On Thu, 1 Mar 2001 08:05:19 EST Bizarro7@aol.com writes:

In a message dated 3/1/01 7:13:46 AM Eastern Standard Time, salma_106@hotmail.com writes:

Don't get me started. It's a pet peeve of mine that, largely thanks to the dominant patriarchal religion, Western society regards sex between consenting adults to be an obscenity, but violence is perfectly acceptable and children may be exposed to tremendous amounts of it from a very young age. If this isn't completely twisted, I don't know what is.

1) Well, I don't think the tremendous amounts of violence kids are exposed to is good. Evil is the more likely word to come to mind.

2) I find myself in an interesting position on your first premise - Christianity's influence on western views of sex. This probably won't go over well with either side, but, personally, I'd put this down as a Greek philosophy derived idea. To make a long story short (and avoid having to dig out the old textbooks and look up details), a common philosophy in intellectual circles two thousand years ago was that spirit and matter were separate and opposed. This actually led to two very opposed groups. The Hedonists held that the separation between them meant you could indulge the body like crazy without harm to the spirit. The Stoics held that the body was the enemy of the spirit and that such indulgence was bad. Culturally, the Stoics won a lot of major rounds on this issue.

Now, I'm somewhat in opposition to this view. I was raised up with the idea that intimacy is sacred, not sick, which puts me in the conservative camp on porn and such.Since Paul's been brought up, let me cite the phrase about bridling passions. The idea of a bridle is not to kill the horse. Rather, it's to tame, train, and teach the horse. Sexuality is a very important part of life but, I would argue, one that belongs in very specific bounds for just that reason. It's a part of a larger relationship (which, where I'm coming from, means a married relationship). Anything less, to me, is too demeaning to it. It divorces it from its human context.

No one has yet explained to me why, in our society, an act of life and love is filthy and needs to be censored, and acts of death and destruction are cool entertainment. Even the bible was full of both.

And showed the consquences of both. Everyone knows the story of David and Goliath, but the story of David and Bathsheba is the one that would fit into the B7 universe (whew, a reference).

However, I will skip the ways in which I think David could be compared to Servalan.

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