Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Our Unvirtuous Society
    Our Unvirtuous Society
    Our Unvirtuous Society
    Ebook187 pages4 hours

    Our Unvirtuous Society

    By Duane L. Ostler

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In American society today, virtue tends to largely be ignored. Rather, many in the country seem to be obsessed with sex. This obsession has led to extreme results that would be considered appalling by prior generations, such as: rampant premarital sex which decreases trust/commitment between partners; gays/lesbians elevating sex to become their god; and abortions in which the unborn have no rights

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDuane L. Ostler
    Release dateDec 2, 2015
    ISBN9781311854391
    Our Unvirtuous Society
    Author

    Duane L. Ostler

    Duane L. Ostler was raised in Southern Idaho, and has lived in Australia, Mexico, Brazil, China, Utah, the big Island of Hawaii, and—most foreign of all—New Jersey. He practiced law for over 10 years and has a PhD in legal history. He and his wife have five children and two cats.

    Read more from Duane L. Ostler

    Related to Our Unvirtuous Society

    Related ebooks

    Relationships For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Questions for Andi Zeisler, Author and Co-Founder, Bitch Media

      Sep 1, 2017

      The term ‘feminism’ used to have negative connotations, but today it seems to have mostly positive connotations. How did this occur? I wouldn’t say that is true across the board. In many places, feminism still has the same — or even more — negative c

      5 min read

    • Article

      How Can Men Support Women Against Misogyny And Violence?

      Mar 17, 2021

      The disappearance of Sarah Everard has prompted thousands of conversations on social media about the fears women have when they go out alone at night or after dark. Since Everard’s disappearance, local police have reportedly warned women not to go ou

      5 min read

    • Article

      We Were Not Socialized To Be Monogamous?

      Aug 8, 2023

      On my aunt’s golden wedding anniversary I asked her what it was like to spend half a century with one man. ‘It’s been wonderful, and, you know, I would have another 50 years,’ she replied. How beautiful I thought, to spend a lifetime with the person

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Sanctuary Of Social And Spiritual Justice: Commentary On Ebenezer Church

      Dec 11, 2020

      Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King preached, has come under threat during the Georgia Senate runoff.

      4 min read

    • Article

      1920s

      Mar 6, 2020

      1920s
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Hubbies For Women?

      May 8, 2021

      WHILE the country’s marriage laws could in the near future allow women to marry more than one husband, just as polygamous men can have many wives, there is still uncertainty surrounding the concept. Legalisation of polyandry is one of the wide-rangin

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fighting For Intersex Rights

      Feb 21, 2020

      “You have a beard like a man, do you want me to punch you in the face like a man? Do you? Do you?” That’s the question a burly, white, cisgender, middle-class man with a beard shouted at me in my local coffee shop a few months ago. The woman behind t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Vitamin A Helps Microbiome Regulate Immune System

      Dec 19, 2018

      New research uncovers another useful role of the microbiome: in mice, the gut microbiome regulates the host’s immune system so that it doesn’t attack these helpful bacteria. The trick to the microbiome’s work with the immune system is vitamin A, say

      3 min read

    • Article

      Women Should Not Be For Sale

      May 26, 2022

      ONE OF THE MOST INSIDIOUS ASPECTS of capitalism is the commodification of absolutely everything. Where capitalism is unregulated, there is nothing that can’t be sold and demand drives supply. This has long been understood on the Left. But what about

      5 min read

    • Article

      AGENTS OF Change

      Apr 13, 2020

      What on earth is a Reformational church? The Reformational church is God’s agent of constant change from glory to glory, conforming to the image of His Son. That’s why we are straightening and aligning the church to what Jesus intended in the first p

      4 min read

    • Article

      Your DNA Is Not Your Culture

      Sep 25, 2018

      Your DNA Is Not Your Culture
      4 min read

    • Article

      Pakistan’s Poisonous Politics

      Nov 12, 2022

      Pakistan’s Poisonous Politics
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Our Unvirtuous Society

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Our Unvirtuous Society - Duane L. Ostler

      OUR UNVIRTUOUS SOCIETY

      by Duane L. Ostler

      Copyright 2015 Duane L. Ostler

      All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, copied or distributed without the express permission of the author.

