Reconsidered

 

Yesterday, 11/17/23, I did a blog entry on BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism). I wanted to reconsider this sad sexual set of behaviors, not disagreeing with what I wrote yesterday, but adding to those remarks.

 

If doing what promotes healthy egoism or self-esteem is morally good, and if engaging in behaviors the depreciate and debase, healthy self-esteem, I would argue that the complex of BDSM behaviors are sick and sickening—for all involved in such immoral engagements--due to their lowering the good self-esteem and their magnifying the negative self-esteem of both the dominant victimizers (actual or feigned) and the submissive victims (actual or pretending). These are unhealthy indulgences.

 

The sage Jordan Peterson when he defines evil—a spiritual but real entity ontologically and a real existential threat in the world—as producing unnecessary suffering in the world, and this sin against God, humanity, and the world, is committed by humans mostly of their own free will.

 

When sadists and masochists work together in their warped games of dominance and submission, where unnecessary pain is manufactured by the dominant victimizer and then exported or visited onto the submissive, often willing victim, both parties to this sordid interaction will suffer or be hurt for participating in these games.

 

For an egoist like me, I recommend an interpretation of the Golden Rule of Love as the personal determination and commitment to love and respect the self and others in relationships upholding the equality, mutual respect, and mutual dignity of all humans. Whatever leads to one to accept abuse, tyranny or being hurt by anyone else, or allows one to live with one’s conscience by abusing, subjugating, controlling, or hurting anyone else, these demented pleasures violate the Golden Rule, and deeply offend the good deities.

 

No followers of any benevolent faith should tolerate BDSM as acceptable group sex or couple sex practices in their congregations. Now we do not want to criminalize these practices, unless they are violent and illegal already.

 

We do not want Saudi Arabian or Iranian morality police going around busting those that use these practices, and we do not want to snoop to see what people are doing in their bedrooms. But pastors and congregation elders should let it be known that such practices are not welcome in communities of the faithful.

 People are natural sinners, and with no reasonably high standard of moral minimum behavior promulgated and insisted upon by the community of adults, sin and chaos grow in that community, taking everyone down with it.