7. If how someone stimulates the pubic nerve has become the needle to your moral compass, you are the one who is lost.

Many of the responses to number seven assumed it was a typo. Some people who copied and forwarded the article corrected “pubic” to “public”. It would have been clearer if I had worded it, “if how someone stimulates a nerve in the pubic region has become the needle to your moral compass, you are the one who is lost.”

The point I was trying to make is that reducing ethics down to what happens to the scrotums in question misses the point. Ethics is about character, faithful relationship, and about what our actions mean to the whole world, not where people are touching each other.

Ethics based on universal love are much more difficult than moralizing based on rules about our physical bodies. It is a much simpler world if we mindlessly obey rules, but then our lives are mechanical, unresponsive and sometimes brutal. Such soulless living resembles the crude simplicity of a paint-by-number picture.

When the painting is done by a true artist we cannot see the lines of composition but still we sense that everything in the picture is in balance. The artist moves not by rigid and concrete rules, but by deep intuitions of the spirit. Rules trace the outline of the beloved, but only love can capture its heart.