Sex Summer 1995

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The great joy of having a body is that life can feel good. The great difficulty of having a body is that you have to live in it. That too much sensuality is bad for you the world has admitted- which is why health and safety have become today's primary virtues. If it were not so, cigarettes and alcohol would not come with warning labels, lottery ticket machines would not display helplines for gambling addicts, and your company's Christmas card would not say, "Have a Safe Holiday."

In other words, the world well knows what Christian philosophy knows, except in reverse. The world treats the body with a balance for the sake of maximizing bodily pleasure to the end. The Christian treats the body with a balance because it is the temple of the spirit that lasts forever. The missionary's task, then, is simple: persuade the world of the rightness of their thinking but the wrongness of their goal. I picture St. Paul at the health club, extolling the members: "I see what a religious people you are by your devotion to keeping in shape. But I have news for you: the unknown god you worship is going to die, no matter how much mineral water you feed it." He might also add that it is foolish to pay two dollars for a bottle of water that spells n-a-i-v-e backwards.

The Epicureans of antiquity and the anorexics of the eighties have shown what happens when you go to either extreme concerning the body, which strangely enough involves a lot of vomiting. But for the most part, the world has accepted the body as one of those paradoxes that requires constant vigilance. Until yesterday, that is, when everything changed.

I am speaking of the Internet. I am speaking of email, cyberspace, the World Wide Web, America Online, CompuServe-the Infobahn. I am ...

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