The Four Loves

If C.S. Lewis' "four loves" could even be assumed to be of equal weight, why is "love" often only synonymous with "romance?" As when people say "I have no love in my life"? It seems to me, the easiest way to add some love to your life is to treat your family and neighbors with respect and kindness, shoring up for yourself some "love," in the form of what is called "storge" (affection for those kindred) and "phileo" (friendship) love. Once that is accomplished, those who weep and cry out for want of love would be able to say that they do have some love in their life, and therefore, should be able dry their eyes. But they can't.

The thing of it is, society and culture has become so twisted that people are made to hunger after a particular kind of love, "eros," at the expense of the others, or at least, as they are made to downplay the other, easier, and equally-fulfilling forms of love. Hungering after eros is perfectly fine and human to do, just as all love is, but it also happens to be the hardest love to achieve and maintain. So when people say they "don't have any love in their life," it's because they're being made to beat themselves up for hungering after and not possessing the hardest kind of love there is, whilst being made to ignore the plentiful opportunities around them to give and receive love to the world. They seek the one, and get lost in the crowd.

This is partly because "eros" love is so emphasized, promoted, romanticized, and idolized (and therefore merchandised) in culture and the others are ignored. The plain truth we are left to grapple with is that not everyone can achieve eros even if everyone is made to want it, whether naturally or by constant prompting by modern culture. Promoting eros, erotica, romance, and all forms of "partner love" to expense of the other forms of love, as society does in movies, television, music, and all media in general, actually depresses people whose only fault is being unable to possess what is perhaps the hardest thing to possess. What is the natural remedy often cited for depression? Charitable giving. Research shows that charity plays a large role in people's overall happiness in life. So less love in the world comes about when people are made to think that love is less than it is.

It is said though that society does value all the forms of love, including friendship, charity, affection, and romance, but just in their own "places." It resigns the friendship to the schoolyard, as if children aren't capable of romance or charity, and likewise, as if friendship is too "immature" for adults or charity too "righteous." Thus every child should have a friend, but every adult should have a lover instead, while a child is denied a lover and an adult is denied a friend. Society resigns charity to the church, for being something one only does when they want to atone for themselves or feel righteous. It reserves affection for the family, viewing the family like some kind of affection deposit box for the individual in the rush of their life. For eros though, it reserves for the bedroom, so that those who can't achieve the bedroom come away despaired and "lonely."

Why does there need to be a "place" for these things? Why not try out true friendship? Why can't pop songs be about romantic love and charity alike? Why can't all four, and perhaps even other kinds of love, be celebrated equally everywhere between all people?

No More Hurting People

While the world focuses on and celebrates the capture and trial of the remaining perpetrator of the heinous attack in Boston, let's take a moment to recognize what is at stake always and continually. A final plea for righteousness in a fallen world:

No more hurting people. Peace.

Kids Offer Tribute to Martin Richard. 

All Human Sexuality is Perverse

People shouldn't be kept from having sex, lest we subject all people to the same oppressive rule we forcefully subject children to, but there just isn't any point to sexual intercourse and sexuality, whether done by children or adults. Those among us who are swayed by the "sexual revolution" may be tempted to say that sex and sexuality has a purpose, and that it's for "procreation," but since when is that the case anymore? The ability to procreate is meaningless. Unless all these pornographic websites and films out there are celebrating the act of impregnation, including the homosexual ones, and all these strip clubs are established to celebrate the bearing of children, we're forced to contend that "propagation of the species" factors little.

The sexual revolution in the 20th century had nothing to do with procreation, and everything to do with making promiscuity guiltless and consequence free--meaning, making sex unnatural. Any observation of unprotected promiscuous sex shows us that is that it has consequences, for everyone who partakes in it, if not biologically, then socially. All the "sexual revolutionaries" succeeded in doing was to make unnatural promiscuity seem normal, which is a dangerous illusion. And how do we know? Because we still restrict children access to such acts. Anything we can't stomach teaching to children for fear that it would destroy them has failed the litmus test for acceptability, for everyone, as far as I'm concerned.

So I merely advise rather than demand, not only that adults not have sex with children or that children have sex with other children, but that "consenting adults" not have sex with each other either. They should all spend that time showing love and kindness to one another instead. Maybe at such time a real sexual revolution will take place in humanity, one that favors brotherly love before bodily pleasure. But still people may ask, is not love and sex the same thing? Let's reason about this. Love is about personal sacrifice. Sex is about being personally narcissistic. There's that part of sex that is obviously about self-love (using the other person for pleasure), but even the part that is so-called "selfless" (for the enjoyment of the other person), even that is selfish, particularly if one is pleasing oneself based on having pleased the other person. There is a philosophical argument that humans always act out of self-interest (egoism), whether in charity or in sex, but these are two different self-interests being looked after.

The self-love involved in pleasing someone sexually is different than the self-love involved in benefiting someone charitably or sacrificially, which is to say "spiritually." It may not be something our society often thinks about, since we have become so taken up with the "sex is good" sexual revolution propaganda, but if anyone lives by a creed other than sex, they can testify to the quality of their life, especially respective to those who live under that creed alone. The idea that pleasure is innately good or moral is Epicurean, and if a human wishes to live that way, they ought to be free to do so, so long as they no longer wish to live in this consequential human society with its "laws," "ethics," and "responsibilities." In the same manner, how often are children told that if they want to act like animals, they should go live with them?

There are further differences though. When benefiting someone emotionally, charitably, kindly, and respectfully, you're edifying their spirit of thankfulness, human respect, strength of will, and generosity. When pleasing someone sexually, you are merely giving into their self-love and edifying their selfishness. These are two different positions, one of inward love of self, and one of outward love of humanity. Nothing about sex encourages charity or kindness, for it is about control, pleasure, and being weak-willed.

Sacrifice, which is what love is, is a matter of encouraging and strengthening the will, while sex is about tearing it down and being a slave to desire. The will is of strength and character, while desire is of weakness and animal passion without restraint, for restraint is an imposition of the will. Why else would we encourage the weakening of wills (in sex), unless we had a society that benefited from having a whole group of people in it with a weakness of willpower, or lack of "sales resistance," more accurately? Because sex is profitable and kindness is not, we've been told, and sold, that "sex is love," and that sex has no consequences.

But what good comes from being pleased sexually? Does it make you want to go donate money, volunteer, clean up the environment, and respect other people? Or does it make you ego-centered, engaging in self-love about your own body and its ability to bring those selfish qualities out in another person? Consider what people find sexually arousing to answer that question. Surely, a life spent under the impression that sex creates anything beneficial for "society" is a life spent building earthly treasures in a world where time and nature corrupts all things, instead of storing up for humanity treasures such as willpower, kindness, construction, and love, that time and nature can not corrupt.

That is to say, sex leads to a lowering of the human spirit on its own, while love, on its own, leads to a lifting up of it. Because of the sexual revolution, I'm even tempted to think all sexual acts, even those in marriage, are wrong and perverse, in this age where sex is recreation and procreation is proctored by geneticists more and more. All humans are born out of an activity that commences with a lowering of the spirit necessarily. Now the species perpetuates itself in spite of sex, and not because of it, and that kind of unnatural perversity has consequences.

Loving Children

There is nothing wrong with loving a child. Children deserve love because they exist, from anyone willing to give it, and they deserve to be allowed to show love to anyone who will receive it. It is only wrong to deny them love and attention, and only right to give it to them. It is wrong to spurn their attempts to show love, and only right to receive them warmly. Society is wrong when it works to separate adults and children on a pretense of fear, and only right when it allows them to coexist in peace and harmony, guided by pure love and care. Children deserve love even when their parents are unwilling or unable to give it, just as those who give it are deserving of receiving it. Their love is human love, and humans need love like they need air, water, and food. Children are no different from human.

Love doesn't have to be unrealistically selfless and overly simplistic, for discipline, when authoritatively enforced, is a function of love (whether adults are disciplining children or children disciplining adults), it just needs to be felt that way. To deprive someone discipline is to be depriving them of love, just as to neglect is to deprive, and to abuse is to keep depraved--none of these are expressions of love. Children deserve to be loved by society as much as they need to be cared for by it. When a child is loved by an adult, and it is purely expressed, the child will love back. To gain the child's love in return for love: this is the only legitimately hallowed co-relation between adult and child that can exist, and the most noble arrangement a man, woman, boy, or girl can be blessed with. The truth is often plain and usually simple.

There's nothing wrong with a child loving an adult. Adult-to-child love and child-to-adult love is human love, and human love expressed tenderly in private and charitably in public is an expression of God's love. Children are not only capable of receiving their parents' love or solely capable of showing love toward their parents, but are capable of accepting kindness from anyone, young and old, who is willing to give it, and giving it to whoever is willing, young and old, to accept it. This is the meaning of "good will toward all."

