Uh huh, throwing the sodomite card down was perfectly unsensational. Hypocrite.

Deleting my posts is also proper treatment. Hypocrite.

Editing my posts because you don’t like the way I spell god with a small g. Hypocrite.

If you think the world smells like pooh, then pull your head out of your bum. Look around, the world isn’t such a bad place.

The choice is indeed clearly yours, until they are 18 (that is, if they aren’t socially retarded from the lack of stimulous and live in your basement until they are 35). Hopefully you have given them the tools they need to navigate life once they have left your house and go to school. Arm your children with knowledge instead of stifling them with fear and I am sure you will be proud of the wonderful and throughful people they will grow up to be.

So, if you insist upon using the mother card, keep this in mind… your love and guidance will do a lot more to enrich their lives than your fear and loathing.

Looking forward to the post on how Amy Winehouse’s nipples were clearly protruding through her shirt in a photo in the newspaper today. Oh, and she has tattoos - does that make the whole thing even more perverted? How will we save the children?

It is interesting that you mention hyper-individualism, Shane. My favourite early 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had this to say about that exact thing, in his famous work called “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” (1930).

For example:

“The Christian emphasis on the individual soul has had a profound influence upon the ethics of Christian communities. It is a doctrine fundamentally akin to that of the Stoics, arising as theirs did in communities that could no longer cherish political hopes. The natural impulse of the vigorous person of decent character is to attempt to do good, but if he is deprived of all political power and of all opportunity to influence events, he will be deflected from his natural course and will decide that the important thing is to be good. This is what happened to the early Christians; it led to a conception of personal holiness as something quite independent of beneficient action, since holiness had to be something that could be achieved by people who were impotent in action. Social virtue came therefore to be excluded from Christian ethics. To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times as much harm. The medieval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted the lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St. Louis. The church would never regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship is due to work of public utility. With this separation between the social and the moral person there went an increasing separation between soul and body, which has survived in Christian metaphysics and in the systems derived from Descartes. One may say, broadly speaking, that the body represents the social and public part of a man, whereas the soul represents the private part. In emphasizing the soul, Christian ethics has made itself completely individualistic. I think it is clear that the net result of all the centuries of Christianity has been to make men more egotistic, more shut up in themselves, than nature made them; for the impulses that naturally take a man outside the walls of his ego are those of sex, parenthood, and patriotism or herd instinct. Sex - the church did everything it could to decry and degrade; family affection was decried by Christ himself and the bulk of his followers; and patriotism could find no place among the subject populations of the Roman Empire. The polemic against the family in the Gospels is a matter that has not received the attention it deserves. The church treats the Mother of Christ with reverence, but He Himself showed little of this attitude. “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John ii, 4) is His way of speaking to her. He says also that He has come to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and that he that loveth father and mother more than Him is not worthy of Him (Matt. x, 35-37). All this means the breakup of the biological family tie for the sake of creed — an attitude which had a great deal to do with the intolerance that came into the world with the spread of Christianity.”

“This individualism culminated in the doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul, which was to enjoy hereafter endless bliss or endless woe according to circumstances. The circumstances upon which this momentous difference depended were somewhat curious. For example, if you died immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon you while pronouncing certain words, you inherited eternal bliss; whereas, if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by lightning at a moment when you were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you would inherit eternal torment. I do not say that the modern Protestant Christian believes this, nor even perhaps the modern Catholic Christian who has not been adequately instructed in theology; but I do say that this is the orthodox doctrine and was firmly believed until recent times. The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out: by this means they secured that these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays do so. In countless ways the doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has had disastrous effects upon morals, and the metaphysical separation of soul and body has had disastrous effects upon philosophy.”

And Russell on Christianity and Sex:

“The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex — an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. We sometimes hear talk to the effect that Christianity improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest perversions of history that it is possible to make. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code. Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress; they have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts. The teaching of the church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for those who find this impossible marriage is permissible. “It is better to marry than to burn,” as St. Paul puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the church did what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.”

“The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effects upon morals.”

“It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of “improper” talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.”

“Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never allowed the word “train” to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.”

“Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.”

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell2.htm

Another good read is “Why I am not a Christian” written in 1927.

http://www.users.drew.edu/%7Ejlenz/whynot.html

The National Post is a mainstream newspaper. Sex is no longer kept in the closet - it is public discourse.

There are two ways of looking at these articles - opportunities to normalize aberrant and unhealthy behaviour, or sounding the alarm to those who need to know. It depends on which side of the fence you sit, how you understand these pieces.

I think it is sad and pathetic that things like real dolls and 2nd Life are becoming more and more socially accepted. It is a sad trend in society that we are now accepting as normal the further separation and ostracism of humanity from itself. Normal, healthy humans do not do these things to themselves. Normal healthy humans don’t encourage these things. But humans who have been brainwashed into hyper-individualism and hedonism see this as a logical and acceptable outcome.

One can only hope that people wake up one day soon and realize that this trend towards hyper-individualism and selfishness as a virtue is bringing down society in a death of a thousand cuts, as much as any other “crisis” today.

Excuse me, I feel an irresistable urge to cast all inhibitions aside, and, maddened by uncontrollable priapic lust, to commit rape and mayhem. That cartoon! That steaming, sensuous, raunchy pornographic filth!!

Heck, we might as well put the link up, rather than taking Matthew’s word for it.

Another case of the blind leading the blind. Ignorance is awesome. At least Matthew had the decency to look at the smut!

Matthew, come down off your high horse for a moment.

Go look in any middle school aged child’s notebook (male especially) and you’ll find drawings far more explicit than that. That doodle (and it is little more than a doodle) is no worse than the slightly ribald humour that used to be in the old Carry On Gang movies in the 50’s and 60’s.

Do you really believe that “covering it up” actually does anything other than foster an utterly irrational amount of guilt and shame over something that is so pivotal to human society?

As for the post that Matthew deleted, here is a brief synopsis:

I still think it is funny that Matthew draws attention to these sorts of things (the same way he did in the summer with CTV - calling for a ban) when what he does in reality is send more traffic to the thing he finds offensive - especially funny is the fact that he is corrupting even more people by exposing them to something, as he puts it, that should be in porn (he also went back and deleted the name of the porn magazine he mentioned in one his posts - because, heaven forbid, he knows the name of it) by directing more traffic to it. This, in turn, will increase the number of hits they get, signalling, that it worked, giving them the rationale to keep doing it.

Next, I said that if he was serious about it, he would use his dollars to vote, by cancelling his subscription. But he won’t, of course, because then that would make it so he wouldn’t have something to complain about. I mean, really, how can one feel morally superior when there is no smut out there, right? So, without it, Matthew would just be like everyone else.

I think you are overreacting here.

At best, the entire section is suggestive, more rationally, it talks about relationships and how sexuality plays into them.

You can find more suggestive stuff in the Sears catalog.

Seriously.

And by the way Mr. RA, would you like to suggest a legitimate reason as to why I, one who finds pornography and lewd behaviour to be morally reprehensible, shouldn’t be upset by this smut coming into my home, or is this just you trying to wish away any standards of moral decency?

lol! yeah, “japanese pop-culture”, that’s what you’re familiar with. we all are, aren’t we? right, got it….

KEvron