Can God create moral facts?

As has been the theme of my entire blog, our culture is astonishingly intolerant to sex. Depending on which flavor of antisex you subscribe to, you believe that most sex is either immoral or victimizing, usually the latter in this day and age. There is a third, health component, and a fourth, practical component, but those play such vanishingly small parts of the justification for antisex laws that they can be disregarded for the purposes of men’s rights activism. So long as the law claims to criminalize sex because it is psychologically harmful, that is the justification we need to address, and if it fails, then the laws must be disrespected and resisted.

If God created the world, then in a sense he created the morality that follows from it, even including whatever morality you may or may not believe in if you’re not a moral realist. But other than that, my impression is that God cannot create moral facts any more than the sex laws can create sexual abuse. Things are what they are, regardless of how they came about.

Traditions can be wiser than any one of us, so-called Chesterton’s fences:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

And I am willing to accept that superstitions have their place in order to enforce such beneficial constructs, but when superstitions themselves become “science,” as in the current “abuse” justification for the sex laws, then that “science” must be critically examined and discarded when appropriate. For example, we know that sexual ages of consent in the high teens, and the entire female sex offender charade, are not Chesterton’s fences because we know how they were constructed, and how their justification was gobbledygook. Ironically, the sex laws would be more convincing if they did not claim that consensual sex can be abuse that will psychologically damage you for life, or that women can rape men, and instead prescribed the same punishments for unspecified, mysterious reasons. Then I would need to scratch my head and ponder whether they might be Chesterton’s fences with an explanation beyond my comprehension. But the feminists have made it incredibly easy for us to dismiss their pseudoscience, thankfully. By explaining their reasoning they expose themselves as so idiotic that we couldn’t have asked for a more intellectually bankrupt enemy.

As to morality derived from an arbitrary decree of God -- well, in principle it is possible that a creator just wants to test or torment us by holding us to senseless standards for whatever reason, including perhaps sheer malice or amusement, but such a notion is unworthy of serious consideration in my view. I also don’t buy that there is some metaphysical reason why sex may be bad that only God truly understands, like it will damage women’s souls or something, though that is exactly what the old and still wildly popular trope of a woman who’s slept with too many men implies.

That said, our religious tradition probably did erect some solid Chesterton’s fences. The antipathy towards male masturbation was one example. The original biblical explanation that you shouldn’t spill your seed (or more to the point, libido, which also tells us why pornography is bad) was the voice of reason, and then the moral baggage which followed including bogus medical consequences were a little over the top, but still served a useful purpose. When I go back to basics and use the language of rationality, sex-positivity and evolutionary psychology to explain why male masturbation is harmful or maladaptive, fewer people listen than did to the moralistic commands, which tells me that yes, they have their use, but not when they aren’t based on reason in the first place like so much other sexual morality or abuse fantasies.

While I do not believe that masturbation/pornography is harmful on any other than a personal (and strictly male) level these days (it's not like we need more people), it is possible that some degree of enforced monogamy is a Chesterton’s fence valuable to the maintenance of civilization. It is also possible that the feminists may inadvertently have inherited some sexual taboos that actually serve a purpose, only to imbue them with a gibberish justification. For example, the female sex offender charade may be a new way to treat women as property and regulate their sexuality in the interests of powerful men, or it may be part of monogamy enforcement, and ditto for the “sex trafficking” nonsense.

But there comes a point when the gibberish is so flagrantly offensive that it must be attacked even if the taboo makes sense under an ulterior motive. The pretense that women “sexually abuse” lucky boys is a clear case of this, a lie so intellectually and morally repulsive that it must be fought regardless of any other merit to prosecuting such women. The female sex offender charade is so absurd that it must be completely demolished and, if society has any use for violently controlling female sexuality, reinstitute it under an honest pretext such as a women-as-property paradigm or laws against fornication.

If you believe that fornication is immoral (as opposed to impractical to civilization at worst) or victimless sex is abuse, however, then you are flatly wrong. This statement is more powerful than God or the law, because as I said, neither of them can create moral facts. Male sexualists do not believe or accept that fornication is immoral or should be illegal apart from actual abuse reasonably defined (that I won't go into now, but a manifesto detailing this is coming).

We know most people are unable to think for themselves on these matters. I am used to the average person parroting the antisex line, whether justified by sin or abuse. But I wasn’t expecting this from someone like Roosh, who went from pickup guru to so intolerant that he doesn’t allow discussion of sex outside of marriage on his forum anymore because he doesn’t want to promote “sin.” Perhaps this is a marketing ploy for a new image as a spiritual teacher, some sort of bizarre midlife crisis or even a pathological drop in libido, or he could be under duress, but he appears sincere. Which is a real shame, because between censorship and self-censorship the sex-positive manosphere is now almost wiped out.

This post did not live up to its lofty title, but I will leave that to the philosophers, or perhaps the comment section if anyone wants to discuss the ontological status of morality in more depth. I think this is a variation of the nominalism vs. realism debate, but I also feel I don’t have much to contribute to such philosophical questions. I am just a humble MRA railing against what I know for sure are not Chesterton’s fences, and also not metaphysical questions of no practical consequence, but extremely evil laws and norms that we need to do away with for our dear lives.