Title: "Nursing Moms Upset With Facebook" Author: Unknown
Facebook's policies prohibit obscene pictures. Facebook believes breasts are obscene and so they will not allow pictures of nursing mothers.
Some mothers feel female breasts are not obscene. Stephanie Muir of Ottawa, is a mother who works with public health and breast-feeding and she says, "I think it's time we all get over this notion that women's breasts are dangerous and harmful for children to see."
I agree, female breasts are not obscene and I believe our society would be better off if we would stop misconstruing nudity as sinful.
The Bible teaches that most people are embarrased to be seen naked. But the Bible never says it is sin to be naked. And the Bible never says it is sin to see someone naked, unless they have been tricked into being naked.
But our Christian heritage links nudity with sin. The link is an erroneous link between nudity and lust. The logic goes something like this. Jesus said in Matthew 5 verse 28 that it is sin to lust after a woman. And seeing nudity can cause sexual arousal. And sexual arousal is considered by some to be lust. And so if seeing nudity causes sexual arousal, which is lust, then seeing nudity is sin. And letting someone see you nude must be sin because you might cause someone to lust.
But the logic is flawed. In Matthew 5:28 Jesus was not referring to an emotion of "sexual arousal", but rather Jesus was referring to an act of the will. Jesus was referring to a man who, with a cheating heart, was "coveting" or wanting to have sex with a woman who was not his wife.
Coveting is defined in the Tenth commandment in Exodus 20:17 where God says, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's."
Coveting is an act of the will. God did not make a distinction between coveting the neighbor's wife or coveting other things. And so we shouldn't make a distinction either. The test to determine whether someone is coveting should be the same for coveting a woman as it is for coveting someone else's car or their home.
Coveting is when you want something, that is not yours, so bad that your strong desire for it interferes with your relationship with God and with others.
Pictures are difficult to covet because you already own the picture. Coveting is wanting something that is not yours. And looking at a picture that you already have is not usually coveting. And people don't usually desire to know and go find the person in a picture. When they do, we call them stalkers and there are laws to protect against them. But most people don't covet what they see in a picture, whether that be a car or a home or a person.
If America would stop thinking that the human body is sinful, we all would be better off. Then, these moms could post pictures of themselves nursing babies. Sure some mothers do feel embarrassed to let people see their breasts and so they don't need to post their pictures.
But the mothers who don't feel embarrassed, they shouldn't be penalized simply because some preachers feel that nudity is sinful because it might cause sexual arousal if someone sees it. Especially since sexual arousal is not sin. Sexual arousal is an emotion which cannot be controlled at will. God does not condemn us for things we cannot control - like emotions.