      The title of this book was formerly Our Sex Saturated Society.

      Cover design by the author.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      CHAPTER 1: Introduction

      CHAPTER 2: Descent into Chaos: Sex in Books, Movies, Music and TV

      CHAPTER 3: General Observations About Modern Society's Sex Obsession

      CHAPTER 4: Sobering Statistics

      CHAPTER 5: Sex outside of Marriage

      CHAPTER 6: Abortion

      CHAPTER 7: Gay Marriage, Gayness, Same-Sex Attraction and Gender Dysphoria

      CHAPTER 8: Conclusion

      OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

      CHAPTER 1: Introduction

      Imagine for a moment that you are presented with a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. The frosting looks creamy and delicious, the cake itself looks fluffy and moist, and the aroma is enough to almost make you drown in your own saliva. In sheer greed you happily accept the cake, stab it with a fork and jam the wonderful chocolaty mess into your mouth. You chew happily, savoring the tantalizing flavor of pure, chocolate heaven, which has an unusual crunchiness to it that you had not expected. You poise your fork to spear another mouthful, and then--

      --notice the dead remains of a roach sticking out of your piece of cake! Its head and upper torso are missing, and only then do you realize THAT is the reason your first mouthful was so crunchy.

      Sound disgusting? Obviously! Roaches do not belong in cake. If you include roaches in your cake recipe and serve it to your friends, you are guaranteed to lose your friends (and they are guaranteed to lose the contents of their stomachs). Roaches go with chocolate cake like roadkill goes with pet adoption; like grease or catsup go with a new tuxedo; or like honesty and sincerity go with politics. They simply DO NOT MIX.

      And so it is with lack of virtue in our age--when sex is the theme of public entertainment, the motive of social behavior, or the goal of public human interaction. Including sex in these contexts where it does not fit taints what would otherwise be good and pleasant into something sick, degraded and animalistic. Sex out of context destroys, debilitates, dulls the senses, and depreciates the beautiful. It vandalizes the sacred, banishes the light, joy and beauty that could otherwise be perceived and appreciated, and uglifies the serene. It is like roasting garbage and serving it up for dinner.

      And yet, an amazing number of people the world over don't see it this way. They might even be surprised at the notion that sex outside of strict limits is bad and harmful. So pervasive has the garbage-for-dinner concept of free sex become, that even the suggestion of seeing sex any other way seems unusual or wrong somehow.

      Strange, isn't it, that right has been turned to wrong, and wrong to right? How odd it is that things have been turned so completely on their head.

      Some may think that I, the author, am the one who is skewed in his thinking. They may think that I think that sex is evil and should be banished from human existence. Such is not true. In its place and time, sex can be a very fulfilling and wonderful thing. It can enhance the love of a married couple (of opposite genders) for one another. It is a God-created method of populating the earth. There is nothing inherently wrong with our natural, in-born desire for sexual fulfillment. But there are limits to sex that must be observed in order to not hurt ourselves and degrade what could be pleasant into something trashy instead. And the main limitations are: (1) that it should never be portrayed publicly; and (2) it should only be engaged in privately between people of the opposite gender who have first committed to each other in marriage before they do it.

      Many chafe at these limitations, and try their best to claim that they are nonsense, and are based on old-fashioned, prudish notions of virtue that have long since been proven false. With all due respect to such scoffers, I ask: where is the proof? At what point were the old-fashioned notions proven false? Why are these ideas ridiculed today as if there is something wrong with them? When did the magical moment occur that some unseen genie or fairy or wizard wave a magic wand and said, Sex is all right now for anyone, at any time, whether there is commitment in marriage or not, whether it is publicly portrayed or not, regardless of the gender of who you do it with!

