- Stephen C. on Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions: “Your eyes are probably fine, you just need top percentile visual acuity to make any sense of the chart.” Dec 4, 18:52
- on “It’s just Violence” Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies: “Yes, context does matter. My wife nurses in church. That’s a special case where it’s incredibly inconvenient for the woman to do otherwise, so guys can deal. However, I wouldn’t want my kids (or I for that matter), watching a scene where a woman is showering in the nude even if showering per se isn’t a sexual act, whereas it would probably be fine for a heterosexual man to see breasts in the scene in “Wit” where Emma Thompson’s soul leaves her body in the hospital. (It’s an incredibly moving scene and an edit would completely ruin it). So yes, context matters, but not all non-sexual nudity is unproblematic given the reasons discussed in the OP, and as a general rule I’m going to be more careful with nudity the younger my kids are, hence my decision about The Mission, but reasonable people can disagree about where exactly that line is for which ages.” Dec 4, 17:37
- on Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions: “My color perception must not be very good because I cannot identify which lines represent major companies, medicine, and military. The greens all look the same.” Dec 4, 17:35
- on “It’s just Violence” Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies: “Stephen C, If a woman was nursing a baby uncovered in a church foyer, would that bother you? My point is that context matters. The nudity in “The Mission” is non-sexual. It doesn’t matter which race exhibits the human form. It is in the image of God.” Dec 4, 15:55
- on Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions: “It mostly looks like a graph of institutions that people are incentivized to criticize versus those that aren’t, as opposed to any horrible institutional missteps. The solution in most cases would be for people to trust most institutions more and have less respect for knee-jerk cynicism.” Dec 4, 13:29
- on Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions: “Maybe, but the fact is that these trends long pre-date Trump, who only shows up in the last sixth or so of the graph.” Dec 4, 11:10
- on Devotion in the Postinformation Age: ““Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ? T.S. Eliot, The Rock I think of this often, in the voice of President Faust when he quoted it in a talk he gave in the 90s.” Dec 4, 09:34
- on Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions: “Medicine and science haven’t bowed to Trump. Generally speaking, all those other institutions (academia, the government, business, media, and, yes, religion) have.” Dec 4, 09:26
- on “It’s just Violence” Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies: “That’s fascinating. I wonder if some of that is because their social trauma wounds from war are fresher. I’ll hasten to add that nudity is not necessarily sexuality, although it has some of the same risks. I’m waiting until some of my kids are a bit older to watch The Mission with them, for example, even though it’s one of the most spiritually touching films ever. WRT The Mission, I used to hand-wave away “National Geographic nudity” as being less problematic in that sense, but then realized that it’s sort of racist in a way to assume that indigenous breast-baring would be less erotically appealing to my teenagers.” Dec 4, 05:10
- on “It’s just Violence” Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies: “My brother lives in Germany and has commented on how over there members of the Church say “it’s just some nudity” when justifying watching a harsher rated movie, and yet they are appalled at the violence, blood, and gore that most American movie-goers tolerate. Europeans generally (including probably Latter-day Saints) are less prudish and Victorian regarding nudity and sex. Americans generally (including probably Latter-day Saints) are far more cavalier in their Wild West, Second Amendment, gun-toting norms around violence than the European Saints.” Dec 3, 23:29
