Feb. 8th, 2012 02:42 pm
It's a sin
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textualdevianceEven though my conservative religious upbringing was comparatively mild, and ended when I was 12, I think I still have some lingering fuckery from it even now. In particular, I have ongoing wars with myself over anything I enjoy, especially food or leisure-related stuff, because I still feel like it's sinful/wrong/immoral to indulge in something pleasurable without paying for it with subsequent pain. Bleh.
Realized this because I was just thinking about the Puritanism involved in the anti-gay/anti-abortion crowd, and how their greatest fear is the idea of pleasure without painful consequences. Poke the "but the baybeez!" anti-abortion arguments, and you'll get to the root of it: believing that the pain and risk of pregnancy and birth is a just consequence for a woman's sin of enjoying sex. (Some will even put it in so many words--birth is a woman's burden because of Eve's sin. Bleh.)
But even among the non-religious, there's still a lot of lingering Puritanism of other kinds. In secular society, we've mostly accepted the idea of consequence-free sexual pleasure--we're down with contraception, pre-marital sex, etc. But we seem to have transferred that idea that pleasure is a sin onto other things. We can't rail against Lust, so we're railing against Sloth and Gluttony instead. (And Greed, but that's a different thing, as there are consequences beyond oneself for Greed-inspired acts. Same with Wrath. Envy is more or less victimless, unless it leads to stealing, and excessive Pride just makes you an asshole.)
The problem with this is that people are missing the point of the deadly sins (which, BTW, do not appear in scripture; they were initiated by the Greeks and developed later by the Catholic Church.) As with the rules in Leviticus about shellfish, pork, etc., they're advice on modifying behavior to avoid real-world consequences to oneself and others. I.e. unclean shellfish and improperly cooked pork will give you food poisioning. The deadly sins didn't start out as "don't do this or you'll piss off God" but "if you do this too much or in the wrong way, you'll face a world of real-life hurt." Too lazy to bathe? You'll get a rash. Get angry enough to take it out on someone? Likely to get a fist in your face. Hoard all the cash and resources for yourself? Prepare for a nasty Tragedy of the Commons.
But when those practical bits of ancient Dear Abby got twisted into issues of piety and virtue, that's when they went wonky. Everyone started playing God Likes Me Best, and soon, asceticism to the point of suffering was all the rage. Lust forbidden? Must be celibate. Sloth forbidden? Must work every waking hour, and sleep only as much as absolutely necessary. Gluttony forbidden? Eat tasteless, boring food in miniscule quantities. And since completely giving up everything good in life wasn't enough, you had to actively harm yourself, too. In suffering, righteousness (which prolly has a Latin phrase I'm too slothful to look up.)
Fast forward to the 21st century, and even though we're not as hardcore on the religious side here in modern Western Civilization, we're still carrying forward that idea that avoiding any hint of those sins makes us somehow objectively good, or at least morally superior to our fellow people, and will somehow pay off for us down the road.
But will it? If you don't believe in an afterlife reward system you have to pay into, probably not.
Now, the practical stuff still applies, of course. Saving for retirement, for instance, is a smart move even entirely unconnected from ideals of morality, and too many rich people don't understand exactly how connected their bottom line is to the well-being of the working class. Sometimes indulging in short-term pleasures can have exponentially worse long-term consequences, and shooting yourself in the foot in some sort of ill-advised rebellion against people telling you what to do is just stupid. But if you've already done the practical analysis, and know at which point you need to stop before you hurt yourself or someone else, there's no sense whatsoever in denying yourself pleasure just for the sake of doing so. Live it up.
Of course, some people will get on your case for this. Some have so committed themselves to such righteous suffering that it makes them furious to see someone who isn't also doing the masochism tango. They also consider your wanton displays a cavalcade of temptation for them to sin. Why else would half those Family Values sorts get caught with their pants down?
I've written before about our culture's Madonna/Whore syndrome; about how we have so demonized sex that many people can't enjoy it in a healthy way. They're so ashamed of perfectly normal desire that instead of merrily indulging in a romp with a fellow willing, happy partner, they shove those desires down, and only express them in furtive, secretive ways. See: "Straight" guys going to glory holes. They can't acknowledge their desire to themselves in the light of day, so they have to detach from that "good" self, and go get their freak on as some other persona. (This is not to say that anonymous sex is inherently bad, just that a lot of people do it solely because they can't reconcile their "good" self-image with their "bad" sexuality.)
