George Carlin, Sex Crimes, Terrifying Questions

 Why does this small tidbit from George Carlin live rent-free in my head, after so many years?

This is from a bit, State Prison Farms, from his Back In Town (1996)

“Alright, next group: sex criminals. Completely incurable, you got to lock them up. You could outlaw religion and in most cities sex crimes would disappear in a couple of generations. But we don’t have time for rational solutions!”

Outlaw religion? For sex crimes? 

And here are two headlines from the NYT’s of 1/29/24:

So…depressing. 

And here is a sentence of transcript from the Podcast, Terrifying Questions, Episode 12: Are We Our Bodies? (January 29, 2024): “It may be that the christian despising of the body because it’s animal and sinful and so on is part of this illicit separation of the mind or the spirit from the body, because it’s by drawing a sharp contrast that you can then kinda condemn all the bodily stuff as lower and base and not worthy of respect.”

Condemn the body.

I think George Carlin saw the connection from christian hatred of the body (as the source of original sin [an illogical concept but here we are]), to the condemnation of the body, to the prevalence of sex crimes. 

What if we didn’t despise the body? 

What if we accepted that we are our bodies? And that our bodies aren’t intermediaries of sensation/perception?
What if we respected our bodies as the source of our being-in-the-world?
What if we didn’t treat our bodies as base vehicles, depreciated to valueless the moment we leave them at death (again, an illogical concept but here we are)?

What if sex weren’t the source of sin?
If we ditched this (illogical) concept, would our public be healthier?

Last Week Tonight - Desantis...and Sin

I watched this

and of course the christian near the end, talking about the two male (homosexual) penguins and how the bible says, “sin no more,” got me thinking about sin.

Well, specifically, sin in light of god’s omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence. It’s essentially a theodicy of sorts, because nothing imperfect can flow from a perfect being, by definition. 

How does human sinning, especially a priori sin, certainly an imperfection, come into being from a perfect being? Remember, nothing imperfect can flow from a perfect being.

How does an all powerful, all knowing god, all good god, permit sin? Notice I did not ask why, but ‘how’. What are the mechanics of sin’s placement into the world, from a perfect being?

Now consider, what if our presidential candidates had to be questioned thusly about sin.

Why is homosexuality wrong? Why is homosexuality sinful? will elicit pat answers with biblical citations, but how, how, how does sin (an imperfection) come into the world from the perfect creator?

Or if this is the best of all possible worlds, per Leibniz, why all the hubbub, Bub?