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Question I
Why has Christianity rejected many expressions of sexuality as antithetical to spirituality while various Eastern traditions Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism have been more accepting of sexuality, have even embraced sex as a vehicle for spiritual transcendence? What do you think about the connection, if any, between sexuality and spirituality? In the Christian view, is Shakespeare's mortal coil, Milton's perfidious bark, just a weight holding us down, preventing us from achieving greater divinity, or is the body, as Blake explains, a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses?
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I appreciate Camille Paglia's reminder that mutilation is a cruel but universal human principle. I might say harsh, rather than cruel. Cruel only applies when the self-punishment is literal and out of hand. Restraint and inhibition are part of sex, not something imposed. But if we can't accept pleasure as a worthy principle, then we won't be very good at restraint. We'll get moralistic and cruel, toward ourselves and others. I suspect that the best way to deal with cruelty is not to forge a liberal ideology of unarticulated pleasure but to discover the joys of restraint, and see that they are inseparable from the joys of abandon.
Moore responds to Francoeur |
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