From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed Jul 24 2002 - 16:06:53 MDT
On 24 Jul 2002 at 15:26, kharin wrote:
>
> "I also wanted to mention that the catholic Church encouraged the
> veneration of Mary as a submissive saint and model for motherhood at
> least in part to lure acolytes away from the goddess religions, which
> they slandered both with the example of Eve's daring to eat of the fruit
> of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and also with the Lilith myth."
>
> Yes, I was aware of that. I would certainly would concede that my observations concerning Mary are footnotes rather than evidence of any great disagreement. That said, christianity had few, if any, compunctions concerning appropriating pagan ideology and custom where it was expedient for them
to do so. But then, most religions are collections of bricolage to some extent and christianity was no exception.
>
> That said, I still think you underestimate the importance issues of homosexuality have, if not in their own right as ethical/moral issues then as a component of wider issues; in this case to the genealogy of christian morals if not to the broader metaphysics. I agree that if the injunction
concerning slavery were reversed then there would have no wider impact on the system as a whole; but I do think there would have been implications had the opprobrium regarding homosexuality been reversed (for reasons already outlined in part).
>
> This mainly pertains within the Aquinan interpretation of christianity; god being the creator of the natural order, homosexuality is an offence against that order ("It is evident ... that every emission of semen, in such a way that generation cannot follow, is contrary to the good for man.
And if this be done deliberately, it must be a sin. Now, I am speaking of a way from which, in itself, generation could not result: such would be any emission of semen apart from the natural union of male and female. For which reason, sins of this type are called contrary to nature." Summa
Contra Gentiles). The Aquinan interpretation has tended to be very dominant indeed (it feats in neatly with what St Paul had to say in Romans; "For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were
inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves !
> the due penalty for their error.") and obviously relates to much of what I said earlier regarding the christian morality of abnegation; the homosexuality issue is not an isolated one, but relates to a much broader schema of a kind that Nietzche was vastly better qualified than I to write
about.
>
The misplacement of semen was not possible in lesbian encounters,
and if that misplacement were the wider issue (pun noted but not
intended), then the only reason that male homosexual relations could
be more offensive than, say, masturbation or withdrawal (onanism, after
Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground) would have to be the
conspiritorial/consensual nature of the act, requiring two people.
> ----
> This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25764>
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