On faith, science, and furries

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Sex-negativity and its myriad ills is kind of a theme of this newsletter. You gotta know your enemies, right? There are a lot of things that frustrate me about sex-negativity. It’s unpleasant, for one. But I think my main objection to sex-negativity is that it doesn’t work. It consistently produces shitty outcomes, including indirectly contributing to higher rates of homicide, sexual assault, STIs, and even poverty. Stigma literally kills. So if we’re going to stigmatize something that slaps as hard as sex I think we need to justify that decision with really consistent and compelling evidence.

Friends, that evidence is balls.

Balls.

Y’all know I define sex-positivity as the idea that sex is inherently morally neutral. So I think sex-negativity is the idea that sex is inherently moral. Which sounds like I’m saying it’s morally good. I’m not. I’m saying it moralizes around sex. It’s the idea that certain kinds of adult, consensual sex are morally right and others are morally wrong.

So, which to choose? On the one hand, you have the idea that anyone can have whatever kind of sex they want. As long as they want it and their partner wants it any kind of sex is nbd, morally speaking. Pretty cool. This idea tends to be popular among furries and sex-positive feminists (SPF).

On the other hand, you have the idea that it’s morally wrong to have certain kinds of sex. Which kinds? No one really knows, but a lot of people have really strong feelings about it and will explain to you why their opinion is right and correct if you let them. This seems not as cool to me. A counterintuitive coalition of man-haters and pastors which I’ll call sex-worker exclusionary feminists and evangelicals (SWERFES) along with most of the country to a far lesser extent tend to buy into this worldview.

Now, if I knew that certain kinds of adult, consensual sex would lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes I would definitely be more interested in moralizing about sex. The goal here is to reduce unnecessary suffering. If furries really are causing the downfall of society maybe dressing in a fur suit and banging really is morally abhorrent behavior in addition to seeming like it would be uncomfortably hot.

Because that’s the thing. I can’t know for certain whether certain kinds of sex actually are morally good, bad, or neutral. There’s no slate of studies that will tell me if consensus reality favors the existence of an objective truth about morality. There’s no way to know anything for certain, other than by faith. Even what we directly observe is sometimes demonstrably not in accordance with reality. But there is a way to know what the evidence indicates is likely to be, if not true, at least in line with most people’s direct experience. Did the sun come up today? Well, I can’t know for sure because it’s possible everyone I know is under a mass delusion but when I ask around it seems like everyone else is experiencing a reality in which the sun came up today. I’m not posing the mass delusion possibility to be flippant. It’s extremely unlikely, but important. I think that leaving room, however small, for new information to come in and update your prior conception of reality is at the heart of what is awesome about science.

I think faith and science are often presented as at odds and I don’t think that’s always necessarily the case. Or, rather I’m not sure that’s the way to look at them that’s likely to yield the best results. As a person of faith, and a lover of science, I look at them as two problem-solving tools. I believe faith and science are best used together, but for different purposes. Faith is how many people answer questions that don’t lend themselves super well to science. Faith helps you answer “should” and “ought” questions. How should we live? And I think science is the way to answer “is” questions. How do we stay alive? What happens when we do X? Are mammals really not able to produce the color green on their outsides? Again, we can’t know the answers to these questions with zero uncertainty. But we can measure what other people observe to come to a consensus about what we think the answer to these questions is.

But anyway. In my worldview, I can’t know for certain whether certain kinds of sex actually are morally good, bad, or neutral. I could have have faith that being a furry is an abomination. But what about the furry’s faith? Why is mine better than theirs? I mean besides that they’re immoral and I’m moral. I mean I guess if I believe my faith is the one truth faith then, yeah, that’s how I answer that question.

But here’s the thing. Ending the discussion by saying well my faith says this and my faith is correct so this must be correct is that it ignores that there are other, competing values, besides your faith’s POV on this one issue.

For example, what if believing that certain kinds of sex are morally wrong causes a lot of needless suffering? “Well, it can’t be needless because my faith said so.”

Well, okay. But is it within the realm of possibility that you or your church leaders might not have fully, perfectly understood your faith’s teachings on sexuality? Or that they could be wrong? I mean faith teachings do change. The Christian church’s teachings on sex, for example, vary widely between sects and have morphed a ton over time.

Because if it’s at all even within the realm of possibility that you could be mistaken or confused about whether or not certain kinds of sex are morally wrong, and you being wrong could be indirectly helping to contribute to a ton of completely needless suffering, wouldn’t you want to be open to changing your mind?

I mean it’s not, obviously. Faith teachings on moral questions have never gotten anything extremely horrifically wrong, like slavery or a Holocaust or whatever.

Still, it might not be the worst idea in the world to consider the extremely remote chance that it’s at all within the realm of possibility that we could be less than 100% correct about the morality of sex, just in case it turns out we’re super wrong and it’s having devastating society-wide consequences so severe our progeny will pretend they didn’t know us out of embarrassment.

So, then it might be good to look at what the evidence says about how moralizing about sex is working out. Does moralizing about sex increase net happiness, meaning, etc.? Or does it cause a lot of ill-effects on net?

And this, my friends, is where things get interesting. Because just about every piece of evidence I’ve looked at indicates the net results of not moralizing about sex are far better than the net results of moralizing about sex.

On literally every issue the SPFs support the position that yields better results and the SWERFES support policies that cause measurable harm. SPFs want to decriminalize sex work, keeping porn legal, and provide medically accurate, comprehensive sex education to every child in this country. The SWERFES want to further criminalize sex work and porn and provide none or abstinence-only sex education. These policies cause or exacerbate homicide, human trafficking, higher rates of STIs and sexual assaults, and other harms. And for what? Criminalizing sex work and porn and abstinence-only sex education don’t accomplish their supposed goals. All evidence indicates criminalizing sex work and porn don’t reduce sex work or porn. Abstinence-only sex education doesn’t lead to more abstinence. Just more STIs and rape.

There are so many examples of policies and norms based on sexual moralizing being just terrible in practice. They increase net human suffering. They provide no measurable net benefit. In many cases they offer no benefit at all.

We can’t know the objective, eternal truth with a capital “T” about whether furries are going to heaven until we get there. All we really know is what we think the evidence says about what’s happened thus far. And what’s happened, it appears, is that believing that certain kinds of sex are morally wrong has led pretty uniformly to a whole lot of laws, assumptions, and cultural institutions that have caused a ton of measurable harm. It’s possible we’re wrong about that. But it looks really, really likely.

Most faiths are in agreement about a few things. One of them is that it’s immoral to knowingly hurt other people unnecessarily. Unlike specific sexual mores, not only is that idea pretty widespread among different flavors of faith, but it’s also pretty constant over time.

When the evidence shows that legislating or socially enforcing sexual morals causes unnecessary harm to others it would seem like the thing to do would be to re-evaluate whether it’s moral to continue.

I don’t have the right answer. It’s not in my worldview to think I could. Though I do leave open the narrow possibility ;)

I’m just suggesting that my fellow people of faith let the higher principle of not causing needless harm supercede your individual ideas about how exactly people should fuck. I’m asking that we all show a little more humility about what we can know and how right we can be for the purpose of not endlessly pointlessly fucking each other over.

And I’m asking us all to please pray for furries.