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Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
I don't think that's correct, though I think many see it that way. I would define lust as SELFISH physical desire. It is the selfishness that is the opposite of love.
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This strikes me as a bit arbitrary. Is the basic desire for sexual gratification or sexual pleasure "selfish"? You will need to unpack this a bit more and demonstrate more clearly the difference between "selfish" and "unselfish" in this context, and how to discern them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
I think, obviously, that the "lust" talked about in those Biblical passages implies selfish desire. I see no reason why the Bible would condemn mere physical desire, especially when there's an entire book of the Bible that's mostly a description of physical desire between a man and a woman.
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I think you are correct in that the Bible defines lust in terms of selfish desire, but I want to be more clear about
why scripture arrives at this definition before adhering to it.
Let's be clear in the first place that I think Song of Songs is only in the canon because of its antiquity, and not because the framers of the Bible had any interest in the value of its sexual imagery.
Second, there are several places in which the Bible does condemn mere physical desire, or at minimum it treats it as an unavoidable nuisance. The Apostle Paul's teaching on marriage comes to mind here. From an historical and social perspective, the Biblical equation of "list" with "selfishness" is directly tied to ancient notions of the purpose of marriage for procreation, the need for ethnic purity, and the marriage relationship as a sacred reflection of religious institutions. Any study of the topic of lust in the Bible must contend with passages from Jeremiah 2, Ezekiel 18, Proverbs 8, the prophecies of Hosea, and the xenophobic edicts of Nehemiah.
But even beyond this—and I am speaking here as a Christian—I don't believe that the Bible constitutes a reliable source of instruction about human sexuality
entirely because it is so ancient. Virtually everything written in the Bible presumes a world of tightly, religiously controlled sexuality, and the primacy of a very narrow definition of family and society that in no way even remotely accurately reflects the modern world. Put more simply, the Bible fails in this regard because it simply cannot contend with levels of access and extent of sexuality in our culture. The Bible fails because the social requirement of sex for ensuring the survival of the tribe or the nation is obsolete, and it has now been replaced by sexuality as primarily a recreational activity.