophilia. More importantly, however, pornography also serves as a vector to challenge our sex negative culture by confronting us with a natural act that we have been conditioned to view as repulsive. And the more it is stigmatized, the more sex, masturbation and pornography are stigmatized and people attempt to criminalize it, the more important it becomes, to remind us what is natural and an integral part of all life, let alone ours.

These are ultimately the lessons to take away from all this.

1: Sex is an inherent part of the propagation of life.

2: Because humans are social creatures, sex is an inherent part of the human and social experience.

3: This applies to children as well, as children are not perfectly asexual and will, one way or another or by the natural instinctual progress, encounter sexual interests or experiences on their own before the law of consent decides they are ready.

4: Fictional depictions of underaged characters in sexual situations is ultimately protected speech in this country at the federal level (see Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition of 2002), but it becomes a complicated subject at the state level because of the centuries long crusade for "states' rights".

5: For those who can't receive sex for one reason or another, pornography is a way to experience sex vicariously.

6: Free access to sex and pornography cause sex-related crimes to plummet dramatically, and there are many statistics available online to show this.

7: By restricting the access to sex and pornography, authoritarians have, since time immemorial, been able to control others and channel their violence into their own agenda to benefit themselves, be it through power or money.

8: If it wasn't about sex or pornography, the moral crusade would be about something else. And it is (fantasy, music, anything that references a god that isn't the Christian God), but sex continues to be the number one thing that stokes the moral panic harder than anything else because of the anti-porn campaign back in the 70s and 80s, on top of the ageless sex negative culture and stigma surrounding recreational sex.

Important and mandatory post-script: Despite the subject matter and the talk that "normalizes" child sexuality and exploration, I am NOT advocating for or supporting sexual relationships between real children and adults. It is very much illegal.

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Added:	3 months, 1 week ago 23 Sep 2024 12:41 CEST

13 Comments on this Journal

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Danaume

3 months, 1 week ago

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I thought it might be important to address some errors in this.

First, some of those faiths didn't /start/ sex negative, they grew into it through rubbing elbows with others or as a means of control later. We are used to only seeing things how they are now and assuming that it was always that way. Christianity and Muslims used to be way more open about things like women's rights and prostitution, and sex in general. This only changed as controlling sex became a way of controlling the people. And the shift for Muslims was, predominantly after the two World Wars when the West put the extremists in power over the moderates. It could be said that sex negativity has transcended religion, and is just being used as a method of control. There are sex positive nations that have religion. And sex negative nations without strong foundations in religion. You are letting where you live color your view here and failing to see that it goes deeper than just thumping a book.

Second, America's founding fathers were mostly Agnostic, they knew that skin color had nothing to do with sin. The mythology that they were strong Christian champions is held lie in every founding document. Regardless, they DID see skin color as a convenient source of free labor. They were deeply flawed, but they tried to give us a nation unchained by one religious foundation.

As you say yourself, child pornography wasn't outlawed in the United States until the 1970s. It wasn't outlawed to protect the children... it was outlawed because they thought by vilifying the topic, they could gain a wedge talking point to outlaw all pornography. This was again a method of control of the population, and completely devoid of religion, they just used religion as an lubricant to shove it down the people's throats. Age of consent in the United States began to rise for a completely different reason, it was a way to get kids to stay in school. At first it was set at 14 so they would finish primary school and not get pregnant or married before that time, then later raised to keep the kids from getting pregnant or married through high school. Again, we look at it now as being some MORAL decision, or somehow religious, but that isn't actually why the United States did it, it had nothing to do with that, and everything to do with making sure kids got an education before they were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I don't agree with how they did it, at all, but I applaud the effort at least.

You have a lot of good points here, but you are so focused on religion as the enemy... but sadly in this case, they are the fall guy. The real enemy isn't a follower of any of these religions, they are using them as the crowd with the pitchforks and torches, riling them up and setting them loose. This is about power, it is about control, it is about taking that power, and that control away from you. And yeah... once they get the religious folk riled up, it can be really hard to see past that, but watch any other nation that has gone through the struggles that the United States is going through NOW... Religion ends up on the persecution block either last, or next to last. Every time. They are just a tool to be exploited and then locked down at the last minute.

skyboxmonster

3 months, 1 week ago

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@ Danaume

"

Danaume wrote:

You have a lot of good points here, but you are so focused on religion as the enemy... but sadly in this case, they are the fall guy. The real enemy isn't a follower of any of these religions, they are using them as the crowd with the pitchforks and torches, riling them up and setting them loose. This is about power, it is about control, it is about taking that power, and that control away from you.

