quote:

---

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in harem seemed to me like a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price to pay for seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I could only be born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.

---

Dude was brilliant with words.

I agree!

________________________________________________________

"Are you going to do something or just stand there and bleed."

quote:

---

A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.

---

How about each gate as I please? Why would it have to be all at once?

quote:

---

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I could only be born once.

---

What of all those who have been "born again"? Are they, too, eschewing their birth?

quote:

---

Polygamy is a lack of realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind.

---

If the man eats all five pears, what is the difference? Is the first pear picked of more worth? Why does he feel that choosing more pears implies an indecision?

I suppose I need a link to the original text.

I don't think you could have missed the point more completely had you tried.

So, without providing me the link, you call me out for missing the point? What is your take on the point in layman's terms?

There is no link; I copied it straight out of Orthodoxy.

The point is that promiscuity does not demonstrate a greater appreciation of or sensitivity towards sex, but an insensitivity and lack of appreciation for it.

10thYrSr, Your response is literal to an eloquent piece that is figurative.

You seemed to have missed the point(s).

Thus, your "arguments" were rather, uh,.......sad.

quote:

---

The point is that promiscuity does not demonstrate a greater appreciation of or sensitivity towards sex, but an insensitivity and lack of appreciation for it.

---

quote:

---

10thYrSr, Your response is literal to an eloquent piece that is figurative.

---

Please, tell me how experiencing sex does not lead to a greater understanding of sex. From your quote, those who have sex are deprived of the true nature of sex. I suppose that you are stating that those who have sex with more than one partner do not understand the union of two bodies. Equivocally , we may state that anyone who has had sex with more than one partner does not appreciate sex. You may as well state that anyone who has seen more than one movie does not appreciate film.

As one who used to be very promiscuous, Chesterton is right. I am much more fulfilled in the bounds of marriage.

quote:

---

A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.

---

Whereas gradoo is satisfied as long as the backdoor's available.
























Forgive me.

Here are two more great lines from Orthodoxy (I paraphrase here):

An optimist is a man who considers the eyes; a pessimist is a man who considers the feet.


I also laughed out loud at this one:


I consider sincere pessimism to be the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment.

I thought it was the optometrist who considers the eyes

I think CS Lewis has this one down pretty good, at least in response to 10thyr...interesting to note as well that Lewis was a reader and fan of Chesterton.

Sex as it was intended to be is between married couples, and it is a union beyond just the physical union of the two bodies in the act.

When one engages in sex outside of marriage and with multiple partners, casually etc. one is trying to capture or enjoy one piece of the union, without having to experience or be subjected to the other areas.

To truly enjoy and appreciate sex as it was intended, one must have all of the other aspects of the union of two people as well.

Probably not a good paraphrasing, but don't have it in front of me and just quickly from memory.

This is from Mere Christianity btw.

The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism-for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact-just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

http://www.philosophyforlife.com/mc16.htm

quote:

---

Sex as it was intended to be is between married couples, and it is a union beyond just the physical union of the two bodies in the act.

---

quote:

---

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

---

How do you derive this singular partner information from the Bible when the era, clearly, did not prevent men from having multiple wives if they had the means to support them?

Chesterton on Love, Marriage and The Sexes

* "Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905

* "A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage." - Chaucer

* "Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men." - A Handful of Authors

* "The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis." - "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911

* "A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is." - Robert Browning

* "Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue." - Chesterton on Dickens

* "Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - Manalive

* "The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." - ILN 1/9/09

* "I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess." - The Victorian Age in Literature


Chesterton on Religion and Faith

* "One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." - The Boston Sunday Post, 1/16/21

* "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - ILN, 7/16/10

* "If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922

* "There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - ILN, 1/13/06

* "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

* "The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

* "It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." - Charles Dickens

* "Theology is only thought applied to religion." - The New Jerusalem

* "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - ILN 1-3-20

* "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." - ILN 8-11-28

* "Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - Blake

http://chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm

quote:

---

* "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

---

My favorite.