purpledawn writes:
His point in
Message 12 being that laws should be based on reason and not personal disgust.
What point are you trying to make with your observation that concerns the topic?
Well, obviously, I could have been more specific. I too, would prefer that laws be based on sound reasoning. However, I am left wondering what might the limits of such reasoning be? Apparently, one can eat a salad with chopped eggs and vinaigrette dressing. But arrange those same ingredients in some other way and you have the dreaded mayonnaise. I would agree with him that it is not a well thought out decision but rather a gut reaction.
Yet another combination of the same ingredients plus a few others would make Caesar dressing which does not seem to me to be very like the other stuff that he mentioned such as sour cream and yogurt. However, it does have anchovies in it and in that he expressed a distaste for eating animals, I would not be surprised that he would also stay away from that. However, there could be a very different rationale for not eating animals that has followed some line of reasoning. Perhaps not a line that a confirmed carnivore such as myself would buy into but a line of reasoning nonetheless. Not “Eeww, white and creamy”.
But enough on food.
Mr Jack writes:
Historically, it's also not considered disgusting - more than a few religious ceremonies or rituals have involved human-animal sexual contact.
However, we all hail from a broadly similar society, which itself springs from the medieval traditions of the Catholic Church - a church that was always big on sexual repression. The revulsion of bestiality, like that of many other sexual practices, lies in these historical routes more than inate nature of humanity.
That is a very good point. Different cultures have vastly different ideas of what is morally repugnant. Today, most people regard cannibalism as reprehensible but in other places and other times, it has been part of religious rites. Or take the warrior culture in the islands of the South Pacific. On some of those islands, the older religious rite for boys becoming men involved them receiving the warrior spirit from their fathers through oral sex.
When I first read of that, I was firmly grossed out but on reflection, it becomes apparent that such rituals were a part of their culture for quite a long time before they were forcibly X-tianized. Which was more wrong (and morally wrong while we are at it), to do what they had been doing for so long or to force them to adopt a new way of life because us European types were stuck up about such matters?
However, since the topic is specifically bestiality, let me ask what if any moral implications would arise if, it was done as a group activity under the guise of religion? Some new group arises and claims bestiality as a sacrament. Shall we condemn them for not being just like us? Shall we shrug our shoulders because it is what they do? Would there be a difference of perspective? Perhaps the high priest of the group claims it as a rite of the group but condemns the farmer who puts a sheep's back legs in his boots?
™ Version 4.2