I wont argue against your points on a technical level. But I will not clear the individuals and religions as a whole of their crimes even if they were 'used' by some other party. Looking at Religions as a whole as a Net-worth calculation. they are far FAR in the Negative. what little bits of positive effects they had do not weigh against the direct bloodshed and suffering they caused.

I would advocate to the ending off ALL non-native and Multi-national religions.
Satanism I do not consider a Religion in all but a Legal aspect.
Meme Religions that do not fit the Multi-national requirement will be ignored at first, and re-assessed later.

Danaume

3 months ago

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@ skyboxmonster

Oh, don't get me wrong, despite being a pornographer, I am a Christian, and until January 6th 2021, I was a registered Republican (though I haven't voted that way since 2009 just because I didn't like the candidates being put forward in my area or nationally.

And I will be one of the first to admit that Christianity has hurt a lot of people by refusing to change with the times, by focusing on excusing evil with out of context snippets from the Bible instead of taking the whole passage in the meaning of the times it was written in, and by, let us not forget... all but endorsing the Holocaust during WWII. The Bible is clear that if you put anything before your relationship with God, it becomes a sin... and Christians have put their religion before their walk with God. That religion has in turn, become a sin. They use it to justify hate. They use it to justify self supremacy. They use it to ostracize those who come to seek God. And it's not just Christians doing it... it has been noted among all religions from Shinto and Buddhism, to the Abrahamic faiths, to Paganism.

I am just saying that in THIS case, they are being exploited, they set themselves up to make themselves an easy target for that exploitation, and then fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And that is bad. Very bad... and that is a sin that is seeing places of worship shrink and fail across the world. They will either need to update, adapt, and pull their heads out of their asses, or their faiths will transform to mythologies instead of active worship.

skyboxmonster

3 months ago

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@ Danaume

I am in agreement with you. That is what my first sentence was for.

I was raised in a religious house. but it never stuck to me.
Now-a-days I am seeing that same religion being featured in various reddit "those who left their cults, what was it like?" posts...

When I visited a friend's house, whos father was a pastor of their own local church, I was shocked and disappointed seeing how nothing said in that house was less then a yell or shout. and the parents were always angry on some level. to the point I did not feel fully safe there even as a guest.

Up until last night the only religion that I approved of was the Satanist church. For its 7 guiding principles and their various legal victories against unethical people. However I did more research and like any group they have internal struggles that taint their image in my mind.

I once tried to talk about the Satanist church to a Christian Ex-abuser of mine. and he did not let me get past the name. he instantly was pissed off at just the mention of "After School Satan".

Instead of a "Religion". I want to build a new "Culture" for people to choose to follow. Guide people to be good because the act itself is rewarding to them. not using fear of eternal punishment to force people to pretend to be good.

Danaume

3 months ago

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@ skyboxmonster

Yeah. A lot of my friends have been deeply hurt by religion in general, and by Christians in specific. As a Christian who lives by what it says in the book, instead of spending my time thumping it... this hurts my soul. The Bible is very clear, it is not my right to judge anyone. It is not my right to call anyone out for their sin, but instead to lead by example and to support them. I am not without blame, so I am not allowed to throw the first stone. I am not allowed to hate anyone, I am to love everyone, even my enemies, even those who wish my death. And man that is hard to live by, but it is what Christ demands. And if all Christians lived by that... the world would be a far better place. But we are flawed humans, and we are easy to sway to darkness... we have 'our' team, and humanity loves it's tribes and teams, and that makes us easy to exploit by those who intend harm.

My team... has been used for harm and been blind to it for a long time. They have heaped sin upon sin onto the name of the one we worship. All to other people so that they can feel better about their own failings. It is... dark. It is wrong. And it hurts. We have a lot to make up for, and I don't see many Christians even aware of why their churches are ending up more and more empty as they scream hatred at the very people they are supposed to be protecting and aiding.

Christ said that we were to be fishers of men, to catch the fish... not once did he say that we were to cook and clean them. That's His job.

MaximilianUltimata

3 months ago

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@ Danaume

Yeah, I should address some of my errors, too.

"	Second, America's founding fathers were mostly Agnostic, they knew that skin color had nothing to do with sin.

Okay, misconstrued. When I said "foundation", I meant the Puritans that came some time before, not the founding fathers*, and when I say color, I'm referring to anything that wasn't Sadd colors, not skin color.

*The majority were technically Episcopalian, but I know what you mean; they approached the faith with a lot of skepticism. And then there's the Jefferson Bible.

