h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If your ideas are right for you Lemon, does that mean that you are never going to copulate unless you want children, assuming that you can't adopt, are you saying that you have no desire for physical pleasure at all?

Arn't physical and mental health both entertwinned?

Apologies for the innovative spellik.. gotta dash and do missions inna mo

Some (maybe most, who knows?) people show affection primarily through touching, and sex can be an important part of that.

I think I might be a disruptive influence in this debate which may be spurious, or it may not. God is both fact and fiction.

Fact because the course of human history seems to suggest that we need a great all powerful deity and where there is a need something will meet that need.

Fiction because I believe man created god out of his desire to fulfill that need.

Both because just because man created god to fulfill his own needs doesnt necissarily preclude the reality of the creation.

"This suggests that she wasn't Christian, though it gives me the impression that she wasn't a traditional Classical Pagan, either."

she seems to have been a Neo-Palatonist, LB - a sort of halfway house between paganism and christianity.

hi StrontiumDog,

Welcome to the thread! And far from being a disruptive influence I think I quite agree with you. Especially the last bit.



az

Thanls, Lemon, that's a very interesting site! I knew Hypatia was a mathematician, but it would seem that's all I knew! (Oh, and the bit about how she was killed - which is horrific!)
I'll read it in detail later.
(I had the idea (obviously wrong) that she had been canonised!)

Thanks for the link Jez - interesting site!

I just went and had a look, Blackberry Cat. Excellent!

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I'm not saying that I have no such desire, just that I try to supress that desire and think that it is wrong to have it.



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I'd suspect that the answwer is yes.

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Physical, therefor wrong.

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I'd argue that sex shouldn't be necesarry to consolidate a relationship and that if a type of pleasure is wrong, than it is wrong to give others that type of pleasure.

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Find a reason to exist--something that you want to do or have happen that requires you to remain alive. That motivates you to remain alive and do those things needed to stay alive and functioning well.

Lemon Blossom, there is no doubt in my mind that, in due course, you will meet a nice young man and be unable to resist his advances. It is not unusual for young women to express a belief that sex is not for them - until they actually try it with someone that they have feelings for. I have seen quite a few such young women truly blossom when they enter into an affectionate, physical relationship. Also, it is not unusual for elderly women, when they think that they are passed it, to say that they wished that they had had more sex when they could have.

stoneageman

I shall try to refrain from pointing out what a sexist, chauvenistic attitude you have displayed, since it is clearly a product of the fact that you are, of course, living in the Neolithic - assuming, for the sake of argument, that Hollywood has the right idea of the state of sexual awareness in the Neolithic...

JR

Damn, I pointed it out...

Hi Lemon Blossom

I find this attitude of yours quite fascinating:

"Sex is wrong because it is a hormonal instinct, a pleasure indulged in for physical, not mental reasons."

How can sex be wrong? It is a natural function of our physical forms. Also how can a natural pleasure be wrong?

If you wish to live the celibate life then that is up to you, but to declare sex in general is wrong is a bit much m'dear.

It is when humans divorce themselves from their true nature that they become disconnected and no longer an active component of the cycle of life. One should relish one's animal nature, excite one's passions and live life to the full.

To deny such an integral component of yourself is to invite disaster. I would counsel you to keep this decision of yours under constant review.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

What we have here is old bout abstinance vs Headonism

In the blue corner we have monastic religious dogma.

In the red corner libertine and anarchic philosophy.

The difficulty with following natural urges is that it is notoriously hard to qualify what is and is not a natural urge. To add to this there is the old quote, from Mark Twain (I think) that a natural life would be nasty brutish and short.

I would tend to believe that Civilisation is built upon the premise that we can moderate our natural urges in the light of good sense.

For example, unprotected sex is more pleasurable than protected sex, but unless you are in a clearly exclusive relationship it is at best foolhardy and at worst irresponsible to have unprotected sex.

From my personal experience, if I had engaged in sexual relations with everyone who I could as often as I would have liked to, Three things would have happened. 1 I would have been exhaused most of the time, 2 I would have had no time for anything else, and 3 Sex would have eventually ceased to be pleasurable.

However: I tend to believe that total abstinance has its difficulties as well, for one thing there seems to be nothing that can isolate an individual more than abstinance, many hermits and monks might attest to this. It seems interesting to me that monastic communities find many other ways of providing pleasure for their residents, e.g. Benadictine brewing.

After reading english translations of as many religious and philosophical texts as I have been able to get my hands on I have in the end gravitated towards Taoist perspectives. The secret in almost any context you can think of is to keep a balance, and never say never.

Just because you can't imagine something happening doesn't mean that it won't.

N.B. Pleasure for one person might also be pain for another, there are many reasons someone might not wish to partake of sex, a sordid experience in that area for instance, in that kind of situation it might be very difficult to imagine a time and place where it might feel O.K.

By the logic that physical pleasure = wrong, you're also eliminating big chunks of human interaction. Hugging for a start.

Perhaps if your sole goal is intellectualism then it becomes a distraction and therefore a weakness, but I would think that sheer loneliness and perhaps madness would then develop into much bigger risks. Strength of a sort perhaps, but is it worth the cost?

The strongest people I know are those who have a good balance of things anyway.

In some ways developing your mind is a good goal to pick: you can succeed a little bit every day, yet there never comes a point where you run out of things to achieve. However, I cannot see it as being particularly fulfilling on its own.

I am of the opinion that anyone who neglects the importance of human relationships of all sorts will come to regret that choice.

The important thing is not that physical pleasure = wrong, or right for that matter, it is that it needs to be measured, and appropriate to the needs of the ndividuals concerned and the social context they are in.

A hug is a nice thing with people you feel close to, it can become something altogether unpleasant when someone you hardly know or dislike wants to hug you for their pleasure, but not necissarily yours.

This raises the issue of mutual consent which I am beginning to think is more rare than you might believe. Adler suggested that we all seek social contact with others and I tend to agree with him. This then links to Bowlbys idea that we all need a close bond as children with a attentive and affectionate care giver. If we dont get enough of either of these we go out of our way to get it some how. For some people the 'pay off' of having someone interested in us is enough to compensate for physical contact we might not actually like for one reason or another. SO from this point of view we give our consent to things we dont want in order to get things we do want.

Abstinence is quite interesting in this context, you could suggest that abstinence makes us unusual and interesting to others, (Nothing is so sweet as forbidden fruit) so through abstinence we can obtain a good deal of interest from others, which might be a good 'pay off' for the pleasure we have disavowed.

The number of posts on this subject kind of hint that it has generated a good deal of interest in the position of the person who first posted.

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My opinion is that all extreme behaviour tends to be unhealthy and also unnatural. Because we have a reasoning mind means that we are not just going to always follow every physical whim or desire that presents itself. But we are also physical beings and our physical needs should not be totally denied.

Being sensual reasoning animals we are able to enjoy our physical pleasures in a more complex way than most other animals and we are also able to use our reason to create (or destroy). To find a healthy balance between these two aspects of ourselves results in personal harmony. Otherwise you always have the two parts warring with each other and neither side ever truly wins and this only ends up causing either misery or extreme weirdness.

az

Lemon, I'm glad that you recognised your feelings for what they are even tho you suppress them, I was kinda worried for a mo!



I asked that Q, because it sounded like you were completely in denial about the importance of physical contact of some form or another.



You go at your own pace in life