Monday, July 10, 2017

The Naturalness Of Nudity

It is truly without justification that some people claim that the public appearance of naked human bodies is unnatural and that the wearing of clothing is natural.  What an inversion of what reason, experience, and divine revelation demonstrate to us!  If we are born naked, then it is utterly impossible for our nudity to be unnatural--it would by pure logical necessity be entirely natural, for that is the very way we enter this world.  There is nothing natural or logical about judging even the genitals to be unfit for display.

I am not committing the naturalistic fallacy by saying that nudity or anything else is good just because it is natural; it is not reason alone that can reveal values, but divine revelation.  Nudity is inescapably a biologically natural thing, and Christianity agrees.  God created the first humans naked and then declared his handiwork "very good" (Genesis 1:31).  Israelite society did sometimes involve displays of public nudity, such as the total nudity of those who temporarily surrendered their only cloaks as securities for debts (Exodus 22:26-27) or when God instructed the prophet Isaiah to not wear any clothing for three full years (Isaiah 20:1-6).  Imagine how many pastors these days might panic if God told them to make the entirety of their bodies, including their genitals, visible to those around them for three years!

The Bible does not teach that extramarital nudity is automatically shameful (much less sinful [1]) by its very nature!  So even if the Bible is not true as a whole (it is impossible for some of its teachings to be false, like the claim that truth is objective), nudity is not inherently sexual or a source of shame.  I am aware of these things because of logic and experience and the Bible agrees with both of them.

Any sense of shame over seeing the nudity of others or others seeing one's own nudity is inescapably not universal.  I know this with absolute certainty regardless of contrary claims by others because did I not expect social outcry, I would not mind forgoing clothing altogether except in select cases to prevent sunburn or remain warm.  I have no intellectual, personal, or emotional grounds by which I would object to the voluntary public exposure of my entire body, nor does the thought of other men and women seeing my body bring me discomfort!

Thus I know with absolute certainty that the idea that public nudity brings a natural sense of shame is totally incorrect (I also know with absolute certainty that nudity is not intrinsically sexual through logic and experience).  Any embarrassment [2] one experiences over either being naked in public or seeing others naked in public is a purely subjective reaction that other people do not all share.  Besides, anyone who claims that all people would feel shame over public nudity commits the fallacy of composition and acts as if what is true of one person is true of everyone; anyone who tries to make moral judgments based on his or her actual sense of shame or discomfort with nudity commits the fallacies of appeal to emotion, non sequitur, the naturalistic fallacy, and begging the question.

There would be various benefits to the normalization of nudity that might result from realizing it is entirely natural.  Regular acceptance of public nudity could greatly reduce money spent on clothing, as it would no longer be viewed as a social necessity (at least to the same extent), and thus people would have more time available due to the reduction of time spent doing things like selecting or cleaning clothes.  Only people who realize the naturalness and nonsexual nature of simple nudity will be equipped to fight American culture's sexualization of it; it would become far more difficult for ethically-minded people to objectify nude people by only viewing them as their sexuality or body once they recognize nudity as not having a necessary connection with sexual feelings.

Really, the only thing people can object to public nudity with is a subjective sense of discomfort or a socially-conditioned sense of inappropriateness.  These anxieties do seem to exist in significant part due to assumptions that nudity equates to a sexual thing, when the truth is totally contrary to this lie.  However, though logic proves that nudity does not have any innate connection to sexual feelings or behaviors, there is no basis for demonizing sexualized nudity just because it is associated with sexuality.  Christians of all people contradict their own worldview when they declare that the sight of a naked man or woman is unnatural, much less that it undermines public morality.  On the Christian worldview, nudity is not only entirely natural, but it also serves as the physical shell for the epitome of God's creation--the human men and women who bear his image.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/bible-on-nudity-part-1.html

[2].  Here I am referring to embarrassment in the context of voluntary public nudity.  Obviously, forced nudity could be extremely humiliating on an emotional level and degrading due to loss of social respect or the violation of complete autonomy over one's body.  So nudity can certainly be humiliating, but not for the reasons given by many Christians.

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