And let's not kid ourselves, Ben Franklin was really into sex. With middle-aged women. Who weren't his wife. He even wrote a letter to a friend advising him on sex, and it's cited as the reason certain obscenity laws were overturned last century.

"	Christianity and Muslims used to be way more open about things like women's rights and prostitution, and sex in general.

I know that was the case with the Muslims, and when Europe was busy being in the so-called Dark Ages, the Middle East was thriving and making a lot of cultural and scientific advancements. And then they were taken over by extremists...

I also know that the faiths have evolved, splintered and changed dramatically and frequently since ancient Judaism (hence why I have to bundle them all together as the Abrahamic Faiths). Painting with very broad brush strokes, but I kind of have to for the sake of brevity or else we'd be here forever.

"	You have a lot of good points here, but you are so focused on religion as the enemy...

It isn't my intention, but it also can't be avoided. Much of how we have taught morality for the past several thousand years has come from religion and folklore, but I was also careful to specify the Abrahamic faiths in this context and not all religions. It casts an exceptionally broad shadow on the history of the world and has been altered many times over the past two thousand years (the introduction of holidays like Easter and Christmas to appeal to pagans comes to mind), many times to serve a new authority or as a rebuttal to the corruptions of the present one (hence all the variations, let alone the versions of the Bible). Many times it's even been explicitly hijacked; only a few years ago did I find a "Christian" on Youtube who was claiming God invented gold so people would want to covet it, and that coveting gold was a good thing. Guess what she was selling?

Even people who grow up atheist are going to have their perception of reality colored heavily by the mainstream perspective, hence why the general consensus on the age of majority, despite being slightly more than a century old, has a borderline mythological status even among atheists, even beyond the written word of the law.

And that is one reason why I felt compelled to write this journal.

Danaume

3 months ago

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@ MaximilianUltimata

Now you can see why I banned political and religious topics from my server. I have... a lot of opinions, a fair amount of education, and my heart bleeds for both sides. I have seen what Christianity is SUPPOSED to be, and I am well aware of what it IS... and there is no way to discuss it in real time in a major forum like Discord, without someone saying something that everyone will regret and turning it into a flame war.

KevinSnowpaw

3 months, 1 week ago

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SO...im not gonna address the Nuclear topic that is childhood sexuality instead I'm going to focus on a couple of other points

"	It's always worth remembering that the foundation of this country was by a sect so extreme that they thought color was a gateway to Satan.

False

The majority of the coudning fathers were free masons and men of great learning most of them would have been considered DEEPLY progressive for there time. they were not kings however and did not seek to be and the prevailing social norm of the time was one of deep relgious conservatism (though it was at the time Less conservative then meny areas in England depending on the colony) so previaling social norms are what carried forword.

as for Abrahamic relgions veiwing sex as dirty sinful or wrong it is not SEX that is vilified in abrahamic faith but the destructive consaqences of reproduction outside of a marriage structure to ensure the safty of the Female and the Child this is sadly why the shame for it allways falls on the female.

it's not that they dont like SEX sex between a married man and woman unified under god is a HOLY thing.

sex in a back allie to get your rocks off or with every whoe in town when you put into shore is not.

there was and is a Social and biological reason why this stigma developed MOST stigmas develop along those loines and for the same reasons... we dont have a prohibition on Incest becouse some old priest thought it was gross to fuck your own sister...we have one becuase it leads to fucked up kids! XD

the bible also says not to eat some animals we eat all the TIME now...like shrimp and pigs!

why do you think that is? does god just REALLY not want mankind to eat shellfish?

NO XD

It was beocuse people diddent understand germ theory or know what bochiline toxin was and ate that stuff and DIED way to often so clearly god doesnt want you to eat or you could read it as god forbidden it so they wouldent eat those things and fall ill.

the ambrahamic prohibition of fucking everything that moves is to protect women and to help support a strong family structure like so meny things in older faiths it is as much a stracture brought about by Social needs as it was a relgious one...

Danaume

makes some good points...religion is not your enemy here it's just a scapegoat.

skyboxmonster

3 months, 1 week ago

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@ KevinSnowpaw

I got little to add so i will talk about the food thing.

I am pretty sure in the early days of the cults the rules against eating certain animals was likely as simple as "dont eat the thing that makes people sick often"

and over time when one group found a way to eat pork without getting sick the other group still against it used it as reason for murder.

I got nothing to back up this claim, but its so basic and and par-for-the-course it is the answer I believe.

Myths are just instructions with extra words.
instead of saying "dont play near the river" you tell the kids about ghosts near the river instead.

