Nudity and Religion

I believe that the separation of the mind and the flesh is responsible for the general aversion toward nudity in society. Such separation is physically impossible if you consider what we are in context to other living things. To separate mind and body you would have to separate the brain so that it could not receive signals, and that means, for all intents and purposes, dead.

The dualistic notion of separation of mind and flesh has a long history and is embedded in religion. Religion teaches people to deny their physical nature and in so doing creates people who believe that they are sinners. This negative view of the self is probably at the core of misdeeds, because a negative attitude toward the self probably can not create positive interactions with others.

Religion teaches that man has dominion over all other things, including women. The feminist movement was intended to engender respect of women as people rather than things. As to nature, only recently has the human race began to respect, begrudgingly, the land, forests, rocks, the environment, etc. Of course, this has been from a self-preservation perspective, a realization that we can not rape and plunder the planet indefinitely, rather than a true respect for the existence of things. Some of the pagan religions had a better environmental scorecard.

To reject the dualistic concept of mind versus body is to accept our existence as natural and a part of the world, a living thing existing along with all other things, animate and inanimate. We survive as we can and in the end we become dust, like everything else. We have feelings, urges, passions, that we have to recognize, accept, and deal with rather than suppress them. What we suppress is bound to come to the fore in unpredictable ways. A true respect for others will prevent us from doing things that will hurt others. We accept things as they are and we enjoy our time here as much as we can.