Sunday, May 16, 2010

Bought With A Price

"Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body" 1Corinthians 6:18-20


I was reading last week about this new diet regimen, developed by A.W.T. Simeons quite some time ago, and ran across this little piece that struck a nerve:


A careful enquiry into what may have brought on such an attack almost invariably reveals that it is preceded by a strong unresolved sex-stimulation, the higher centers of the brain having blocked primitive diencephalic instinct gratification. The pressure is then let off through another primitive channel, which is oral gratification.

I realized that most of us are being stimulated sexually all day long every day simply by living in modern day America. You cannot drive or walk around in the city, or watch TV, or listen to the radio, or even go to work for some people, without being exposed to countless sexually suggestive, if not actually explicit imagery…everywhere.


This one is at the bus stop that I drive by every day on my way home from work.
There are countless ones just like it all around town on bus stops, billboards, storefronts at retail stores, etc. If you walk into a nice office where women dress up, they often will wear beautiful, but very sexually suggestive clothing. The universities, especially in the warmer parts of the country are filled with half-dressed young ladies wander around campus.

Television? Forget it. It seems that every single show is filled with gorgeous women, wearing form-fitting, and revealing clothing and most prime time shows have, at the very least, a tacit understanding and acknowledgement of sexual activity, if not a very plain reference or display.

Movies are no better unless you carefully watch only animated movies for the little ones. Now this is just the passive stuff. If you actually go looking, there is much, much more from simple celebrity gawk sites all the way to porn on demand internet sites.

My hypothesis is this:

As sexual imagery has become more and more available to us as a nation and technology has made it easier and quicker to access and as advertisements and the popular culture has supposedly become "desensitized" to it, I argue that we haven't. Not only that, but I would be interested if there was a way to track obesity in our nation as a function of the quantity of sexual imagery passively and even actively available to the general public.

My hypothesis, is that even people that are in sexually gratifying and healthy monogamous relationships, can be and probably are, sexually-stimulated in a way that cannot possibly be resolved often enough or complete enough. In turn, people turn to eating, drinking and smoking in an unhealthy manner.

As a very unscientific piece of evidence, how about tracking the size of a proper drink that one orders at a restaurant or a convenience store? A cup, a measely 8 ounces, is called a cup, because that was how much one supposedly drank at a sitting in polite company. Sure, you might have a second or third cup over the course of a meal, but that is only 16 or 24 ounces. Go to a convenience store and observe the sizes of the soda fountain drink cups available. There are some stores that you won't even find one as small as 24 ounces. The standard seems to be 44 ounces, with some stores having a 64 ounce option. That is over a half a gallon.

Now consider that a person working might down this half gallon drink once or twice a day and consider that this might be Dr. Pepper, Coke or some other soft drink, and we have the source of our obesity problem. The source of that desire to continually put junk in your mouth? Bebe. Not to put all of this on Bebe, but you get what I mean.

I think I've always understood the concept that what you put into your body directly contributed to your health and quality of life. I've never gotten into the drug scene and don't like taking medication of any kind. But I overeat and now have gotten into a rut of over-eating junk.

After reading Simeon's essay, however, I think I now believe that consumption is not only what you eat and drink, but what you listen to and what you watch, and I think it affects your health in a physical way that I had not considered before.

And wouldn't it be the perfect truth if the false promise of gratification by consuming large quantities of sexual imagery, results in obesity and a reduced ability to function sexually?

Isn't it the truth that chasing after worldly delights always ends badly?

What if by keeping your mind on purer stuff, was the cure for obesity? Smoking? Alcoholism? I guess obeying God's commands can actually be good for you after all.