You Can't Control Emotions

[DesertBob]

The discussion centered around being attracted to girls and making a move. He is really weird when it comes to this, he's all about treating all girls like a sister and pretty much never making romantic intentions clear unless God gives both of them a sign or something... I don't know how that's supposed to work in the real world. Anyway, he was arguing that if he saw an attractive woman and became hot and bothered, that his spirit of self-control was able to overcome those feelings. He said he's able to turn down the lust as well as any other emotion, including things like anger etc. He quoted stuff like love being slow to anger etc.

LOL. This is all just a response to the idea that any sexual thought is evil, at least outside of church-sanctioned marriage. He's kidding himself.

 

Even in the church I was taught, "you can't keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building nests." This was in reference to thoughts, and the canonical example is, the thought people frequently have on the edge of a cliff, "I wonder what it'd feel like to jump?" and thankfully, most don't act on that thought.

 

If one accepts that feelings are responses to thoughts, then the only way to influence feelings is to influence your thinking, usually by choosing to act or not on certain thoughts and thus reinforce them or not. But the connection is flaky at best. For most practical purposes, you just feel what you feel, so why flog yourself about it? Just accept it as information, and act (or not) on that data as you see fit. The original evolutionary purpose of some feelings (think: fight or flight) in many situation no longer applies, so it makes sense to ignore feeling sometimes. Although it's true that feelings tend to resurface elsewhere when repressed, that's not universally true. If you're terrified of roller coasters but force yourself to ride one a dozen times, you use desensitization to remove that feeling from your repertoire.

 

If your friend finds a woman attractive sexually, all it means is that he's a sexual being responding to another being's sexuality [shrug]. But the Bible tells him that simply desiring a woman sexually is the same as acting on it in the eyes of God, and if he isn't married to the woman then effectively the feelings are disallowed. This is of course patently ridiculous, and your friend is going to needlessly jump through rings of fire and eat little pieces of glass to convince himself that he can conform to the Will of God ™.

 

If this isn't yet another illustration of what a rotten system Christianity is, I don't know what is ...

[Phanta]

Emotions may be influenced by our thoughts, by where we put our focus. You can lead thoughts by practicing actions. A practiced action influences our thoughts and these effect our emotions. We can certainly influence our emotions.

[Naughtyhamster]

This is one of the major problems with christianity as a whole, as I experienced it. That whole "sin in your heart" tripe. When I was told that, I was a hormonal and angst-ridden teenager, I couldn't help it if one moment I wanted to hump someone, the next punch someone's face in. Of course, I shouldn't DO either of those things with wild abandon, but masturbation and martial arts helped more than just trying to "let Jesus in my heart to fix it." It never works! And who the hell is anyone to say that just HAVING those feelings is evil? It's insane. Anyone who is taught to simply repress their feelings instead of truly dealing with them is a ticking time bomb. Many a pastor's kid gets to college and dives straight into the party scene. So much for keeping pure for Jesus. I wouldn't be shocked if many of the same also have anger problems.

 

When I was a Christian suppressing everything, trying to keep that fake "Happy! Happy!Joy! Joy! Good vibes!" mask on it took a toll on my health mentally and physically. Perhaps this is one reason for those studies showing certain Christian sects having a higher rate of health problems and obesity than the general population as they suppress "negative" emotions at the expense of their overall health.

 

When it comes to romantic love my mother used to believe the bullshit that "Love is an action , not an emotion.", and believed that if she expressed her love through action to my father that he would accept her. She totally squelched her gut instincts for a long time because a Christian aunt said not to trust her emotions of fear of his violent threats as it was Satan trying to manipulate her into divorcing him. I think that's one reason she was concerned when I got engaged a year into dating my fiance as she wanted to be sure I had true feelings for him and not going by some kind of Dr.Lauraisms of how engaged and married people should act.