On the sin of perversion
I've been reading Cornelius Plantinga's excellent book, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 1995). He begins by describing life as God designed it to be, namely a life of shalom , lived in right relationship with God, with each other, and with nature, resulting in peace, joy, and goodness, experienced in the presence of God. Sin, in its various forms, brings disruption to that life . It breaks, disrupts, alters, pollutes, twists, distorts, or perverts the way things ought to be . A popular notion of perversion is that it is something that is strange or creepy or cringey when compared with what is normal to the rest of the human race, or at least, to the rest of the human race at a particular time in history. In certain cultures, practices like child prostitution and cannibalism have been accepted as normal behavior rather than perversion. But we must realize that what makes an action (or thought or intent) perverted is how it is evaluated from G...