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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way.

Very much so, yes. It's important that we think clearly about what we mean when we talk about "the sacred". And the best way to clarify your concepts is to stretch them to their logical limits, so that you're forced to draw distinctions and clearly demarcate the boundaries of things.

But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful.

It would be extremely helpful, if it were genuinely a part of your ultimate motivations. I'm less interested in debating policy and more interested in understanding why different people think the way they do, regardless of what those reasons turn out to be. (Sometimes people aren't honest about why they think what they think. Sometimes they genuinely don't know why they think what they think, or they're lying even to themselves. That makes it a difficult endeavor.)

At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children?

Sure. But that doesn't really seem to be addressing my question, because this new criteria (about what's appropriate for children) seems totally orthogonal to the dimension of the sacred. The sacredness of the phenomenon or object in question is no longer relevant; we just have to look at whether it's safe for kids (or addictive or whatever other criteria you want to propose) and that will determine what types of prohibitions we need. But the reason I asked the question in the first place is specifically because I wanted to clarify what exactly the sacredness of sexual acts consists in.

I do believe that you (and not just you of course, but many people, both religious and non-religious) correctly perceive that there is a certain type of spiritual power in sexuality, and that this power can be dangerous if left unchecked, and this perception is what prompted you to use the word "sacred". A spiritual power that is not present in booze and guns and etc. We can quibble over whether "sacred" was the correct word choice, or if the category of the sacred needs to be subdivided further in order to account for different types of sacred phenomena, and so forth. But regardless, I think you were at least directionally correct.

Oh, cool! Yeah, that's my missing the point a little bit. Thanks for writing the clarification.

In that case then, my personal method of thinking about the sacred in the context of the sexual is pretty straightforward:

  1. God created everything with a purpose in mind. The Thomistic view on this is that everything has a 'telos' or properly ordered end (or goal) to it.
  2. In the context of man and woman and sex, the telos is eternal unification (marriage) and procreation. This is the Catholic view on not only sex, but marriage. The well ordered purpose and end of a marriage is to create children and then raise them in virtue (Side note: For couples who cannot conceive, a marriage is still good and valid so long as it results in a mutual support for sanctification - 'becoming a saint' - in the course of life. You don't divorce because of problems with conception).
  3. Sex is a sacred act because it results in the creation of life and is also a manifestation of true feelings of love between man and woman only so long as it is performed licitly in the context of the sanctioned sacrament of marriage.
  4. To have sex outside of marriage is to violate the laws governing sex.

To comment more specifically about porn:

  1. Porn is a disordered use of sex. It isn't done within the bounds of marriage with the intent of conception. Even in a strange edge case where two married people are filming themselves having sex with the expressed purpose of conceiving, this is still disordered because the specific character of sex reserves it exclusively to the participants - man and wife. Sex is never "shared" with spectators.

  2. Masturbation, likewise, is a disordered use of one's sexual organs for the purpose of self gratification rather than towards the well ordered end of procreating (again, within the context of marriage).

A lot of it comes down to what a thing of any kind is supposed to do - what I started with, it's "telos." When you misuses that thing, you're sinning because you're out of concert with the will of God. Of course, there are many different degrees of severity to this. Mortal vs venial sins and all that. But the underlying assumption is that there is a way to all things and that that way is defined by God and also totally knowable by man.

I am allowed to judge people who are having pre-marital sex and using porn because I want them to be in sync with God's natural law and ordering of the universe because it will be to their greater happiness, joy, and benefit.

Translated to the more secular, I don't like porn because I think it's bad for everyone involved - the porn viewer, the porn maker, the porn producer, etc. All of these people will be spiritually worse off for having engaged with what is an intrinsically disordered act.

I just wanted you to know that I’m not ignoring this, but I only have so much time in the day for typing long replies, and this thread is already buried. I’ll save my thoughts on this for the next time this topic recurs.

I appreciate you.

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