And, of course, the same has become true of how we look at other pleasures. This is the core experience of bulimia, after all: deprive yourself to a ridiculous degree in order to be "good" and then, when that pent-up, perfectly normal desire to eat finally explodes, you go completely the other direction, and down a bucket of chicken or an entire pizza or a pile of candy. Whatever it is you've disallowed yourself solely for reasons of personal morality comes raging back until you make yourself sick on it. Then you have your ritual purification moment, and go back to square one.
Same goes for sloth. You're all pleased with yourself because you're only sleeping 5 hours a night, you're working 60-hour weeks, you're scrubbing behind the toilet with a toothbrush and working out two hours a day. And then it catches up with you, and when you finally have a window of time to yourself, you completely crash.
The thing many (including yours truly) need to learn is that as an adult in this earthly life, you don't get gold stars for being a martyr. Yes, some folks are still true believers in the idea of earning heavenly Brownie Points, and will continue to deny themselves any pleasure in order to make a sadistic deity happy. But if that's not your personal theology, why let your behavior be driven by what boils down to the same motivation?
Of course there's some courtesy and compassion involved. It's rude to grossly enjoy oneself in a way that rubs it in the face of others who are suffering. But, assuming you're not being a mocking jerk, if you didn't have a hand in that suffering, and what you're doing has no bearing on whether it will end? Go to it. It's not inherently mean to indulge in a passion for painting just because some are blind. If you got in their face and said, "neener neener! I can see all these cool colors and you can't!" then sure. You're being a total dick and deserve a slap. But the mere open enjoyment of something you love is not a mockery of those who don't have that thing. Enjoying a pint of ice cream doesn't mean you don't care about starving kids in third-world countries. Driving to work because you get claustrophobic on buses doesn't mean you don't care about global warming.
What it all comes down to, I think, is this: for most of us, life kinda sucks fairly often. Unless you're born into every privileged class imaginable, you're going to suffer on some level. And because there's so much suck in life, why on earth would you voluntarily increase that suckage if there's no benefit to doing so aside from some vague sense of moral purity? The only people who will be impressed by such wholly voluntary suffering are assholes, sadists and control freaks. They are not worth it.
And on that note: I think I'm going to go take a nap. ;)
Realized this because I was just thinking about the Puritanism involved in the anti-gay/anti-abortion crowd, and how their greatest fear is the idea of pleasure without painful consequences. Poke the "but the baybeez!" anti-abortion arguments, and you'll get to the root of it: believing that the pain and risk of pregnancy and birth is a just consequence for a woman's sin of enjoying sex. (Some will even put it in so many words--birth is a woman's burden because of Eve's sin. Bleh.)
But even among the non-religious, there's still a lot of lingering Puritanism of other kinds. In secular society, we've mostly accepted the idea of consequence-free sexual pleasure--we're down with contraception, pre-marital sex, etc. But we seem to have transferred that idea that pleasure is a sin onto other things. We can't rail against Lust, so we're railing against Sloth and Gluttony instead. (And Greed, but that's a different thing, as there are consequences beyond oneself for Greed-inspired acts. Same with Wrath. Envy is more or less victimless, unless it leads to stealing, and excessive Pride just makes you an asshole.)
The problem with this is that people are missing the point of the deadly sins (which, BTW, do not appear in scripture; they were initiated by the Greeks and developed later by the Catholic Church.) As with the rules in Leviticus about shellfish, pork, etc., they're advice on modifying behavior to avoid real-world consequences to oneself and others. I.e. unclean shellfish and improperly cooked pork will give you food poisioning. The deadly sins didn't start out as "don't do this or you'll piss off God" but "if you do this too much or in the wrong way, you'll face a world of real-life hurt." Too lazy to bathe? You'll get a rash. Get angry enough to take it out on someone? Likely to get a fist in your face. Hoard all the cash and resources for yourself? Prepare for a nasty Tragedy of the Commons.
But when those practical bits of ancient Dear Abby got twisted into issues of piety and virtue, that's when they went wonky. Everyone started playing God Likes Me Best, and soon, asceticism to the point of suffering was all the rage. Lust forbidden? Must be celibate. Sloth forbidden? Must work every waking hour, and sleep only as much as absolutely necessary. Gluttony forbidden? Eat tasteless, boring food in miniscule quantities. And since completely giving up everything good in life wasn't enough, you had to actively harm yourself, too. In suffering, righteousness (which prolly has a Latin phrase I'm too slothful to look up.)
