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PetraG
Guest
(a) You’re not, excepting maybe that you’re choosing to bring up a single detail in a larger debate and using the wrong term to describe it. High-waisted bikini bottoms use far more fabric than a string bikini, not less.
(b) Like it or not, what women wear is their choice and their debate and what you do with your eyes is your issue.
You really are capable of looking at attractive women who aren’t leaving anything to the imagination and still remembering that they are your sisters, just as men are even capable of being gynecologists and still remembering that their patients are human beings and not objects put on this earth to tempt them.
Work to obtain and maintain that self-mastery, and you’ll be OK. This is a story from the desert Fathers:
Once the disciple of a great hermit was tempted by lust. When the hermit saw him struggling, he said, ‘Shall I ask the Lord to release you from your trouble?’ But he said, ‘Abba, I see that although it is a painful struggle I am profiting from having to carry this burden. But ask God in your prayers, that he will give me enough patience to endure it.’ Then his abba said to him, ‘Now I know that you are far advanced, my son, and beyond me.’
and another:
Two brothers went to a town to sell what they had made. In the town they separated, and one of them fell into fornication. Afterwards the other brother said, ‘Let us go back to our cell, brother.’ But he replied, ‘I’m not coming.’ The other asked him, ‘Why, brother?’ He replied, ‘Because when you left me, I was tempted, and was guilty of fornication.’ The other, wanting to help him, said, ‘The same thing happened to me; after I left you, I also fell into fornication. Let us go together, and do penance with all our might, and God will pardon us sinners.’ When they returned to their cell, they told the brothers what had happened to them, and were told what penance they should do. But the one did penance not for himself, but for the other, as though he himself had sinned. God, seeing his earnestness and his charity, revealed to one of the elders, a few days later, that he had forgiven the fornicator because of the charity of the brother who had not sinned. Truly, this was to lay down his soul for his brother.
This is what those who fled the world to be monks in the desert had to say on the matter. It agrees with the Beautitude: Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Always test your thinking on this matter against mercy and the desire that all may reach eternal life, and you will not have to worry about the great danger of being lead from mastery over lust into slavery to pride. Those are the twin traps that the evil one always tries to use, for the Devil does not care which trap we fall into, provided we can be seduced into a fall.
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