It occurs to me that relations are sometimes symmetric. Sometime after this post, while I was watching the film Crank, I realized that violence can be pornographic, and I don't mean in the sense of a strange fetish. Of course this has been said before, and may be nothing new to you. It was new to me, to really understand what was meant by the phrase. The stripping away of all meaning, of any spiritual dimension, from death and gore and reducing them to mere spectacles of animal behavior. There is no redemption, there is no Charity, there is only hatred and blackness. It is as if they are trying to undo the St. John's Gospel.
In other news, this is going to be a shitty day, hence why I'm posting reflections on sin when I should be reading header files. I need a break. And prayers, those are good, too.
Ab hoste maligno, defende me.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Pornography as Violence
Sin is NP-Complete. For those who don't care to read Wikipedia's article, NP is a space of problems in mathematics that are very difficult to solve. For a problem to be NP-Complete, it must be shown to be equivalent to another NP-Complete problem (the Travelling Salesman Problem is an example).
So what I'm saying, really, is that a given sin, or at least a given mortal sin, can in someway be traced back to another mortal sin. Of course, the root sin is Pride, and all others can be linked through this, if we were actually interested in Mathematical Sin Space, which we aren't. I'm merely giving an example of how my mind works... mathematics is a disease that infects everything.
Briefly considered, lest we dwell too long on this darkness: violence is about power and destruction, it is about incinerating the beautiful, beating it beyond recognition. People like to quote John Paul II, who said that the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but rather that it shows too little, that it is merely a hollow shell of the love that should be present in the sexual act. This is fine as far as it goes, but something is missing, and that is an understanding of the way evil works. One would think, from the way this is quoted, that satan's one desire is to replace the Beauty and Love God gives us with a counterfeit. I think this is a distortion in its own right. It credits the devil's insidiousness without making clear his maliciousness.
Much like our current government, which has replaced real money with its own counterfeit and then, by distorting it beyond any resemblance to the original, has, through perversion and violence, gained power of life and death over us, so does the evil one seek, not merely the replacement of the good, but its destruction.
The counterfeit is not the goal; it is the initial means to the goal; it is the deception. The goal is power; the goal is the rape of beauty, the bloody murder of innocence. The goal is unspeakable violence. I am not speaking here of snuff, though that is clearly an example of the most perverse depths. No, I am speaking here of the mere desire to see innocence lost, to see the pure defiled. In this, pornography is the bedmate of violence, for both seek the desecration of the sacred. The power to take, the power to destroy, the both are different manifestations of the same oily sickness with which the evil one would poison all, a sickness that reeks with the stench of damnation.
So what I'm saying, really, is that a given sin, or at least a given mortal sin, can in someway be traced back to another mortal sin. Of course, the root sin is Pride, and all others can be linked through this, if we were actually interested in Mathematical Sin Space, which we aren't. I'm merely giving an example of how my mind works... mathematics is a disease that infects everything.
Briefly considered, lest we dwell too long on this darkness: violence is about power and destruction, it is about incinerating the beautiful, beating it beyond recognition. People like to quote John Paul II, who said that the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but rather that it shows too little, that it is merely a hollow shell of the love that should be present in the sexual act. This is fine as far as it goes, but something is missing, and that is an understanding of the way evil works. One would think, from the way this is quoted, that satan's one desire is to replace the Beauty and Love God gives us with a counterfeit. I think this is a distortion in its own right. It credits the devil's insidiousness without making clear his maliciousness.
Much like our current government, which has replaced real money with its own counterfeit and then, by distorting it beyond any resemblance to the original, has, through perversion and violence, gained power of life and death over us, so does the evil one seek, not merely the replacement of the good, but its destruction.
The counterfeit is not the goal; it is the initial means to the goal; it is the deception. The goal is power; the goal is the rape of beauty, the bloody murder of innocence. The goal is unspeakable violence. I am not speaking here of snuff, though that is clearly an example of the most perverse depths. No, I am speaking here of the mere desire to see innocence lost, to see the pure defiled. In this, pornography is the bedmate of violence, for both seek the desecration of the sacred. The power to take, the power to destroy, the both are different manifestations of the same oily sickness with which the evil one would poison all, a sickness that reeks with the stench of damnation.
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