On Paedophilia

First, I refer you to the previous post as background. This is also a prophetic message.

Paedophilia is contained in Western Civilization. It starts and ends with the peculiar mythology of Western values. Take away the peculiarities of Western thinking and it’s not a significant issue.

Have you noticed that the Bible never addresses child sexual abuse? It’s not as if there was no one outside the West having sex with children, but that the sin was never elevated as a particular sin worse than other sexual sins. Westerners are hysterical about it, all the while far more likely to engage in it. In the Bible it’s lumped in with other idolatries; it’s not raised as a significant issue because it was a very unlikely temptation. It requires a Western culture to become widespread.

The whole thing rests on a peculiar idolatry. Westerners worship youth; they also have a very heathen approach to human sexuality in general. We have divorced it from the sacred position it held in the Ancient Near East (ANE). We don’t have space here to draw out the full image of ANE attitudes about sex, but they were both far more relaxed and far more restrained. Sex was never treated as a deity, but was typically indulged in service to a deity. Not in the sense of ritualized rigidity in performance, but the act itself was impossible to divorce from ritual meaning.

Thus, one of the first questions in the ANE mind was what a particular sex act signified. As you might expect, conjugal relations in the home with family was very private from outsiders, yet rather frank and open within the household. Every other form of sexual activity was inherently religious in nature. In this, the Hebrew religion was a radical break from the rest. Not that you couldn’t find the same sexual mores outside of Israel, but that the ANE was dominated by a vast depth of pagan religious sex rituals. Sex was a major factor in devotion to the most common pagan deities Israel encountered.

Thus, it was rare to find a prostitute who wasn’t pandering on behalf of some pagan deity. Most particularly was this true of homosexual prostitution. Indeed, virtually all homosexuality was presumed part of heathen idolatry. Given the Hebrew teaching that all pagan religion was devotion to demons, homosexuality was first and foremost a betrayal of Jehovah.

This was not the legalistic nonsense that pervades modern Western imaginations about Hebrew religion, as this imagery arose only with the birth of Judaism. Judaism was a departure from Old Testament religion, a perversion arising from the introduction of Hellenized intellectual traditions. In the minds of true Old Testament believers, sex outside of marriage was a serious threat to shalom. This whole business of sex itself as naughty, the symbolism of the Fall associated with apples and sex, stems from pagan insertions into biblical religion. In the Bible, sex was a gift from God that could be enjoyed or abused like anything else. Adam and Eve enjoyed conjugal relations long before the Fall.

And virtually no one was sexually attracted to children. There was a complete absence of this heathen idolatry of youth; normal life in the ANE didn’t begin before 30. There was no separate period of adolescence. There was a period of childhood that ran up to about age nine, at which point one began preparing for entrance into the Covenant. After that bar Mitzvah, there was a long apprenticeship during which one might not have full adult accountability, but you were expected to be striving for it. This, in contrast to how Western society infantilizes adolescents and pretends that it’s a magical time.

So the whole mess of Western culture makes paedophilia inevitable. It sets up an unbearable tension between the sacredness of childhood and the urge to steal our way back into by bringing adult sexual spoliations. While Western minds can see how much trouble this causes, that trouble is ghastly distorted and swollen out of shape and out of proportion by missing the whole point of why it’s wrong. In God’s eyes, paedophilia is a moral failure that stands entirely upon other, worse moral failures. Our modern Western hysteria about it is a primary provocation that causes it. You cannot propose a moral solution to the problem from within the problem.

Western society has followed the demons far, far from the revelation of God.