Exalting religious celibacy as the highest good makes procreative marital sex look not that good at best and like a necessary evil at worst in comparison.
Well, since it is clear from the actual teachings of the Church that the Church views marriage as a very good and holy thing it sounds like you are again misunderstanding the teachings if you are trying to claim that the Church thinks that marriage is not good and holy. I can look up more passages for you from the CCC if you wish, but the fact that it is a whole sacrament in and of itself is already a pretty big indicator that the Church views it as a very good thing.
To be honest I have learned a great deal about Catholicism over the years.
Is virginity or celibacy for the Sake of the Kingdom to be esteemed highly? Yes
G 48,540I have already read many of those documents.
I wouldn’t have put it quite so bluntly but I basically agree with the above sentiments.
Well I think that St. Paul does say in so many words that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage. I’m fine with that because I do think it takes a certain kind of discipline and holiness to live that lifestyle.
Admiring beauty is quite different from experiencing desire and sexual arousal.
Yes, which is why it is a bad expression for explaining what people are trying to get at and which is why it is better to explain it as looking on your spouse as a person to be loved rather than an object to be used. This is essentially what people are trying to get at when they talk about having a “selfless desire”. And I think it is pretty darn obvious that this is important, just look at my example of a man who rapes another, he treats her as an object to be used for his pleasure rather than as a person deserving of respect and dignity.
That’s my point.
In other words your problem is with the views of individual Catholics as opposed to the actual teachings of the Catholic Church. This is a very important distinction to make. I agree with you that there are plenty of individuals with a puritan mindset with respect to sex, but the Church herself is not so.
That is an important distinction and you will certainly find lots of extreme views that claim to be Catholic especially on the internet.
The connection is that by making it a selfless act you deny all legitimacy of desire or the satisfaction of that desire. Selfless implies that you recieve nothing from it, it is all for the recipient of the act.
Ok, on re-reading this I realized that it could be taken to mean something different than I first thought. If the you are trying to claim that Church teaching seems fine in itself when left an idea but in practice turns into puritanism I must respectuflly disagree. There are plenty of Catholics who follow all the Church’s teachings who are anything but puritan in their understanding of sexuality. It is not trying to live according to what the Church actually teaches which is puritan, but trying to live according to the puritanical mindset of, which does belong to some Christians, which leads to a puritanical lifestyle with respect to sexuality. Being a faithful Catholic does not make one a puritan.
No. As a Catholoic you may have heard these:
One of the main points of the Gospel, death to self brings joy, peace, fulfillment.
Yes, that is my basic premise.
And it is quite false. I don’t understand why you can’t accept the voices of multiple Caholics who have no qualms about sex being bad, or pleasure from sex being immoral as proof of this. We exist, and plenty of us. Following and accepting actual Church teaching does not lead one to think of sexual pleasure as bad, in fact, it actually leads to the opposite conclusion in both thought and practice. I’m sorry if you think that I and all other Catholics who tell you the same thing are lying, but I have no hangups about sexual pleasure despite accepting everything the Church has to say about it and I am not the only Catholic I know like this. Its kind of hard to get anywhere in a conversation when one person decides that they will ignore any evidence that conflicts with their previous conclusion, so I really don’t know if this conversation will be able to go anywhere, but my experience as well as the experience of others that I know personally, and others on this website directly contradicts your above assumption. That claim is just plain false.
Key word bolded.
He is making an argument not stating an opinion.
I agree with this. It is perfectly natural to look at one’s spouse and to desire them.