      Indeed, when it comes to the strange transformation in recent society by which sex out of context has inexplicably become normal, there seems to be some genuine confusion and mixing of two very distinct concepts. These are the concepts of (a) what is old-fashioned, and (b) what is publicly accepted. Sex outside of the context of marriage between a man and woman, and portraying sex publicly in movies or TV or music or books, was not publicly accepted until relatively recent times. Hence, what has shifted are notions of what is publicly accepted. Portraying limits on sex as old-fashioned is nonsense because sex outside of the limits is just as old fashioned as the sexual limits, since both concepts have been around from the beginning! The only difference is that sex outside the limits was not publicly accepted until recently.

      But public acceptance does not make something right, or good. Consider feeding people to lions in the coliseums of ancient Rome. Or consider the practice in some ancient American cultures of sacrificing children on an altar, and bloodily ripping their still-beating heart out in front of a crowd of onlookers. These were practices which became publicly accepted by two distinct, degraded societies. In the early days of these societies, such barbarism would have been unthinkable. But eventually, through a process of time, these things became publicly accepted. Did that make them right?

      It is no different with our time. After all, is there any less barbarism in watching a person be eaten by a lion, or watching a child have his heart ripped out, than there is in using a special tool to reach into the womb and suck out an unborn baby's brains leaving his skull to collapse like an egg, then pulling the baby out piece by piece if they don't come out in one yank? Sounds gruesome, doesn't it? But that is one of the abortion techniques that is publicly accepted (and incredibly is also legally protected) in our world today. And abortion is but one of the spin-offs of our unvirtuous, sex-saturated society, and its acceptance of sex with almost no limits.

      All of this leads naturally to the very pertinent question: Why has sex outside the limits become publicly accepted today, thereby creating the false illusion that it is somehow acceptable and ok? This question requires a background of historical context, which will be explained in chapter 2 of this book. This chapter will briefly explain the why of this question, and will demonstrate how this mystical transformation was not due to a single event, or a single group of actors who made a decision, or even a single time period. Rather, it was a gradual process brought about by changes in thinking of society.

      Following this in chapter 3 will be a presentation of a number of thought-provoking issues regarding our unvirtuous, sex saturated society, and how people have become very confused on this topic. Then in chapter 4 will be a gruesome and highly disturbing discussion of the statistics of a world gone crazy with its sex obsession. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 will review premarital sex, abortion and gay marriage, and demonstrate how each is extremely illogical.

      Now, to return to the roach example, most people would agree it is not normal or common or publicly accepted to use roaches as a cake ingredient. Such has been the understanding of man since time immemorial. This does not mean the idea or concept of using roaches as a cake ingredient has never surfaced before. The concept of using despicable insects in recipes has been around as long as there have been recipes and insects. But such has never really caught on, in most cultures at least. And because of this, we naturally assume that it never will. After all, it is so incredibly self-evident that roaches are not an appropriate cake ingredient that it need not even be discussed, right?

      And so it is with sex outside the boundaries. 120 years ago the taboo nature of the unacceptability of rampant, blatant sex was well understood by everyone. It seemed laughable and pointless at that time to even discuss the issue, when the wrongness of sex out of context was so obvious. In those days, what kind of nut would even SUGGEST that sex outside of marriage, that sex between members of the same gender, that sex in a public theater event was normal? The mere idea was unthinkable, and laughable!

      And hence, the roach and sex examples tend to merge.

      And so our journey begins. In the next chapter we will embark on our discovery of the reason the previous mode of thinking about sex has faded so completely, and been replaced by the modern concept that sex should be accepted openly and without criticism in almost any context, at almost any time and place, and involving almost any set of human actors.

      CHAPTER 2: Descent into Chaos: Sex in Books, Movies, Music and TV

      As noted in the last chapter, illicit sex has been around from the beginning of time. However, it only has become publicly acceptable recently. This chapter will briefly describe the history of what led to this change.

