Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 05-09-2013, 01:43 AM

An interesting perspective:

Sex, economics, and austerity

Quote:

Historically, attempts to prohibit sodomy (defined broadly as non-procreative sex) have had an economic dimension as well as a moral one. Economics, for the ancient Greeks, was household management (oikonomia being the Greek counterpart to our word husbandry). While the pre-Christian Greeks didn’t have any notion that homosexuality was sinful, they did develop the idea there was a tension between sodomy and the procreative goal that they saw governing proper household management.

By remembering how the Greeks saw economics, we can make sense of the curious argument made by Aristotle—that usury was similar to unnatural sex, a case of money being generated by interaction with an outside party rather than the growth of a household through the fruitful union of husband and wife. In the Politics, Aristotle argues,

“There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of any modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”

Aristotle’s linkage of non-procreative sex with usury profoundly influenced Christian thinkers. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica codified the fusion of Aristotle with Christianity, argued that sodomy and usury were both “sins against nature, in which the very order of nature is violated, an injury done to God himself, who sets nature in order.” Echoing Aquinas, Dante placed sodomites and usurers in the same circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy. In his 1935 tract “Social Credit,” Ezra Pound, whose obsession with crackpot economics took him down many historical byways, argued that “usury and sodomy, the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.”

Clivedurdle · 05-09-2013, 07:37 AM

Interesting letter in today's Guardian about this

Quote:

May I point out that at the inception of the Thatcher era, the Times (then under the editorship of William Rees-Mogg) carried a leading article (Mr Robinson and Mr Blunt, 22 November 1979) which read: "Even in the case of John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the finest product of this [liberal] culture, there may be a parallel between his emotional resentment of the monetary rules which prevented inflation, and particularly the gold standard, and his need to reject the conventional sexual morality of his period. He did not like rules." (The same article also suggested a relationship between the homosexuality of Mr Blunt and his "hateful and unrepented personal treason to the monarch".)

I don't think the Times or its editor ever apologised for this.
Giancarlo de Vivo
Department of economics, University of Naples

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...-grandchildren

Letter above at this link also moot.

outhouse · 05-10-2013, 02:30 PM

For Israelites

I always viewed this stance against sodomy, due to its non-procreative nature.

The Israelites being wiped out and rebuilding its culture almosty constantly, needed its numbers built up, and gay sex wasnt rebuilding anything.

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05-10-2013, 02:30 PM	#3
outhouse Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Auburn ca Posts: 4,269	For Israelites I always viewed this stance against sodomy, due to its non-procreative nature. The Israelites being wiped out and rebuilding its culture almosty constantly, needed its numbers built up, and gay sex wasnt rebuilding anything.

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