In response to Kelsey's remark about the functionality of sex as being or not being part of the joy, I think Gandhi's aproach has been the most enlightening for me. He essentially said that there is an inherant immorality in sex. No ifs ands or buts. Lust is immoral, it is a basic sin, and there is no way around it.

In the same vein, people can't live without killing. Now, for us vegitarians that is mostly only including insects and smaller life-forms, but Gandhi saw this even and also as immoral. Like a Jaine monk, he saw one of the possible ways to remedy this as essentially suicide. But that, he decided, was a sort of "easy way out." I don't know how many of you out there are big on Budhism, but he saw the suicide way out as sorta like the difference between Theravaden and Mayahanistic budhism (I think I spelled those both wrong). Rather than sticking around and helping others with their morality, you'd be ensuring your own moral life, but not helping anybody else.

Anyway, Gandhi eventually just sorta says that we have to live the best we can while accepting the intrinsic immoralities of life. That being true, we should treat our "spouses as sisters" with only the exception of when we are deliberatley trying to make a child. And even then I got the gyst that he wanted us to enjoy it as little as possible. Or rather, we should enjoy it for what it is, for the good we are creating and living in, rather than temporarily giving in to a lust we know is wrong just to fulfil an end result.

I think it's a bunch of phooey most of the time, but at least it's not hypocritical phooey, which is what most of the mainstream talk about sex before marriage being immoral but after marriage being ok, seems to be.

posted by john owens-ream   [1:55 PM]

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