site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1597 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Are their any non-religious organizations whose members take vows oaths of celibacy, a la the Night's Watch or the Maesters from ASOIAF?

(I'm pretty sure the answer is "no," but I'd like to double-check my bases so I can be more certain in replying as such the next time someone "advises" me to "go join the Night's Watch" or similar.)

(Edited per @FiveHourMarathon's fine pedantry.)

Not that it answers your question, but technically the Night's Watch doesn't take a vow of celibacy. They promise to take no wife and father no children, not to abstain from sex.

Celibacy is no marriage, chastity is no sex. Don't worry even Catholics get it wrong a lot (and rise of the incorrect term Incel has furthered that misunderstanding)

My understanding is that chastity is no sex outside of marriage, but inside marriage is fine. i.e. all Christians (married or not) are called to chastity but they are encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse.

Then again my understanding might be mistaken. I definitely don't claim to be an authority on that. Fair point about celibacy, I got sloppy and was just using the common sense of the word even though I should know better.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers. But because humans are so weak, the married are supposed to occasionally close their eyes and think of canaan so their spouse does not engage in sexual intercourse with lucifer or other people, which would be like, so much more disgusting.

1 Corinthians 7: 1 Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers.

This is definitely not true, at least for Catholicism. My source is that I just recently went through the pre cana process (for those who don’t know, this is the Catholic marriage preparation, basically a retreat where you do various activities with your soon-to-be-spouse alongside other couples; it was a very good experience actually, happy to explain more to the curious) and they were very clear that a husband and wife are supposed to enjoy sex together. Sex is a hugely important part of romantic attraction and the general human experience, not to mention for procreation, and God made it feel good for a reason. You’re just not supposed to enjoy with people other than your spouse, or while using contraception other than cycle-tracking methods (of which the church offers a surprisingly robust suite of resources to help with, including services like biomarker tracking to help precisely identify a woman’s fertility cycle; they also included an array of secular scientific studies showing good success rates for the methods, I found it all very interesting). I admittedly can’t cite the biblical references off my head but I can tell you with absolute certainty that the Official Church StanceTM is that sex is good, actually.

Edit: reading further down the page I see that @urquan has included a key term I forgot to use, which summarizes the position and reconciles the attitude that “sex is good” with the attitude that “celibacy/chastity is good”. Marriage is, in and of itself, a vocation in the religious sense. There’s a reason it’s a sacrament after all. The priesthood, of course, is also a vocation. Priests are not “missing out” on something religious by being celibate and unmarried, nor are married couples “missing out” on part of the religion by not becoming priests and nuns instead. They are simply two different callings.

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy. It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers.

That's not true at all. For one thing, the Song of Solomon (in the Old Testament!) is really sexual (I mean, by biblical standards) and is a good example that the Bible considers sex between married couples to be a praiseworthy thing to be enjoyed.

But also, your cited verses directly work against your claim. Paul never claims that sex is disgusting or bad, and in fact explicitly says that couples should engage in it! He does say it is better to be single and focus on God, but acknowledges that not everyone is equipped for that. If you choose to read disgust into that, that's your interpretation and not something supported by the text.

I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons. It's not about you, it's not about having fun, it's a means to an end. I have my own biases, but I don't buy the christian counseling websites spin of 1 corinthians 7 to be a 60s hippy pro-sex message. Cite me some pre-20th century catholic authority that encourages sexual pleasure in marriage.

I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons.

You should read it like this: It’s one spouse’s duty to help the other fulfill their sexual needs, so that they aren’t tempted to have sex outside the marriage. Millions of dead bedrooms, affairs, resentments, and divorces speak to the wisdom of this provision. If you hate the idea of a sexless marriage, like most people do, St. Paul is simply agreeing with you!

It’s true that Christianity places a high premium on celibacy. But the married have their calling and their vocation, which Paul, though he advises celibacy to those who will accept it, also praises in the highest terms, as an image of Christlike love. And the superiority of celibacy over marriage is also a provision confirmed by experience: not all wish for marriage, not all wish for the responsibility of a relationship. And where the celibate are not celebrated, they are vilified, rejected: see hatred directed towards spinsters, incels, communities not knowing what to do with single people with no interest in marriage, etc.

You can view the Christian approach to sex, particularly historically, as repression. You can view it that way, and even twist yourself into knots interpreting the holy text through the most uncharitable angle, rather than trying to grasp, with sincerity, what was meant and what is understood by it. You’re free to do so. But given what has happened — the conflicts, social upheaval, bitter divorces, mass loneliness, party culture, hookup culture that has resulted from unrestrained sexual norms — I would rather advise looking at Christian sexual norms as a bulwark against grave danger.