The parental responsibility over their children is only there to be the gatekeeper deciding who may enter and who can not, as is their right to keep their child safe, but children deserve love even from their gatekeepers, and even from those incapable of keeping the gate and are still tasked to do so. If they are unable to receive it from their primary gatekeepers (their parents), then they both need someone else to fill that responsibility and extend to them the warm embrace of love and guidance. Parents love their children because they have to, by nature. Childlovers love children because they want to, by choice. True childlovers are never out to replace parents, but to supplement them. They are not there to strip a child off their family, but to be an extension of child's family. They are not there to further suppress the child, or to spoil them into subservience, but to act as role models working through legitimate channels of outreach acceptable to all capable of accepting love.

Childlovers love children as an adult lover might for their own lover, but the love of the childlover is purer, because it is felt almost exclusively out of interpersonal connection, selflessness, and devotion to allowing the child complete freedom. Adult love relationships, by contrast, are often compounded with expectations of monogamy and sex, but such things would be unthinkably selfish, and potentally hazardous, in a childlove relationship. The childlover never seeks to gain the child solely for themselves for "all eternity" as the primarily self-motivated adult relationships often do as an institution (marriage). The childlover instead only seeks to impart to a child the kindness and charity they are deserving of as human beings, and lets the child alone to live their own lives and pay that love forward to whoever they wish. That is the difference that makes all the difference!

The adult should only be someone the child knows personally for one reason or another, someone his or her parents know and trust, and someone from whom the relationship develops naturally and gradually out of friendship and trust. And because true love is never forced, coerced, or manipulated out of someone, whether adult or child, that which is isn't love and doesn't have any legitimate reason for existing. This is as much true for a child's non-parental lovers as it is for their legal guardians. Anyone who can not love a child genuinely (selflessly, harmlessly, charitably) has no business around them. Those who can will prove themselves worthy if their heart is pure. Psalms were written to celebrate such a love as that!

A Thousand Prayers Worth

A repulsive, evil act, and an unspeakable tragedy today. My thoughts and prayers go out for the victims and their families. To God above, Amen. 

"A man opened fire Friday inside the kindergarten classroom at the Connecticut elementary school where his mother was a teacher, killing 20 children [and 6 adults], as youngsters cowered in corners and closets and trembled helplessly to gunshots reverberating through the building, before the gunman took his own life." (CBS/AP)

Children are Sexual

Puberty is not the beginning. The sexual life of the human being begins in the womb. It is expressed, enjoyed, shared, and felt in childhood. It is then repressed by those who fail to regard its existence. It is punished by those who fail to recognize its humanity. Children are instead fed fabrications about what their sexual feelings mean, and even adults begin to believe what they preach. We are told that child sexuality not only doesn't exist, but that any expression of it is deviance, and any discussion about it is the promotion of child rape. This has not always been the case, as any cursory glance will reveal from such academic works as Loving Boys (1986) by Dr. Edward Brongersma, or Paedophilia: A Factual Report (1985), by Dr. Frits Bernard, or The Sexual Life of Children (1994), by Floyd Martinson, or even The Sexual Life of the Child, from 1912, by Albert Moll, among hundreds of others lost to history.

In decades past, discussion about the sexual life of children was alive and well in fact. It was accepted as repeatedly observable in the wide breadth of scientific inquiry into human development, and discussion about it didn't lead anyone to think that by investigating child sexuality anyone was in fact promoting child rape. Times have changed though, and all progress has not only stalled, but reversed itself. The very fact of a child's sexuality has been run over by the preponderance of research dealing with child sex abuse, and now all child sexuality has become subjugated to the adult fear of child sex abuse first and foremost, rather than remain liberated as the legitimate form of inquiry it is.

The inquiry determining the difference between mental and physical sexual maturation for the purpose of procreation, and the preexisting sexual feelings that children are born with and grow up experiencing and acting upon, has been left behind with the sexual revolution of the 20th century. All other aspects of human sexuality have been greeted with toleration and eventual acceptance (and even many of the earlier sexual "perversions"), but children are not extended such courtesy, and it has everything to do with the maintenance of adult illusions. Having no conception of breathing does not stop an infant from breathing as an act of self-preservation, and neither does having no conception of sexuality stop a young child from masturbating, even at the age of seven months, for boys in particular, no matter what we tell ourselves.