MaximilianUltimata

3 months, 1 week ago

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@ skyboxmonster

All that it says in the Bible is that eating those things is "an abomination" (probably because they are bottom feeders). There's also something about not mixing meat and dairy, even putting them on the same plate. The only people who really pay attention to that kind of thing, though, are the Orthodox Jews. And meat standards in countries like Japan and Germany are so strict that you can eat raw pork.

Lobster and crab, we learned how to safely prepare only fairly recently. The reason is because very shortly after death, the shellfish's body produces certain toxins that make it unsafe to eat no matter how much you cook it. The only solution is to throw it into boiling water while it's still alive, which almost instantly kills it and neutralizes all organic function.

Danaume

3 months ago

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@ MaximilianUltimata

The thing people forget is that the 'Old Testament' is actually Hebrew law, not actually statutes handed down from God. Only the 10 commandments are handed down from God, if you believe the Bible, which I personally do. But the rest of the sins listed, well... In Hebrew, to violate the law was a sin, not a crime. Crime and sin were synonyms.

You didn't eat shellfish because red tide could kill you.
You didn't eat pork because trichinosis could kill you.
You didn't mix dairy with meat, because the process of making both in the day carried bacteria and viruses, and doubling them up from the same animal... could kill you.
A woman didn't lay with an animal, because animals carried STI's that could kill you.
You didn't eat in the same tent as a woman on her period, because dead blood uncontrolled by sanitary napkins and tampons, left on an old rag, or unwashed hands, could pollute the food, and that could kill you.
A man didn't sleep with a man as he would with a woman (no mention ever of a woman sleeping with a woman) because anal sex carried diseases, and that could kill you.
You didn't sodomize a woman, because anal sex could kill you.

The list goes on and on... they observed what killed you and added it to their hygienic laws.

Later in the Bible, God sent a vision to one of the Disciples, laying out a sheet and covering it in unclean animals. Shellfish, pigs, and other animals that the Old Testament clearly says not to eat. God told the man to eat the food. When he protested, God very clearly declared 'CALL NOT UNCLEAN THAT WHICH I HAVE RENDERED CLEAN'.

As we learn to protect ourselves, it is no longer a sin.

We know how to only harvest shellfish from areas without red tide, and how to safely clean and cook them.
We know how to raise, slaughter, and cook livestock to the point where trichinosis is all but unheard of in the western world, and even things like salmonella come more often from salad than chicken or eggs.
We have enemas, condoms, and antibiotics that mean that anal sex is a very low risk.
We have birth control that makes sex outside of marriage very low risk.
And the list goes on.

The old sins... are no longer unclean. So they are no longer sins.

There are over 300 verses in the Bible that declare that slavery is just, and talk about how to be a proper slave, and a proper slave owner. But we all (save for the truly backwards hate mongers) believe that slavery is wrong.

There are over 150 verses in the Bible that declare that women are unclean and worth half that of a man. But we all (again save for some truly backwards hate mongers) believe that women are equal to men in every way.

There are 8 verses in the Bible that talk about homosexuality, 4 of which are about rape (We can all agree that rape is wrong, no matter what genders are involved) and the remaining 4 are hygienic laws.

There is 1 passage in the Bible that says that porn is a sin... and fun fact, it's mistranslated. The verse says that to look upon a woman with lust in your heart is to commit adultery. But it was written in Greek, and the actual Greek word for lust there didn't mean lust... it meant Zeus style lust, 'To look upon a woman with and plan how you would claim her as your own and rape her, in your heart is to commit adultery' is how that should be literally translated. Reads kind of different, huh?

There is 1 passage in the Bible that says that masturbation is a sin... and another fun fact, it is misinterpreted. Onan would rather spill his seed on the ground than in his wife and that was a sin. Now lets get some context. Onan was already married. But his brother married the woman he TRULY loved... His brother was older and set to inherit the land. That land would go to the brother's wife when she had a child. The law of the land said that since he died before giving her a child, Onan was to marry her and give her a child. So he would fuck her, pull out and finish on the ground, so that he could keep fucking her and keep the land.

Danaume

3 months ago

link

@ MaximilianUltimata

(I got cut off for being too verbose)

... that was Onan's sin. Not masturbating. But refusing to follow the law that said that he was to knock up his late brother's wife, so that she could have a son to inherit the land. He stole his brother's wife, and his brother's land. The masturbation wasn't the sin.

skyboxmonster

3 months ago

link

@ Danaume

Whoa, This reads like a academic essay o.o

but. yeah. That is what I was trying to communicate. but i only had a feeling to go off of. no evidence or sources.

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