To clueluss
This is one of the weird things about Christians. When they talk of 'sinning', they are often talking of things that anyone sensible would regard as quite harmless.
As example : take the earlier discussion of lust. If I look at a woman and feel lust, to me it is just the normal reaction of my body. To these Christians, my feelings are sin. How weird is that?
it's not weird.
you claim this is a normal reaction of your body, and that's true. but it's a reaction that is dependent upon your mind. it's not all biological, and it's not "automatic". i think this is common sense, but to make sure i researched it a bit, and this is from a psych 101 website...
Psychological Factors in Sexual Motivation
Hormones alone cannot cause sexual arousal. Psychological factors are also highly influential.
Erotic stimuli: Both men and women can become sexually aroused by external and internal erotic stimuli. External erotic stimuli include sexually exciting material that is read, heard, or seen. Internal erotic stimuli include thoughts, fantasies, and memories of past sexual experiences. What is considered erotic varies according to the individual, historical period, and cultural context.
Desires: People have an infinite number of desires that influence the motivation for sex, including to procreate, to express love, to have physical enjoyment, to cope with difficult situations and emotions, to validate one’s desirability, and to do what peers do.
Cultural context: Having a strong influence on sexual behavior, cultures inform people about sexual scripts, or implicit rules that allow a person to judge the appropriate sexual behavior for a given situation. For example, people follow sexual scripts when deciding whether they should initiate sexual activity or wait to receive a partner’s advances.
A culture’s social and economic structure determines the gender roles that men and women adopt. These gender roles in turn determine people’s attitude toward sexual activity. In some cultures, for instance, women need marriage to get access to status and wealth. In such cultures, a woman is less likely to be interested in sex for its own sake, since casual sex can damage her reputation and reduce her chances of marriage.
Sex and the Brain
Psychological influences are clearly powerful motivators for sex, and the brain is highly involved in sexual arousal. People who have lost all sensation in their genitals because of spinal injuries, for example, are still capable of sexual desire.
there's a difference between sex drive, which is primarily biological, and arrousal, which requires some type of stimulus. the stimulus can be physical, or it can be a thought. the thought can come from an association you make. perhaps from the smell of a warm apple pie, or perhaps from the sight of a beautiful woman. what i am saying, is that it doesn't make any more sense to associate sex with the sight of some random beautiful woman than it does with the smell of a warm apple pie.
why? because it's not correct to have sex with apple pies and it's also not correct to have sex with random beautiful women.
