Love Of Pleasure

The mere love of pleasure and hedonism are not only quite distinct, but they do not even resemble each other up close whatsoever.  It is one thing to enjoy and seek out pleasure, even if pleasure is a very high personal  priority; it is something else entirely to suppose that pleasure is the ultimate good or perhaps even the only thing of any significance.  The latter alone is incompatible with Biblical ethics, for the love of pleasure is not an enemy of Christian spirituality.

Pleasure of various kinds, when understood from a genuinely Biblical standpoint, can actually strengthen one's relationship with God by inspiring a gratefulness for the fact that many things Christians have considered sinful are completely innocent on their own.  The human mind and body were intended to experience pleasure.  Pleasure itself is not a result of sin, even though some people may subjectively find particular sins pleasurable.

Inversely, a relationship with God, the love of justice, and the love of reason can also be very pleasurable.  Certain sins might be pleasurable for certain people, but pleasure is never the problem.  Pleasure is not an incidental or trivial component of human life, as evangelicals may imply.  It is deeply intertwined with many aspects of human existence, spirituality among them, and it is thus thoroughly unbiblical to condemn the love of pleasure.

Nothing about loving pleasure excludes loving God.  The notion that the two are irreconcilable or opposed is only a myth perpetuated by ascetic legalists either out of fear or out of stupidity, and the Bible rejects the idea as early as the first two chapters of Genesis.  A deity who creates humans with the capacity for experiencing psychological and sensual pleasures and calls his creation "very good" cannot be opposed to pleasure unless it is pursued in an illegitimate way.