To that may be added that the mere gaze in any given situation may also be said to be morally neutral. It is the intentions of the will coupled with that gaze that determine the sinful nature of such deed. One could continue to look and not be contractual of any guilt or sin while another could turn away and, due to the entertainment of lustful thoughts, be subject.
The fact is they knew to cover up. Regardless, they knew what to cover. You’re right that we don’t know how they did.
The point is that indigenous people are working off of their own understanding of natural law together with their willingness to know what is right. They may sense modesty or the wrong nature of a sexual act but they may not. They do not have Revelation to guide them and make the moral code more explicit and well-known.
If it had been sinful for them to run around naked, God would have clothed them from the get-go. It wasn’t the nudity itself that was wrong, but sinfulness brought on a sense of shame with it. In certain cultures it is not looked at as anything but normal - like wearing jeans and a t-shirt. They look at eachother and don’t think twice about it.
Love it! My mother has a photo of my grandmother which was taken back in the '20’s. She is wearing one of those cloche hats with her hair in a chin-length bob, and she has around her neck one of those fur pieces that has the intact minks strung together. She looks just darling in that picture! Granny was going to leave the fur-thing to me when she passed on, but being an animal-lover, I just couldn’t wear a string of dead critters around my neck. So we gave it to the local community theater’s costume department, and they were delighted to have it. I do wish I had that hat, though.I’ve just bought a 1920’s style “cloche” hat for winter…woollen…red. I like it very much indeed.
Vintage style is one of my most favorite things in the whole wide world! Anything from the 20’s-60’s (especially the 30’s/40’s, which is generally very conservative dress). And I have a particular love for hats!Love it! My mother has a photo of my grandmother which was taken back in the '20’s. She is wearing one of those cloche hats with her hair in a chin-length bob, and she has around her neck one of those fur pieces that has the intact minks strung together. She looks just darling in that picture! Granny was going to leave the fur-thing to me when she passed on, but being an animal-lover, I just couldn’t wear a string of dead critters around my neck. So we gave it to the local community theater’s costume department, and they were delighted to have it. I do wish I had that hat, though.
Nope. You’re seeing the bikini as immodest, which is your perception and your judgement, and then you’re projecting it on the Catechism’s injunction against “showing what should be hidden” - which is incidentally the objective substance of the matter. But once again: there’s nothing in the Catechism that says bikini is immodest. Personally, I believe bikinis are more modest than some of the “complete” outfits people wear.
Agreements about perception do not create objective reality. An agreement about what we see as immodest is in no way objective (objective is the fact we agreed), but intersubjective.
Including the house when no one’s looking?
Most of the time but not necessarily, at least not necessarily in such ways as automatically to provoke a reaction against the beholders’ will. I don’t think your typical doctor struggles with that much temptation. In fact, an adult doctor seeing nude females every day probably still faces less temptation than a hormonally intense teenager.
There’s no necessary link, for one. Then, if some of them kill people for even alleged violations of chastity, I guess they take it seriously.
That’s correct, actually. Yeah.
Also.
Depends. The situation does a lot. For example, relatives don’t work on us as much, neither do patients on doctors, statues and paintings in museums don’t work like porn does, either. The problem is more with people trying to be sexy than with the actual exposure to bodies.
Thank you. You appear smart and well-read as well, in addition to attachment to the moral virtues.
Nope. Maybe individual clerics made them more often, but I’m not even sure of that. The Church has never legislated precise limits of skirt lenghts or cleavage area. Doesn’t mean the Church didn’t care - at all. See Vatican’s own rules for visitors. And yeah, it does appear like the decision is on individual conscience - doesn’t mean there’s nothing objective to base the decision on, such as let’s say, scientific research about human reactions, local traditions and whatnot. These things will not all be objective strictly speaking, but they aren’t subjective, either, so there’s nothing like the wearer’s own moral authority making it right to wear what he’s wearing.
