![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's been a while
Sep. 16th, 2010 05:07 pmI haven't posted on LJ for a long time (e.g., I neglected any semblance of smut journal from my annual pilgrimages to Chicago and New Orleans); but just lately I've found myself posting stuff of such length and substance on Farcebook that it's clear I need more space to bump about in. To begin with, however, let's recycle some of that already-spewn material and see if anybody wants to fight. :)
On Christine O'Donnell winning the GOP senatorial primary in Delaware:
I think the folks around me are spending entirely too much time and energy calling Christine O'Donnell a nutjob and/or an idiot and not enough figuring out how people with her reprehensible belief system manage to be electable. Ms. O'Donnel is Abagail Williams incarnate and I'm feeling uncomfortably like John Proctor. 'I saw Gordy Geise with the devil!'
I've not heard O'Donnell say anything that I'd be unlikely to hear come out of the mouths of most of my relatives. This is mainstream fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, folks: this is The American Religion. Some of the sexually proscriptive dogma roster is shared with Catholicism and many so-called liberal Protestant denominations.
Ok, well, the 'masturbation is adultery' thing is a little weird, but it's only a weird explanation for a belief (masturbation is sin) that scores of millions of Americans share. Instead of her robo-recitation 'The Bible says', O'Donnell would do a little better in her cause to point out that big Jee hissef told his posse that having lust in they heart for they neighbor wife was just as bad as boinking her; but what nobody including O'Donnell grasps is that for Jesus it was about the betrayal of adultery, not the lust. Likewise in the story of Onan, the source of all religious proscription on masturbation:
Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter framed the concept of 'memetics', or the perpetuation of ideas on trajectories that imitate genetics, arguing that the stronger cultural memes win out and weaker ones disappear. I've recently read an NPR story about researchers attempting to show that a predisposition to believe in a deity and other supernatural forces is an attribute of the species that's been selected for over the last million years. I think nothing could be more obvious. What's less obvious is why there seems such a strong gen-/memetic tendency toward fanatical infatuation with other humans' sexual behavior. I surely hope that the 'my sex life is not your fucking business, nor that of your deity, you pernicious fuckwit' gene is stronger.
[More to come]
On Christine O'Donnell winning the GOP senatorial primary in Delaware:
I think the folks around me are spending entirely too much time and energy calling Christine O'Donnell a nutjob and/or an idiot and not enough figuring out how people with her reprehensible belief system manage to be electable. Ms. O'Donnel is Abagail Williams incarnate and I'm feeling uncomfortably like John Proctor. 'I saw Gordy Geise with the devil!'
I've not heard O'Donnell say anything that I'd be unlikely to hear come out of the mouths of most of my relatives. This is mainstream fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, folks: this is The American Religion. Some of the sexually proscriptive dogma roster is shared with Catholicism and many so-called liberal Protestant denominations.
Ok, well, the 'masturbation is adultery' thing is a little weird, but it's only a weird explanation for a belief (masturbation is sin) that scores of millions of Americans share. Instead of her robo-recitation 'The Bible says', O'Donnell would do a little better in her cause to point out that big Jee hissef told his posse that having lust in they heart for they neighbor wife was just as bad as boinking her; but what nobody including O'Donnell grasps is that for Jesus it was about the betrayal of adultery, not the lust. Likewise in the story of Onan, the source of all religious proscription on masturbation:
So Judah said to Onan, "Come to your brother's wife and perform the rite of the levirate, and raise up progeny for your brother." Now Onan knew that the progeny would not be his, and it came about, when he came to his brother's wife, he wasted [his semen] on the ground, in order not to give seed to his brother. Now what he did was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and He put him to death also. —Genesis 38:8-10. (Judaica Press Complete Tanach)...the issue is disobedience to an urgent parental command toward propagating the race and/or the family line (for Judah, practically the same thing). How this came to be interpreted as 'spilling one's seed is a universal evil' is beyond me.
Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter framed the concept of 'memetics', or the perpetuation of ideas on trajectories that imitate genetics, arguing that the stronger cultural memes win out and weaker ones disappear. I've recently read an NPR story about researchers attempting to show that a predisposition to believe in a deity and other supernatural forces is an attribute of the species that's been selected for over the last million years. I think nothing could be more obvious. What's less obvious is why there seems such a strong gen-/memetic tendency toward fanatical infatuation with other humans' sexual behavior. I surely hope that the 'my sex life is not your fucking business, nor that of your deity, you pernicious fuckwit' gene is stronger.
[More to come]
