Some of you have great respect for C.S. Lewis. The men in my family have been greatly impacted, most especially, by his book Mere Christianity. As for me, I read portions a little at a time. I chose to take the book with me on a recent flight and turned to Lewis’ chapter entitled “Sexual Morality.” Here’s what Lewis had to say in 1943:
. . .[F]or the last twenty years [we] have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.
“They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. Modern people are always saying, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.’ They may mean two things. They may mean ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.’ If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same . . . Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body — which believe that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion . . . But, of course, when people say, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,’ they may mean ‘the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.’
“If they mean that, they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips . . . There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
“. . . Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural,’ so ‘healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth — the truth . . . that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy,’ and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humor, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary.
“. . . Many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility.”
“. . . Virtue — even attempted virtue — brings light; indulgence brings fog.”
Ezerwoman's Blog 
Raquel Regrets
Posted in Biblical manhood & womanhood, Commentaries of others, Culture Shifts, Faith & Practice, Life issues, Relationships, tagged attitude, Bible, change, consequences, divorce, God's Word, hope, marriage, promiscuity, purity, Raquel Welch, regrets on October 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »
History is real. It happened. Of course, the best one to tell it — and explain the lessons learned from it — is the person who lived it. I’ve been reading several stories of “older” women who were supposedly “modern” and “unbounded” earlier in their lives who now have a different perspective.
Matt Kaufman notes one. He writes:
“Sometimes family-values talk comes from unexpected sources. Like Raquel Welch. Writing for CNN on the 50th anniversary of the Pill, the 69-year-old actress regrets that it took ‘the caution and discernment out of choosing a sexual partner, which used to be the equivalent of choosing a life partner.’ As a result, she writes, ‘nobody seems able to . . . honor a commitment.’
“Welch regrets her own track record in this area, too. ‘I’m ashamed’ — how many celebs use that word? — ‘to admit that I myself have been married four times. And yet I still feel that it is the cornerstone of civilization, an essential institution that stablilizes society, provides a sanctuary for children and saves us from anarchy.’
“There’s more. Welch deplores ‘promiscuity.’ She says ‘any sane person’ must make a moral ‘judgment’ about certain sexual practices. She even sounds pro-life: When she got pregnant, she realized ‘this process was not about me,’ but about the ‘life’ inside her.
“In a new book, Welch says she’s reconnected with her Christian upbringing and regularly attends church and Bible study.” (Matt Kaufman, Focus on the Family CITIZEN)
What do you have to say about that?
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