Gazelam wrote:
Thank you for moving this thread, although I would recommend Outer Darkness as opposed to Telestial. Thank you for removing the disgusting images as well.
It is peculiar to the theology of the Latter-day Saints that we regard the body as an essential part of the soul. Read your dictionaries, the lexicons, and encyclopedias, and you will find that nowhere [in Christianity], outside of the Church of Jesus Christ, is the solemn and eternal truth taught that the soul of man is the body and the spirit combined.
So partly in answer to why such seriousness, we answer that one toying with the God-givenand satanically coveted-body of another, toys with the very soul of that individual, toys with the central purpose and product of life, "the very key" to life, as Eider Boyd K. Packer once called it. In trivializing the soul of another (please include the word body there), we trivialize the Atonement that saved that soul and guaranteed its continued existence. And when one toys with the Son of Righteousness, the Day Star himself, one toys with white heat and a flame hotter and holier than the noonday sun. You cannot do so and not be burned. You cannot with impunity "crucify Christ afresh" (see Hebrews 6:6). Exploitation of the body (please include the word soul there) is, in the last analysis, an exploitation of Him who is the Light and the Life of the world.
Perhaps here Paul's warning to the Corinthians takes on newer, higher meaning: Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body·... Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of
Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid .... Flee fornication ....He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body....Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's. (1 Corinthians 6:13, 15, 18-20, italics added.)
Our soul is what's at stake here-the spirit and the body. Paul understood that doctrine of the soul every bit as well as James E. Talmage did, because it is gospel truth. The purchase price for our fullness of joy-body and spirit eternally united-is the pure and innocent blood of the Savior of this world. We cannot, then, say in ignorance or defiance, "Well, it's my life," or worse yet, "It's my body" It is not. "Ye are not your own," Paul said. "Ye are bought with a price." So in answer to the question, "Why does God care so much about sexual transgression?" it is partly because of the precious gift offered by and through His Only Begotten Son to redeem the souls-- bodies and spirits-people too often share and abuse in cheap and tawdry ways. Christ restored the very seeds of eternal lives (see D&C 132:19, 24), and we desecrate them at our peril. The first key reason for personal purity? Our very souls are involved and at stake.
Jeffey R. Holland, excerpt from the talk "Souls, Symbols, Sacraments."
You all should really think about the garbage you printed here.
So basically masturbation is this awful damaging terrible self destructive thing because god said so, or more correctly put because someone claims that God said so. Your eloquence Gazelam is commendable, but the reasoning is still circular and not based on any satisfactory reason to me. The only logical reason I see is to force people into marriage and insure reproduction of the species.
Why didn't God say that playing sports was self destructive and defiling the temple given to man. This would have at least had a reason such as twisting an ankle and being unable to do God's work for Him.
It still doesn't address the issue that living a life of sexual repression is a self imposed pain to endure. Do you believe that men will carry this same pain during the resurrection, or is the idea that one is so full of the spirit that he doesn't feel the pain. If you strain the people enough, atheism and it's doctrine of disappearance and incapability of caring one way or another seems preferable to the life that God has given us. Then if you take away there hope of the life to come with statements from the pulpit like, "If you're not happy now you can't be happy in the next life." Then they'll start to realize that perhaps these men who feigned to be their "friends" are really just master manipulators with the end goal not of the happiness of man, but to get the most he can out of man for himself.
