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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Trigger warning - this is related to pornographic material

Lily Philips is an onlyfans model who slept with 100 guys in a single day. She is from the UK and does not have the background of a typical pornstar from the looks of it. Popular Youtube video maker Joshua Pieters made a documentary around it with her in it where at one point she just cracks where she gets a hint of what she just did, in trying to sleep with more guys than most friend circles do in a few lifetimes all for the sake of being edgy.

The clip has gained traction and I feel bad about the girl. Some Christian women are asking for her to be forgiven and taken back under gods grace whilst the Tate Brothers asked their followers to go undercover in her gangbang and literally preach the gospel to a cum infested e celeb. Hell this is the first time I have seen either of them show regret for having ran an onlyfans studio.

Lily and her friends have done similar things before but I cannot find any of it since any mention of her name brings up thousands of links about what she did this week. How do you even describe what she did given that she wants to do a 1000 in a day despite breaking down on camera? The cherry on this cake is that she can get married to a fairly normal guy tomorrow because Riley Reid, another adult entertainer did this too.

edit - removed a question about religiosity, since I think it came off in bad faith which is not my intent at all as a religous person

Do religious people actually genuinely believe that those who willingly perform such stunts are capable of having all their sins washed away?

If you have to ask, you fundamentally do not understand Christianity, or its concept of repentance or grace. You appear to be using a model where forgiveness is for lesser sins, but too much sin means that this forgiveness is overwhelmed. In the first place, there are no lesser or greater sins; all sins are alike in that they all involve rejection of God, his nature and his creation. In the second place, what prevents forgiveness from working is not the amount of sins committed, but rather the refusal of the sinner to repent, leading eventually, one way or another, to an inability to repent.

If you have to ask, you fundamentally do not understand Christianity. [...] You appear to be using a model where forgiveness is for lesser sins, but too much sin means that this forgiveness is overwhelmed. In the first place, there are no lesser or greater sins

Also, from @SubstantialFrivolity: The girl who bangs 1000 dudes in one day is no worse, in God's eyes, than the sweet old grandma who snapped at her grandson in a moment of frustration.

It's hard to say uniformly "what Christians believe" about sin and hell because of denominational drift. The Catholic church certainly teaches different levels of eternal punishment exist for different degrees of unrepented sin. (And, correspondingly, different levels of virtue in life grant different amounts of glory in heaven.)

So yes, it's a mess. Even the most agreed-upon doctrines, such as that any sinner can repent and be saved; find dissent in at least a few churches, such as Calvinists with their TULIP.

(While I'm here, another denominational difference: a Catholic would say that Lily Philips loses eternal punishment for sleeping with 100 men by repenting, but the damage to her soul still requires purification, which can be accomplished in this life or after death. Eastern Orthodox Christians have a similar idea, but they have 'purification after death' rather than purgatory, and it varies in the particulars.)

Even the most agreed-upon doctrines, such as that any sinner can repent and be saved; find dissent in at least a few churches, such as Calvinists with their TULIP.

This is not really true. It's true in the same sense as it would be true to say "material determinists claim that there certain orderings of a deck of cards that can never be created." Some orderings of the cards will never be created, and since material determinism says that the entire course of the universe is already set, in a sense that's equivalent to saying that there are some orderings which "can never" be created. But for all practical purposes it would be a misleading way to phrase it.

The same applies to Calvinism. Calvinists teach that everything which will come to pass has been foreordained by God from eternity. This means that those who are foreordained not to be saved, "can never" be saved. But it's not due to anything special in the person nor susceptible to our analysis ahead of time. Certainly it is not a Calvinist doctrine that certain sinful acts allow us to know here and now someone's predestined fate.