Letter: Suffering from pornophobia?

Mon, 04/21/2008 10:36 AM  |  Reader's Forum

This is a comment to an article titled "Suffering from pornophobia", The Jakarta Post, April 3, and a number of responses to the article.

First of all, the author of this opinion column and many of the comments posted argue that since sexual desire is from God, any restraints upon it must go against God's will.

I can't speak to other religions' point of view, but from an Islamic point of view, God gave us sexual and other motivations for two reasons: first, to fulfill some basic function (in this case, reproduction) through moderate and disciplined realization of our desires (in marriage); and second, the opportunity to grow spiritually by disciplining and controlling ourselves, submitting to God by exercising our own free will.

Yes, those desires are from God, but it does not mean we have license to go to extremes in following them -- quite the contrary. Islamic sages have clarified this point for hundreds of years, going back to the Prophet -- the ignorance of these people about Islam is shocking.

Second, one writer claims that sexual desire is entirely "explained" by sexual selection, therefore there's no need for God. This typical Darwinian view of evolution is simply baseless.

Natural and sexual selection explain only the spread of reproductively advantageous traits -- it does not explain the origin of those traits, nor how variation is maintained in a population, nor the developmental processes that translate genes into workable phenotypes (anatomy, etc.), nor the structure of DNA, the genome and the proteome -- without all of which, natural and sexual selection would be impossible.

Finally, the idea that moral outrage is "selected" because it is a "signal" of something is just a story without any hard scientific basis at all. Please stop trying to use evolution as a way to argue God's non-existence. It's just ridiculous and self-serving.

R. A. STALLMANN
California

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