The Silence and the Noise
This is the chapter I have been avoiding. Not because the argument is weak -- I believe it is among the strongest in the manuscript -- but because it is the most personally exposing, and because the territory it covers has been so thoroughly poisoned by bad faith on every side that even raising the subject invites immediate mischaracterization. The sex-positive left will assume I am arguing for hedonism. The religious right will assume I am arguing against chastity. The academic center will assume I am being confessional where I should be analytical. All three assumptions are wrong, and I want to be precise about what I am actually claiming before the assumptions calcify.
The claim is this: the sex-negative strain in the Abrahamic traditions is a historical accretion -- primarily Augustinian, amplified by medieval monasticism, and exported through colonialism -- rather than a scriptural or theological necessity. A properly embodied theology, one that takes the Incarnation seriously and that builds on the felix culpa framework of Chapter 12, must integrate sexual energy as a fundamental creative force oriented toward the point at infinity. The criterion for sexual ethics is not categorical prohibition but trajectory: does this expression of desire contribute to the derivative pointing toward infinity, or away from it?
This is not an argument for libertinism. It is an argument for wisdom. The distinction matters, and the entire chapter turns on it.
What the Texts Actually Say
The first task is exegetical, and it is more straightforward than two millennia of moralizing have made it appear. I want to examine what the scriptural texts of the three Abrahamic traditions actually say about sex outside the institutional frameworks that later traditions imposed on them.
The Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew scriptures contain no concept of "premarital sex" as a categorical sin. This claim will strike many readers as false, because the assumption that the Bible condemns all extramarital sexuality is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it functions as background noise -- unexamined, unargued, simply presumed. But the assumption does not survive contact with the texts.
The sexual prohibitions in the Torah are specific and contextual. Adultery -- na'af -- is condemned, but adultery in the Hebrew legal framework is a violation of covenant, a property-rights transgression in the patriarchal context of the ancient Near East, not an abstract offense against sexual purity. Incest, bestiality, and cultic prostitution are prohibited. The Levitical holiness code addresses sexual conduct within a system of ritual purity that the Christian tradition itself claims to have superseded.
What about sex between unmarried people? Exodus 22:16-17 addresses the case of a man who seduces an unbetrothed virgin: he must pay the bride-price and marry her, unless the father refuses, in which case he pays the bride-price anyway. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 addresses a similar case. These passages establish a liability framework -- an economic and social remedy for the disruption caused by sexual activity outside marriage -- not an abstract prohibition of sexuality itself. The man owes compensation because he has created a social obligation, not because he has committed an offense against cosmic moral order. The framework is closer to tort law than to the theology of sin.
The Song of Solomon is the most remarkable and most systematically misread text in the canon. It is an explicitly erotic love poem between lovers who are not married to each other. The woman speaks in the first person with a directness that would make most church reading groups uncomfortable: she describes her lover's body, she invites him to her bed, she celebrates desire without qualification or moral framework. The tradition has allegorized the Song into an image of God's love for Israel or Christ's love for the Church, and these allegorical readings have their own power. But the allegorical reading does not negate the literal one. The text is canonical. It is Scripture. And its literal content is the celebration of erotic desire between unmarried lovers, with no moral framework imposed and no condemnation attached.
The one passage in the Song that approaches ethical instruction is the refrain: "Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires" (Song of Solomon 2:7, 3:5, 8:4). This is wisdom about timing and readiness, not prohibition. Do not force what is not yet ready. Do not rush what needs to ripen. The ethic is one of attentiveness and patience, not of suppression.
The Talmudic tradition develops a sexual ethic that is far more sophisticated and far less repressive than the Christian tradition that emerged alongside it. The concept of onah -- the wife's right to sexual satisfaction -- is codified in Jewish law. Maimonides discusses sexual practices with clinical frankness and treats sexual energy as a creative force to be channeled wisely, not an evil impulse to be eradicated. The yetzer hara, the evil inclination that the rabbinical tradition identifies with sexual desire, is explicitly recognized as necessary for human creativity and procreation. The Talmud states plainly: without the yetzer hara, no one would build a house, marry, have children, or engage in commerce. The force that drives transgression also drives civilization. The rabbinical tradition understood this. Augustine did not.
The New Testament. Jesus's actual teachings on sex are remarkably sparse, and what exists is consistently oriented toward compassion rather than condemnation. He condemns adultery -- again, covenant violation -- and in the Sermon on the Mount extends the prohibition from action to intention ("anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart"). But this extension is about the orientation of desire, not its existence. The problem Jesus identifies is not desire itself but desire that treats another person as an object to be consumed rather than a subject to be encountered.
Jesus's interactions with sexually "transgressive" people are consistently compassionate: the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery ("Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone"), the unnamed woman who washes his feet with her tears. In each case, the religious authorities demand condemnation and Jesus refuses. The pattern is unmistakable: Jesus is more concerned with the self-righteousness of the condemners than with the sexual conduct of the condemned.
