Decent

One of the bad habits accredited to the Christian religion, more so than to any of its counterparts, is its inclination to eliminate its competition by innuendo, making their competitors appear to be immoral, ¹assaulting them physically if it cannot use legal means, and otherwise stifling their ability to practice their beliefs. As a result of this centuries-old campaign, gymnosophy and gymnotheosophy have all but been eliminated from the populated areas of this globe.

One idea that even a peremptory reading of nudist literature will gain you is its detachment from human sexuality, a subject broached mostly in response to accusations of various sorts hurled into their camps by outsiders. Because of its freedom from distractions presented by clothing, and for a host of other reasons, nudity has been a major portion of religious practices for as long as we have any records, and that included Christianity before the fourth century of the Common Era.

For many, even now, nudity represents a detachment from worldly things and the resultant state of purity. Impurity gets associated with clothing and other possessions. Restrictive clothing, to some, represents the antithesis of freedom, of being bound by mundane features of beliefs counter to that which is seen as real.

To lie out of ignorance remains an act against one's own professed idea of God. That has to be true when done with malevolent intentions that end up destroying lives and creations accredited to that same God. Avoidance of guilt for that can only result from refusal to repeat words unsupported by one's own firsthand knowledge and experience. Otherwise, the only escape from guilt is if the liars and destroyers secretly doubt their own God's existence—but to do so involves them in further manifestations of untruths, and in practices they usually accredit to their own ideas of whatever is evil. No one needs to work very hard to determine which parties are innocent victims seeking mainly to practice their beliefs, and which are the aggressors intent on interfering, in most of the recorded history that deals with this.

Groups of naked people have seldom ever been transgressors in any of the stories you can find about this subject, including those occurring as this is being written. Most generally they are being victimized by falsely gotten prejudices serving to support those with malevolent intentions, who hold wicked images about their victims in their minds in order to coax their own selves into action, and in order to imagine them doing things they can complain to others about. People with such iniquitous images in their minds, while having no intentions to do so—wanting, in fact, to hide such imaginings behind their actions and accusations—will portray the innocent as guilty without experience nor information to base their accusations on.

And so, because of the great number of accusers and the heinous nature of the pictures they keep painting, and because of the threat of guilt by association and the frightening nature of the crimes falsely touted by seekers of office, status, and public position, few private individuals will bother to see for themselves exactly what must be true. Most private persons will assume that no one would deign to make accusations if they were not true—and most private persons do not seek the kind of publicity that catapults such accusers into fame out of former obscurity.

And so, the private person becomes deprived in many ways as a result of those who think indecent thoughts and base their actions on them. He and she end up losing freedoms they had not realized they had. They lose the chances they had to discover a way back to their natural selves and another bit of respite from the stressful oppressiveness of their lives. They lose a chance to experience the nature mankind has shunned in recent times, and to learn a way of life that might serve to keep them reminded of what they lost when they shackled themselves with rags and bent to serve the hungry gods of commerce.

What represents decency and what does not ought to be easy to present. I will describe two characters to you, and I challenge you to gain firsthand experience to know both of them for yourself. If the activities involved in the gaining of that experience end up doing you some kind of harm, I will make it clear while making the descriptions from which side you can expect it to come. I must leave it up to you to not make up your mind until you have actually acted to gain this experience and decide from nothing other than that as to whether I told you the truth.

What represents decency is a group of people who have made a place to gather for the innocent pleasure of each others' company, who respect the benefits of living the most basic and stress-free possible way of life, who respect members of the opposite sex and have been taught that attitude from the beginnings of their lives. This wholesome group feels victimized and concerned for the loss of many kinds of freedoms related to discovering and holding their rightful place in the schemas of Nature, and the loss of a source of joy and health they gain from having always pursued that aim.

Or, does this represent decency to you instead: A group of people struggling hard to work their pious beliefs into the chambers and procedures of our government, and to make of them stifling points of law. Pointing fingers at persons with different sets of beliefs and practices, and saying things in ways that question their morality and their status as human beings. Using common terms from similar sets of beliefs to support their own personal climbs into positions of power and status, and thereby having an easy life at other people's expense.

Decency, it seems to me, would spring from a person's ability to get along with other human beings, as much as would from any set of moral values derived from questionable sources. A big part of getting along with others has to do with tolerance and appreciation for everybody's worth in the pool of humanity. We all represent resources that, in one way or another, ultimately support the human cause in the evolutionary scheme of things.

Perhaps what it actually boils down to is an interplay between predators and prey in the most natural way that's possible, the predators and prey in this case all being of the same species in a rather cannibalistic fashion. Decency has little to do with anything in that scenario, except to shed a little light upon what has been going on in our world during most of recorded history.

Foot Notes_________________________________________

|1. British suppression of nudity in Jainist rites (India) is one notable example from relatively recent recorded history (Back)