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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 2164273" data-attributes="member: 4720">I didn't pretend that.  I don't think I explicitly trivialized anything.  If the poor attempt at humor made it sound like I was trivializing it, that was not my intent.  I laugh so as to avoid crying.  In any event, I made no judgment, moral, practical, or otherwise, on sex in that comment.  I said we are wired to think that sex is fun.  Which we are.  (I could get into an explicit description of how that works, but detailed conversations about the medial preoptic area and dopamine receptors tend to make people's eyes glaze over.)  I also said that our culture generally equates fun with sin or "badness."  Which it does, if you belong to the same determinedly Judeo-Christian culture I do (your culture may vary, check your parents for washing instructions)In any case, I am not espousing the opposite idea that fun = good.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.  My problem with the cultural mandate on the subject is that it is too broad.  Some types of fun ARE bad.  Some of them are good, bad, or ugly depending on circumstances.  For example, I do believe that giving other people pleasure is good.  But when you are also simultaneously giving them an STD, that's not so good (downright evil if you have an inkling that you might be doing it).  If you're also giving them a significant contribution towards an embryo, that's either really good or really bad depending on the circumstances.Absolutely.  I specifically said "our culture" not the D&D one.  As you said, in D&D terms, neither is evil or chaotic.  But if people were really basing their judgment of what made a paladin on the D&D milieu, we wouldn't have a couple hundred posts on the subject.  Which is not to say that we couldn't have a difference of opinion on the subject, but that we (hopefully) wouldn't feel so strongly about it as to keep posting.  It is very clear to me that decisions in this thread are almost entirely based on the cultural and personal inclinations of the posters, and have very little to do with D&D, really.</blockquote>

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