Fast forward to the 21st century, and even though we're not as hardcore on the religious side here in modern Western Civilization, we're still carrying forward that idea that avoiding any hint of those sins makes us somehow objectively good, or at least morally superior to our fellow people, and will somehow pay off for us down the road.
But will it? If you don't believe in an afterlife reward system you have to pay into, probably not.
Now, the practical stuff still applies, of course. Saving for retirement, for instance, is a smart move even entirely unconnected from ideals of morality, and too many rich people don't understand exactly how connected their bottom line is to the well-being of the working class. Sometimes indulging in short-term pleasures can have exponentially worse long-term consequences, and shooting yourself in the foot in some sort of ill-advised rebellion against people telling you what to do is just stupid. But if you've already done the practical analysis, and know at which point you need to stop before you hurt yourself or someone else, there's no sense whatsoever in denying yourself pleasure just for the sake of doing so. Live it up.
Of course, some people will get on your case for this. Some have so committed themselves to such righteous suffering that it makes them furious to see someone who isn't also doing the masochism tango. They also consider your wanton displays a cavalcade of temptation for them to sin. Why else would half those Family Values sorts get caught with their pants down?
I've written before about our culture's Madonna/Whore syndrome; about how we have so demonized sex that many people can't enjoy it in a healthy way. They're so ashamed of perfectly normal desire that instead of merrily indulging in a romp with a fellow willing, happy partner, they shove those desires down, and only express them in furtive, secretive ways. See: "Straight" guys going to glory holes. They can't acknowledge their desire to themselves in the light of day, so they have to detach from that "good" self, and go get their freak on as some other persona. (This is not to say that anonymous sex is inherently bad, just that a lot of people do it solely because they can't reconcile their "good" self-image with their "bad" sexuality.)
And, of course, the same has become true of how we look at other pleasures. This is the core experience of bulimia, after all: deprive yourself to a ridiculous degree in order to be "good" and then, when that pent-up, perfectly normal desire to eat finally explodes, you go completely the other direction, and down a bucket of chicken or an entire pizza or a pile of candy. Whatever it is you've disallowed yourself solely for reasons of personal morality comes raging back until you make yourself sick on it. Then you have your ritual purification moment, and go back to square one.
Same goes for sloth. You're all pleased with yourself because you're only sleeping 5 hours a night, you're working 60-hour weeks, you're scrubbing behind the toilet with a toothbrush and working out two hours a day. And then it catches up with you, and when you finally have a window of time to yourself, you completely crash.
The thing many (including yours truly) need to learn is that as an adult in this earthly life, you don't get gold stars for being a martyr. Yes, some folks are still true believers in the idea of earning heavenly Brownie Points, and will continue to deny themselves any pleasure in order to make a sadistic deity happy. But if that's not your personal theology, why let your behavior be driven by what boils down to the same motivation?
Of course there's some courtesy and compassion involved. It's rude to grossly enjoy oneself in a way that rubs it in the face of others who are suffering. But, assuming you're not being a mocking jerk, if you didn't have a hand in that suffering, and what you're doing has no bearing on whether it will end? Go to it. It's not inherently mean to indulge in a passion for painting just because some are blind. If you got in their face and said, "neener neener! I can see all these cool colors and you can't!" then sure. You're being a total dick and deserve a slap. But the mere open enjoyment of something you love is not a mockery of those who don't have that thing. Enjoying a pint of ice cream doesn't mean you don't care about starving kids in third-world countries. Driving to work because you get claustrophobic on buses doesn't mean you don't care about global warming.
What it all comes down to, I think, is this: for most of us, life kinda sucks fairly often. Unless you're born into every privileged class imaginable, you're going to suffer on some level. And because there's so much suck in life, why on earth would you voluntarily increase that suckage if there's no benefit to doing so aside from some vague sense of moral purity? The only people who will be impressed by such wholly voluntary suffering are assholes, sadists and control freaks. They are not worth it.
And on that note: I think I'm going to go take a nap. ;)
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I would get into so many knock down fights during sunday school when I was a kid defending Eve that it wasn't even funny. I remember being maybe 10 and protesting, "ADAM GO INTO TROUBLE TOO!" and really, if you believe that it happens just like it says, then Eve just couldn't say no to the second most powerful being in the universe.
Adam just couldn't say no to a naked woman, and again, at the time he didn't even care she was naked. So really, why the fuck to does everyone focus so much on Eve?
I remember everyone just kind of looking over my head and going back to ignoring Adam, and bitching about Eve. Ugh.
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