The majority of the people here understand nudity in the American - European context. Your conclusion about seeing the naked human body makes no sense. Too many are addicted to pornography and seeing the naked human form has a lust inducing effect on them without question.
Mere nudity is not necessarily pornography. Because nudity is viewed as taboo in the US, it is so often linked to sex. Like someone noted earlier, in parts of Africa where women often go topless, that part of the female anatomy does not cause a sexual response in the males there.
Obviously the Sistine Chapel, which has fully nude men and women, as well as many other famous pieces of art, weren’t meant to incite lust. If they were, the pope wouldn’t have allowed that stuff to be painted anywhere, much less in a holy chapel!
I always get the feeling that those who insist on exposing Western Catholics to other cultures which we do not live in, and there attitudes to partial or full nudity, is not about education but about the idea that public nudity is not only OK but should be practiced in Western countries. I’m against that.
My point is that public nudity is not a sin
per se. It just depends on the situation and intent.
I do think that if nudity was less taboo, we would actually have less problems with pornography in our country. One priest, who is from Europe, who my brother knew at Ave Maria, thought that Americans treated mere nudity as too taboo and thus over-sexualize a picture of the human body. He thought that this lead Americans to have more problems with pornography than the rest of the world. As of recently, I’d say I agree with him.
I’d like to see nudity gradually become less taboo in America
if that would lead to less use of pornography and less lust. However, most people in this culture would have a hard time imagining that more acceptance of nudity would lead to less lust because in this culture we have connected the two.
I hope you’ll note that as missionaries entered other cultures, the trend was for people to cover their bodies?
I’m a history minor. Sometimes, but not always, having missionaries enter other cultures caused people in those cultures to cover up more. However, this is mainly because those cultures were poor, and tend to go around nude out of necessity because they had little clothes. Thus, when the missionaries arrived, they had more opportunities for resources, and used more clothes as they came. Also, many of these cultures changed to become more like the visiting culture in order to gain favor with them. Other cultures visited by missionaries were different…
I’m not exactly trying to say that people should run around in public naked (although that wouldn’t be sinful to do in some places in many cultures) nor trying to justify the use of pornography. In our culture, it generally would be a sin (unless you went to a private nudist resort, in which case it might not be a sin).