Theological understanding, yup. Philosophical? Probably. Intellectual? Likely. But she probably understands them better than your typical American or Western European, I think.
I don’t think the Samaritan woman was Jesus’ enemy.
Yes, that is correct. And it should always, always be taken into account. But this still doesn’t set an objective limit on cleavage area or skirt length if you know what I mean. A girl, if she’s informed and well-meaning, when she looks at an outfit, she will probably know in her heart if she should wear it or not. Problems start when she starts thinking maybe she has a good reason to wear it that somehow trumps the dangers. Still, since people’s reactions change over the course of history and between places on the other, what is improper here and now will not necessarily be or have been improper at some other place on the map and in history. This is why there is no need for an artificial construct, a platonic idea of the right exact and ideal size of cleavage, for instance. What is really important and remains unchanged throughout time and space, is the need to guard ourselves and others.
Yep. I can find a number of proper or theoretically proper or abstract and imaginary contexts where it would be proper or at least not obviously wrong to be nude, whereas I can’t find a proper context for come-hither clothing designs. Some people would argue it would be proper to use some of that as tools in foreplay, but in my view, it’s so objectifying to begin with that one had better stay away from it all. But our bodies are not inherently unclean.
For one part you are correct, that is, if the compulsion is complete (100%), he can’t be committing a sin. On the other hand, extreme imagery does awaken involuntary reactions and while the reactions themselves are neutral and not sinful, the situation which leads to them are not necessary similarly neutral. For example, if someone exposes himself, the audience is not responsible for involuntary reactions (but only for entertaining them, accepting them, enjoying them and so on), but he is still responsible for awakening those reactions in people. We cannot be held responsible for how other people are perverted if they are and we don’t know what temptations our sight puts them in, but we can be and are responsible for our intentions, plus we have no right to tease people sexually, so in the end, the woman in your example may well be sinning. The man, in so far as he makes the choice to, “look at her to lust after her,” “commits adultery with her in his heart.”
But they don’t necessarily need a revelation telling them that in the Western culture a woman’s breasts are heavily sexualised and so they need to adjust their own culture and start covering up. Our problems are not necessarily theirs and just because we see ourselves as more developed doesn’t mean our perceptions are objectively binding on whom we see as savages.
Yeah, that’s some delusional leftist ideology. It just can’t go right. The problem, however, is that they weren’t going there for the beauty of the body or the goodness of it, strictly speaking, but for the nudity, and using the beauty or goodness as an excuse. That’s where it started going wrong. The nominal cause was different from the actual cause and the whole thing went bonkers, scientifically speaking.
What is more, in knowingly dressing like that we actually abuse ourselves. We either make ourselves into objects of gratification for others, or even derive some masturbatory kind of pleasure from exposing ourselves.
That sacrum of the person would be the core of the matter. The inches are ancillary to it.
But of course, but once again, that doesn’t mean “N inches”. You have the inches in your head, so when you read, “what should be hidden,” you automatically associate and replace it with, “ah, that would be N inches here, X inches there and this or that exact point must be hidden at all times.” But that part is not in the Catechism and is synonymous with its words, in fact.
Of course, but the mere occurence of arousal, let’s say, by accident, doesn’t automatically mean some sin must have been committed somewhere and somewhen (except maybe the original sin). Sins always include intention. Immodesty may be a result of direct intent or negligence (culpable ignorance), but you cannot commit a sin without an act of will at some point in it. Without a choice in other words.
I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. You seem to think only exposure of body appeals to concupiscence, whereas all the “come hither” designs and devices do not. It is most certainly possible to lust after a fully covered person. It is also possible to make an all-covering outfit immodest as well. Everyone knows this. You can’t pretend it somehow doesn’t arouse. All those outfits two sizes too small, with captions on the butt and all sorts of devices to attract attention to the breasts or the crotch. Do you think it matters less than some skin?
Yup, and if it’s worse in terms of leading to sexual sins, then it’s more immodest.