But no amount of adult illusion can change the fact that children are sexual, engage in sex play, feel every bit of sexual tension and pleasure that adults do, and that all of it is denied to their understanding. No amount of telling ourselves it isn't true is going to erase the fact that decades of research has repeatedly shown children engaging in genital stimulation, auto-erotica, and even sexual activities with one another at what we in the twenty-first century have concluded are "unnaturally low" ages. On the contrary, they knew something in the 19th and 20th centuries that seems lost to us now: that the "unnaturally high" ages of sexual activity we promote in our modern "progressive" age are indeed what is more abnormal, if anything. For procreative purposes, the older ages are in fact divorced from nature, rather than any representational paradigm of it. The inability for adults to accept aging out of sexual activity in recent decades has caused them to criminalize and pathologize all youth expression of it instead, despite youth sexuality being the natural paradigm.

So we celebrate the birth of a new century where childhood sexual activity is not only stricken from all public discourse, but so is the very fact of its existence. It has been erased from both the academic landscape as well as popular opinion. Demonstrable facts have been lost and replaced by adult illusions--the illusion of the child as a wholy innocent creature devoid of feeling and depth, who is merely here to be a repository of adult services. This is the "predator panic" illusion that our society calls progress.

There is so much lack of understanding on this issue that actual child sexuality, existing as a fact of nature, has been conflated with pedophilia, and pedophilia with child sexual abuse, done through its constant repetition in research and popular culture to scare our sensitivities away from where they naturally would've been. In this way, all discussion of child sexuality as a part of a child's physical being, manifesting a great deal of their humanity, has been equated inextricably with child sexual abuse instead. "If a child is a sexual being," so goes the popular opinion, "whether sexually active or not, the child is beyond help, and more likely to be raped or sexually exploited." But since every child is sexual by nature, expressing it to varying degrees, and child sex abuse is still a relative rarity by comparison, this is hardly an appropriate conclusion.

Adults attempt to eradicate the existence of a child's sexuality so as to protect them from themselves as well as predators, and make deviant a child's natural sexual exploratory behavior all as the price for protection against those who are truly deviant. So the only image we are fed is that of the child as a porcelain doll who feels not, thinks not, and perhaps only breathes so that in life they may give adults something to protect. In this way, a child's humanity has been taken away every time their human drives are equated with deviance. It seems the western world has no problem with stripping the humanity off a child though, just so long as the boy or girl keeps their clothes on for it. 

Agreeing to Disagree?

People tell me I fail to agree to disagree, and I tell them it's because I have principles--not to my own point of view, but to the truth, whatever it may be. I have too much respect for the truth to accept that I'm right when I could be wrong, or that others are right when they are wrong. Agreeing to disagree only creates an impasse in a social dialogue. It shuts down all communication, and ends all progress towards the truth. It is an excuse to leave the room when one's ego can not submit itself. But a line must be drawn between truth and falsehood, between right and wrong, on any social issue of disagreement, and if there is no one solution, progress towards one is all that is needed. Without progress, we are merely in perpetual disagreement.

Agreeing to disagree, as a solution, is motivated by the supposition that warfare and hatred are avoided only when parties agree that everyone is wrong, and right, as if coming away with a mutual misunderstanding of each other is the only preferable solution. It's an excuse to give up the quest for understanding when the terrain gets difficult, to give up at the precise moment that we really ought to be convinced if we are wrong or convincing the opposition if we are right. A stalemate is not a win for either side, it just means that both sides have delayed losing until another date. It is a prolonged lack of progress, because no one is right when everyone is right.

Only when someone is convinced of something can progress resume, otherwise, it's a perpetual stall. Disagreement is acceptable only because it is unavoidable, but we have to recognize that perpetual disagreement is a stalemate, and not a win. We can't accept perpetual disagreement as a solution in and of itself, or else we fall victim to apathy. If the fate of the world rested in the balance, an agreement to disagree about a problem or solution offers no solution and no progress towards one, and only gives us a good feeling about our lack of ability to admit where we are wrong. There are always things, even small things, we can agree on, and when we agree to disagree, we kill off our opportunity to agree on anything else but that.

Someone is always right, at least in part, and someone is always wrong, at least in part. There is no convincing me that we are "both right" when one of us is clearly wrong. Let history be our dialectic and rationality be our tool. If I am wrong, I will accept it, no matter how much it hurts, no matter what I have to give up, and you may go glory in yourself in your victory. You have my permission to do so, just as I would expect you to accept it where you are wrong, at least in part. This is preferable, because agreeing to disagree is more about maintaining ego than arriving at an approximation of the truth, whether one exists or not. Ego is an impediment to rationality, not an impetus of it. Ego is the impetus of ambition, and when tested by reason, the result is progress.