Food For Thought is a public theology & Bible advocacy blog for Eternity from Sophia Think Tank’s David Wilson, who gathers top Christian thinkers to take a closer look at how the Christian faith addresses matters in society at large every week.

Sex.  The papers have been full of it (in every sense of the term) this past week.  Sex with animals, sex with the same gender, sex in advertising, sex that is abusive, sex and the church, sex and a call for more responsible pornography…..and so it goes on.  Apparently sex is news worth reporting, I guess because it sells newspapers.

But it’s not only the tabloids that carry news about sex.  This past week there were two pieces of academic research on sexuality that caught my eye.  One was carried by The Conversation and the other was a report in Fairfax newspapers around the country.  The first was to do with sexual arousal and a sense of permissiveness and the second was all about lust and heightened ability.

In The Conversation the article by Brendan Zietsch was entitled ‘Dirty but not down: how sexual arousal can dampen disgust’.  It was a report on research carried out by two psychologists from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, Charmaine Borg and Peter de Jong.

According to Zietsch, Borg and de Jong wanted to find out “how we find sex so pleasurable despite it involving so much stuff that we tend to find disgusting in other contexts – stuff such as saliva, sweat, vaginal fluid, and semen”.

Through their research, it was discovered that heightened sexual arousal makes us less disgusted with the things that usually disgust us, sexually related and otherwise.

Fairfax’s Catherine Armitage writes about Simon Laham’s work on Lust (and the other so called seven deadly sins).  Laham is a psychologist from the University of Melbourne, author of ‘The Joy of Sin’ and speaker at this weekend’s ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ at the Sydney Opera House.

The main focus of the article by Armitage is Laham’s idea that lust is good for you – it boosts your brain, makes you more focussed and detailed in your thinking, and assists you in analytical skills.  Laham states that research from around the world shows that a heightened state of lust will cause your mind to be more focussed on the present and on detail.

The ramifications are endless, as some of the blogged responses to Armitage’s article rather humorously pointed out.  But, as is always the case with Food for Thought, we ask the question ‘What does the Bible say about that?’ Is there any ancient wisdom that makes sense in this post-modern sex-saturated world around the topics of lust, disgust, and social wellbeing (not to mention personal wellbeing!)?

I mentioned above that the media this past week has been full of references to sex.  But so is the Bible.  There are stories about abusive sex, poems about the beauty of sex, and instructions on keeping sex in its rightful place.  There is also plenty of material on lust, disgust, and wellbeing.

To summarise the Bible’s teaching on lust you would have to say that it’s seen in a negative light.  Lust is not good for you, nor the communities in which you are involved.  Generally speaking, lust is seen as something that makes you more self-centred, more determined to get your own way and less considerate of other people’s needs and desires in the process.  The Bible is big on the responsibility of the individual in community, for the sake of the community’s wellbeing.  It’s very big on social responsibility and flares up against anything that is likely to destroy the safety and wellbeing of others.  Such things are indeed seen as disgusting in the Bible’s economy.

When we integrate the two reports cited above we find the scary notion that heightened lust will make us more focussed and analytical, more able to get what we want, and more willing to put up with things that would normally disgust us.  When that mixture is applied to such things as abusive sex, abusive power, abusive greed and abusive consumerism the picture is indeed scary.  Such lust is certainly not ‘good for you’ or for the society in which you live.  God help us all.

Food for Thought.

Featured image: sxc.hu/soniacastr