- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
- Messages
- 32,586
- Points
- 113
I'm not referring to married men or physical adultery—that's a separate conversation.
What troubles me is Jesus raising the standard so high: he taught that if a man even looks at a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Yet this feels profoundly difficult to reconcile with human nature.
If God created men with significantly stronger libidos than women, why would Jesus set an expectation that seems almost impossible for most men to meet?
Why design some women to be strikingly beautiful—and create both sexes to be powerfully drawn to physical attractiveness—only to then equate natural attraction and fantasy with sin?
To me, it feels like setting someone up for failure.
It's analogous to taking a child with an intense craving for food to an incredible pizza buffet and then telling him he can only eat a plain salad. Any slip, and the consequence is permanent.
Why create men with such strong sexual drives, wired to notice and desire beauty, and then command them not to even fantasize or linger in those thoughts?
It raises the question of whether the rules were designed in a way that makes stumbling almost inevitable from the start.
What troubles me is Jesus raising the standard so high: he taught that if a man even looks at a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Yet this feels profoundly difficult to reconcile with human nature.
If God created men with significantly stronger libidos than women, why would Jesus set an expectation that seems almost impossible for most men to meet?
Why design some women to be strikingly beautiful—and create both sexes to be powerfully drawn to physical attractiveness—only to then equate natural attraction and fantasy with sin?
To me, it feels like setting someone up for failure.
It's analogous to taking a child with an intense craving for food to an incredible pizza buffet and then telling him he can only eat a plain salad. Any slip, and the consequence is permanent.
Why create men with such strong sexual drives, wired to notice and desire beauty, and then command them not to even fantasize or linger in those thoughts?
It raises the question of whether the rules were designed in a way that makes stumbling almost inevitable from the start.
