Thread: Sex & Violence
View Single Post
Old 09-14-2007, 09:06 PM   #10
shadowfyr
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
Re: Sex & Violence

There are places in the US like that too. They are called Nudist Colonies, or Naturist camps. The fundgelicals get their panties in a wad over them so much that, in Texas at least, and probably other places, they have actually passed laws "prohibiting" camps for children that involve Naturism preemptively, just in case someone **might** one day consider opening one there. Though why any one would, given that the reaction of people in those places is one step away from calling for a lynching due to a persons ankles showing.

See, in their minds, **violence** is a consequence of loose rules and immorality. Sex however, and even nudity, ***lead to*** loose rules and immorality. It therefor follows that the later is more dangerous than the former, which is just a symptom. This isn't surprising thinking really, statistically 90% of murders are either a relative killing there kids, wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives, lovers killing their loved one, etc., and when you also have the statistically the highest rates of teen pregnancies, rapes, incest, and so on, in the nation, it kind of unhinges the mind. It can't ***possibly*** be the rampant bigotry and ignorance in the areas where hatred of nudity/sex, advocacy of guns and warmongering, and "abstinence/say no to <fill in blank>" programs are most prevailent, so it must be the fact that the rest of the world isn't as bigoted and ignorant. Facts also don't matter. We are dealing with cranks here, and by definition, a crank sticks with a theory, even if 50 other cranks are insisting that the real cause is everything from not enough sex to children wearing Spiderman underwear. What matters is that all the cooks agree the problems are the fault of the other 90% of the country, who don't pass preemptive laws to prevent non-existent people from mooning dukes on the shore of some lake some place.

There is no rational basis for it, and there is even one Christian group that advocates for Naturism that flat out argues, based on Biblical passages, that not only is going nude in humility OK, that nudity was **required** for baptisms until a few centuries ago, and that God **never** punishes anyone for such an offense any place in the book, including the one women in a passage who gets raped while bathing by the river. She became a major political figure, her sons the rulers of the nation, and the idiot that raped her get his head stuffed on the end of a pike in a war, soon after the act (or something like that). Trait number 2 of cranks - No matter how much history, psychology, logic, statistics or basic undeniable facts you drop in front of them, they will do what Dembski did at the Dover trial. They will look at your mountains of data, facts and evidence, turn and stare dumbly at you and say, "All that stuff is meaningless nonsense. I don't see any evidence here."

Anti-nudity and the absurd idea that what "does" work for violence (making sure the kid knows the difference, which a lot don't bother to teach them in the first place) is entirely a relatively new phenomena, less than 200-300 years old in its less extreme absurdities, and probably less than 30-40 years in its worst idiocies. Wookstock came as a real shock to a lot of people that wouldn't have had a second thought letting their kid go to a local pond, strip naked, and swim around, in mixed sex company. It sent whole segments of the US right of the deep end from general prudery into abject insanity imho. Kind of like the nut I ran into recently who just **knew** that the real danger wasn't a bunch of religious nuts in the ME that already once overran most of Europe all the way to like France or so, before being pushed back, but rather those "damn commies" in China. Times change, but some people not only can't adapt to the pace, they calcify in their thinking, like mud turning to sandstone and go completely irrational.

Worse, what they completely fail to see is that, where ever bigotry, obsession and grandiose causes abide, more than half the people defending the cause are little more than leeches, sucking on the suckers, who get drawn in by the idea that all the worlds problems can just be solved if they throw another $2,000,000 at, "getting the message out to the heathens", and passing laws designed not to "inform", but deny information. The theory being, much like security and virus protecting on all those companies that keep "losing track of" huge databases of user information or having their networks compromised, the *best* defense again bad behavior is to not tell people all the things they could do that would be bad... A theory that plays right into the vultures nibbling the edges of the carcass of their ethics and morality. The last thing a con artist wants is for people to start thinking, "You know, this really isn't working... Maybe we should try giving people real information instead?" Informed people don't send entire paychecks to some huckster that promises them that God will rid the world of gays, cure cancer and stop all abortions, if they just send enough cash to help them sell a $5 book about, "abstaining from sex", (final price $50), to every school in the country. Ignorant people will send their life savings in to such crackpots.

And, while they have always been among us, its only now that they have 3-4 national TV stations dedicated to their BS, billions of dollars in funding, and direct access to nearly every fool on the planet to dupe into handing them more. Whose biases do you think they are going to latch onto, the guy that thinks safe sex ed is the best way to solve teen pregnancies, or the half wit, who has had 11 kids, starting when the first born when she was 14, and probably by her own brother, and who just *knows* it was the pictures of women's bras in the Sears catalog that caused him to rape her at 13?

Ironically, its the very separations we have, which most of Europe never implemented as strictly as the US, which led to them a) being able to do something about this kind of BS and b) figuring out, a lot faster than we have, that people mucking around in politics or law, based on ideology and dogma, should be **embarrassing**, not mandatory (as it virtually is now) for a stable country. Note, I said, ideology and dogma. Religion can, by itself be harmless, sometimes helpful, if it pushes people to do good, an occasional annoyance, where it interferes in things it doesn't apply to very well, but when you add in radical ideology and the dogmatic assertions that everything the ideology says "must" be true, even when, as in most cases, their personal source book doesn't even agree with them, it becomes **dangerous**. This is as true when some nut like Stalin warped the concepts of communism, which its author merely said was the "logical long term consequence of capitalism, not a direct replacement for it" (How much 'pure' capitalism do we really have now? Consider why the next time you pay a bill for a small sum to one of several companies, instead of one megacorporation, which owns the entire industry...), into an ideological dogma about how *his* world was going to work. Mind you, communism was naive, but bore no more resemblance to what some turned it into than fundigelical groups bear to early Christians (or just early Americans). Fact is, its is just as true when some dipstick with a Bible in one hand and a list of, "naughty things I don't think people aught to know about", in the other, insists that he needs to win more points before the end of everything, by "uncorrupting" the world using some crackpot mix of ideology and dogma that leave Biblical scholars, most Christians, biologists, geologists, heck 90% of the scientists in general, and everyone from any other religion, lacking religion, or just from a less nutty country, scratching their heads and trying to figure out what drugs they had to be taking while making it all up. lol

But yeah, in short, I sort of understand how they come up with the screwy idea that sex/nudity is worse than simulated murder, but it makes about as much sense to me as the concept that there are people dumb enough in the world to **need** labels, like, "Not for internal use.", on a bottle of shampoo. The idiocy of it is just mind boggling.
shadowfyr is offline   Reply With Quote