You can disagree, or you can even offer a more refined ethic that prizes sexual restraint without restricting sex to marriage, but what I often see is people criticizing Christian moderationism towards sex and offering as its alternative the spirit of the 60s, which is facing mass rejection because it holds up a carrot of free love and sexual pleasure, but gives few people what they actually want. St. Paul, by contrast, says: “you should love one another as yourself, and you should make it an important part of your life — even a duty! — to aid your spouse in fulfilling their sexual needs.” In what sense is this not wisdom?

To the degree that the christian sexuality norms can work for a society, they do so in the compromises, between the cracks, of the true christian vision, which is just anti-sex asceticism. Like paul’s ‘ok fine, if you have to, I guess you can fuck your wife’. Or Thomas aquinas borrowing of pagan aristoteles’ sexual ideas rather than augustine’s. Or all the priests who looked away when young people had sex, or when married men went to prostitutes. That was christian sexuality norms’ finest hour, when they did not insist upon themselves, but accomodated human nature.

On the contrary: cite me somewhere in the Bible (or authoritative interpretation of it, e.g. Catholic Tradition) which says that sex is bad and not to be enjoyed. The burden of proof is on you here, especially given that the evidence you already cited (Paul) doesn't say what you claim it does. Otherwise, it seems self-evident to me that God would not have made something so fundamentally part of our nature feel good to us if he didn't intend for us to enjoy it. Much like the taste of good food or the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed in their proper context, so is the pleasure of sex. It makes no sense otherwise.

Otherwise, it seems self-evident to me that God would not have made something so fundamentally part of our nature feel good to us if he didn't intend for us to enjoy it

Counterpoint: It also feels good to dominate other human beings, but I don't believe God intended for us to enjoy that.

Now, match "domination" to "sex", combine that with the degree that marriage is inherently an exclusive prostitution agreement for sociobiological reasons, mix that with a generally-productive instinct for men to do this sexually more often... and now you know why traditionalists have an emergent, adversarial relationship with sex. For progressives, mix that with the female zero-sum social game, and the result is "yes, all men do that for power reasons, and they all do it on purpose".

More comments

Aquinas views sexual pleasure in marriage as necessary, natural and good. Going to the sex act with one’s spouse strictly for the pleasure is a sin, but sexual pleasure within marriage and the marital act is a positive.

For Augustine every sex act not for procreation is a sin. Augustine never left any space for healthy sexual desire after the fall. Thomas Aquinas follows Augustine’s opinion when he says that sexuality exists for the sake of propagation and for the strengthening of the marriage bond between a man and a woman. So here again there’s the idea that sexuality is just an instrument, and there’s no inherent value in physical sexual enjoyment itself.

But then Thomas also borrows from Aristoteles’ view that the spiritual and the physical are closely related to each other instead of in conflict, and that reason should ‘coach’ our desires instead of suppressing them, and so accepts that the physical-sensual part of the person has its own longings and joy. Sensual pleasure is good for the physical-sensual and therefore for the entire person.

So I think it's pretty confusing under what circumstances you're allowed to enjoy yourself. As a byproduct mostly.

More comments

They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse"

Yes we are.

that's new age degeneracy.

No it isn't. Have you read Song of Solomon?

It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers. But because humans are so weak, the married are supposed to occasionally close their eyes and think of canaan so their spouse does not engage in sexual intercourse with lucifer or other people, which would be like, so much more disgusting.

That is a blatant misreading of the quoted passage, which specifically states that sex should be a regular part of married life, and that a major goal of this sexual activity is gratification of your partner. The Bible contains numerous depictions of erotic love portrayed as a positive good, and again, there is an entire book of erotic poetry right there in the middle. You are quoting the one passage most conducive to your desired distortion and portraying it as normative, hoping that people won't notice that this passage is an outlier and that even as an outlier it still doesn't say what you want it to say. It's also ignoring the passage's historical context: whatever your thoughts on when and by who it was actually written, the text is explicitly framed as advice for people who are about to undergo an attempted extermination by the Roman state. Having a spouse and children doesn't make it easier to handle imprisonment, torture or execution for your faith.

Nor is it necessary to approach this question from pure theory; it's pretty simple to reduce this to an empirical question and just look at surveys of sexual satisfaction, in which conservative Christians score highly.

Sure, but the relevant canon regarding celibacy actually says ‘clerics in the Roman rite are obliged to perfect and perpetual continence’- it doesn’t use either word.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats