Sexual Pleasure

Sexuality is one of the most powerful, personal, and diverse avenues to pleasure in all of human existence.  There are certainly pleasures even more foundational and important than this, including pleasure in reason, God, or friendship, but as far as sensuality goes, there is nothing else that is so thoroughly existential and yet so pleasurable when it comes to the unity of sensory perception and psychological, even introspective experience.  Pleasure is experienced subjectively, so this is not to say that everyone will or must have the same kinds of sexual feelings, or the same sexual reactions to stimuli.  It is still true that sexuality is an inherently far more philosophically important issue than, say, the capacity to eat and enjoy food--on an introspective, individualistic, moral, and general metaphysical sense.

There are many ways that sexuality can be acted upon and pursued in accordance with personal desires and attractions that are Biblically innocent.  Among these are dwelling on sexual feelings for someone of the opposite gender, sexual flirtation regardless of one's marital status, and masturbation, including masturbation to any nonsinful thoughts or imagery.  Deuteronomy 4:2 makes it clear that there is no such thing as subjective conscience or cultural tradition revealing Biblical ethics, as desperately as many Christians would hope otherwise--and the irrelevance of feelings and traditions to morality is knowable apart from Biblical prompting.  Sexuality is one of the most delightful, potentially intoxicating areas where legalism's invalidity is liberating, for the Bible condemns none of these things as it explicitly establishes the freedom to do any nonsinful thing.

Existing as a sexual being and embracing sexuality is not irrationalistic or unbiblical for a host of reasons.  What is irrational is to think that sexuality is good because one likes it and that whatever thought or action one wants to participate in must be morally permissible, all because one's conscience or convenience are not offended.  Like in all matters, emotionalistic appeal and personal preference or perception are not what grounds logical truths, and of course this is true of sexuality as well.  The subjectivity of sexual feelings means it is possible for one person to long for what another person would be repulsed by.  However, when it comes to what a given person wants to do, the emotionalists of the world act as they please regardless of their supposed worldview.

Often too stupid and too insincere to even stop themselves from enacting sexual things they condemn in others, many non-rationalists are unsure of how to actually live as sexual beings without allowing random and perhaps immoral impulses (though having a desire is not automatically wrong, even though believing things about it or acting on it could be).  Rape, bestiality (which is just rape directed towards a non-human species), homosexual behaviors, promiscuity, adultery, and incest are the majority of what the Bible prohibits as far as deeds are concerned, and yet many (non-rationalist) Christians seem to gravitate towards at least one or two of these.  They might at a minimum act on these desires if they simply had the chance.  In no circumstances, though, do their emotions or longings make something rational or irrational, good/permissible or evil.

The depth and theological significance of sexuality as something positive or neutral, even aside from rationalistic truths that are independent of whether the Bible aligned with them, is seldom understood by Christians.  They instead tend to share the sexual emotionalism of a good part of secular people.  Inside or outside of marriage, they might do things that they rightly or wrongly think are Biblically wrong, all while their secular counterparts dive into the belief that whatever their emotions or the emotions of their community desire is true and morally acceptable, at least until someone else living by the same irrationalistic philosophy offends them!  Whether the Bible is actually true or not is not the primary truth in view here.  Sexuality is an incredibly deep, existential thing to be savored and emotionalism is just as erroneous here as it is in any other case.  Rarely does someone know and celebrate both truths.