Thanks to that essay, I now know that Luther did not really hammer those on the doors. Makes for a nice story though.
There is plenty there to be impressed about. One of those is this:
Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. ...Imagine if Luther had lived and died before Gutenberg had invented the printing press! The Reformation was aided by the technological advancement of the day.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.
The printing press has been put to uses of many kinds since its invention. Including for pornography. Porn has always been at the cutting edge, ready to embrace the advancements in technology. When it was print, porn in the papers. Then porn in the films. In the initial months and years of the worldwide web, porn led the way with web pages. In an op-ed during those days, I wrote about how porn sites cleverly worked their addresses after popular websites. A small little mistake took users, for instance, not to the White House page, but to a graphic porn site. Porn also blazed the trail for payment and e-commerce.
And now, porn is all set for virtual-reality:
While virtual-reality pornography may feel like something out of a science fiction movie, it already has a formidable, if underground, presence. According to website Pornhub, views of VR porn are up 275 percent since it debuted in the summer of 2016. Now the site is averaging about 500,000 views (on Christmas Day in 2016, this number shot up to 900,000.)
By 2025 pornography will be the third-largest VR sector, according to estimates prepared by Piper Jaffray, an investment and management firm.
The primal, animal, urges that Luther's Christianity and other religions try to moralize about cannot be tamed that easily.
Porn, VR and regular, work for a simple reason:
Sex sells, and where there is money to be made, there will be entrepreneurs who want to adopt it and make money from it
The power of the market!
Many complications lie ahead, of course. Not only in terms of technology, but also regarding ethics. But, there is one issue that is increasingly the problem in these modern times that then fuels the need for VR porn too: Loneliness.
“There are people who are already lonely, and people who live their lives being alone. They work all day and come home to an empty house,” he said. “This is just offering an alternative to those types of people. They don’t have anyone else.”
Martin Luther did not have to worry about loneliness. He was gregarious. "He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him." And he lived a happily married life, after theologically questioning "the requirement of priestly celibacy."
But, life now is not the life of five centuries ago. Even a Luther cannot help us understand how to be happy and content in this modern kingdom.
2 comments:
Loneliness is completely a state of mind. I disagree that loneliness has increased - on the contrary most people were lonely throughout history. Throughout history , marriage was nothing about companionship - the individuals in a marriage practically led separate lives. And since often you were a widow , you just lived out the remainder of your life as lonely as lonely can be.
Yes, people might have lived in a joint family or a village together. There was company only superficially. You just fitted into a role in the community/family/society and that was that.
The cliche is completely true - you can be alone but hardly lonely. Equally you can be in a crowd and incredibly lonely.
Well ... I disagree with you, and will claim that humans experience way more loneliness now than ever before. But, even more important is this: The loneliness that men feel. This is important because often the sex-related activities in the marketplace (and the coerced ones too) are driven by men.
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