      America in the 1890s was in a giddy mood. The bloody American civil war was now sufficiently far behind the nation that it could be somewhat ignored. New-fangled automobiles were starting to make their noisy, frightening way along muddy roads. Light bulbs had transformed night activity in America from relying on smelly whale oil lamps (or total darkness), to all-night, well-lit outings. Invention of the airplane was right around the corner, and the Wright brothers were already dreaming of flight while selling bicycles in Ohio.

      Sexual promiscuity was generally taboo in this era, in spite of the increased night life brought about by the light bulb. Whether in the theater, the newspapers or on the street, long-held traditions of virtue and fidelity still held sway. But the winds of change were blowing, due in large part to the slow increase of free time for workers (who no longer had to work exhaustively from dawn until dusk on the farm, but now worked 10 hour days), combined with the mass of European immigrants entering the country who had different sexual standards. As free time and European ideas began to expand and take hold, they started to be assimilated into popular entertainment. This trend was very small at first, and was hardly noticeable. And as with most changes that eventually end up taking society by storm, the primary voice or medium of public exposure for these new ideas was the written word.[1]

      Novels

      To be sure, novels of the era continued to maintain appropriate standards of morality, or they would not be accepted by publishers. But some of the stuff being published in Europe was already becoming rather racy. The temptation to do so in America gradually increased. And as it did so, authors began pushing the limits and including content that never before would have been considered tolerable.

      Part of this was driven, of course, by the increase of leisure time in which people could read. This consequently increased the demand for new books. And producers of novels in this era began to discover that sex sells, even in its mildest forms. It's big money. The only caution was that it had to be dosed out in portions which were acceptable to the public at the time. In the 1890s, these portions were small, and seem almost trivial to us today. But the doses gradually increased as the years passed, and as novelists saw they would not be prevented from including more and more of such nonsense.

      At this point, it is important to stop and acknowledge an important reality about entertainment. This reality applies in any age and regardless of whether we are talking about a book, play, song or movie. The reality is this: nothing in a work of entertainment is there by accident. Some creative artists may try to justify questionable or dubious content because that's the way the story came to me, and demanded to be told. Such is nonsense of course. Everything included in a piece of entertainment was inserted there knowingly, and could just as easily have been replaced with something else. Hence, every item included in entertainment was chosen out of many alternatives, and was chosen for a reason.

      To site a neutral example, when The Wizard of Oz was being written, there was nothing certain or definite that Dorothy would find her way back home to Kansas by way of magic slippers. The author (L. Frank Baum) could just as easily have had her get back some other way, such as by having Glinda the Good wave her wand, or perhaps by Dorothy being carried home by winged monkeys. But the magic slippers were chosen by the author for whatever reason, and that is the way the story has been told ever since.

      So it is with sexual content. None of it is ever included in a piece of so-called entertainment by accident. It is always put there intentionally. This can be clearly seen in a statement from the Motion Picture Distribution Handbook of 1981: If a producer is very wise, he will show the rough cut of his film (prior to final dubbing and cut negative) to the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America]. If he wants a certain rating and is refused, he can then re-cut the film without too much difficulty and conform to their suggestions, thereby getting the rating he desires.[2] In short, he decides what to include and what not to include, based solely on the rating he wants.

      The inclusion of something in a book, song or film does not mean it is appropriate simply because it was put there, nor does it mean that it is somehow innocent and will not cause harm. The truth is, all inclusions of sex in entertainment are completely needless. As the great movie-maker Samuel Goldwyn said, I feel very strongly that motion pictures should never embarrass a man when he brings his family to the theater. Public morality is a very important factor on the screen. A picture can be dramatic, effective and have a great love story without any nudity or excess of sex. I seriously object to seeing on the screen what belongs in the bedroom.[3]

      Returning to our historical narrative, as time went by, creators of entertainment learned that sex is a popular topic and that many weak-minded people will pay to indulge in it if given the chance. Indeed, this is the reason pornography has always provided an unstoppable undercurrent of purchasers, and is still so popular today. And this is also the very essence of the entire mood or scene in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1