Paul is more complex, and more contextual. His statement in 1 Corinthians 7 -- "it is better to marry than to burn with passion" -- has been read as a grudging concession to human weakness. But Paul explicitly labels his preference for celibacy as personal opinion, not divine command: "I say this as a concession, not as a command" (7:6) and "I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment" (7:25). Paul's asceticism is contextual: he expected the imminent return of Christ, and his advice is practical given that expectation. If the world is ending next year, lifelong commitments are imprudent. This is situational counsel, not universal moral law.
The word porneia, which appears throughout the New Testament and which English translations render as "fornication" or "sexual immorality," is the lynchpin of the entire debate, and its meaning is far less settled than the translation implies. In classical Greek, porneia referred specifically to prostitution. In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), it translates zanah, which covers a range of sexual transgressions but centers on cultic prostitution and covenant unfaithfulness. In the specific context of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:20), where the apostles are deciding which requirements to impose on Gentile converts, porneia most likely refers to the specific sexual practices prohibited in Leviticus 18 -- particularly incestuous marriages that were common in the Greco-Roman world but forbidden under Jewish law. To read porneia as a blanket prohibition of all sexual activity outside marriage is to impose a Victorian semantic range onto a first-century Greek word. The imposition has been enormously consequential, and enormously distorting.
The Quran. Islamic sexual ethics are simultaneously more permissive and more structured than is commonly understood in the West. The Quran describes sexual pleasure between spouses as a divine gift: "They are clothing for you and you are clothing for them" (2:187) -- an image of mutual warmth, protection, and intimacy. Paradise in the Quran includes sensual pleasures, which the tradition has sometimes been embarrassed by but which the text states without apology.
The prohibition of zina (unlawful sexual intercourse) is real, but its enforcement mechanism reveals something important about its intended function. The Quran requires four eyewitnesses to an act of zina for legal prosecution (24:4). Four eyewitnesses to the act itself -- not to circumstantial evidence, not to rumor, not to the testimony of the parties involved. This is an impossibly high evidentiary standard, and it is impossible by design. The effect is to make zina virtually unprosecutable while maintaining the moral prohibition. The law functions as a statement of values, not as a system of surveillance. It says: this is the ideal. It does not say: we will police your bedroom. The gap between the moral ideal and the enforcement mechanism is not hypocrisy. It is discretion codified as jurisprudence.
Masturbation is not mentioned in the Quran at all. Later jurists disagreed about its permissibility -- the Hanbali school prohibited it, the Hanafi school permitted it under certain conditions -- but the Quranic silence is itself significant. A text that addresses sexual conduct in considerable detail and says nothing about a near-universal human practice is not an accidental omission. It is a choice about what rises to the level of divine instruction and what does not.
The Augustinian Distortion
If the scriptural sources are more nuanced, more varied, and more sex-positive than the tradition that claims to interpret them, where did the distortion originate? The answer is largely one man: Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine's account of original sin -- the doctrine that Adam's transgression is transmitted to every subsequent human being through the act of sexual reproduction -- sexualized the Fall in a way that the Genesis text does not support and that the Eastern Christian tradition has never fully accepted. In Augustine's reading, the very mechanism of human reproduction is tainted. Concupiscence -- disordered desire, particularly sexual desire -- is both the symptom and the transmission vector of original sin. Every act of sexual intercourse, even within marriage, participates in the disorder. The best that can be hoped for within marriage is that the procreative purpose partially redeems the concupiscent act. Outside marriage, sexual activity is simply sin, full stop.
Chapter 12 argued that the Fall is the initialization of the trajectory on the Riemann sphere -- the first nonzero derivative, the transition from static innocence to dynamic history. The felix culpa reading treats the Fall as simultaneously catastrophe and necessary beginning. Augustine's reading collapses the tension: the Fall is catastrophe, full stop, and its catastrophic nature is transmitted through the body, through desire, through the very act that creates new life. This is not the felix culpa. This is the infelix corpus -- the unhappy body, the flesh as enemy of the spirit, the material as obstacle to the divine.
Augustine's biography is inseparable from his theology here, and honesty requires saying so. The Confessions document a man tormented by his own sexual desire, who experienced his conversion to Christianity as liberation from that torment. "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" is the most quoted line because it captures the internal conflict that shaped Augustine's entire theological project. His personal experience of desire as enslaving became a universal doctrine about the nature of desire itself. His guilt became the Church's dogma.
I say this not to psychologize away Augustine's theology -- the man was a genius, and even his errors are instructive -- but to identify the mechanism by which a personal psychological configuration became an institutional theological commitment. Augustine's influence was amplified by medieval monasticism, which had its own institutional reasons for valorizing celibacy (celibate monks do not produce heirs who might claim institutional property). It was further amplified by the Counter-Reformation, which doubled down on sexual rigor as a marker of Catholic identity against Protestant laxity. And it was exported globally through colonialism, imposing a sex-negative framework onto cultures -- African, Asian, indigenous American -- that had their own, often more integrated, sexual ethics.
The result is a tradition that reads its own Augustinian overlay back into scriptures that do not support it, and then claims scriptural authority for positions that are historically contingent.
I must name the darkest consequence. The Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis -- the systematic rape of children by priests, covered up by institutional hierarchies for decades -- is not an aberration of the Augustinian system. It is its predictable output. A system that treats sexual desire as inherently disordered, that demands celibacy as the price of spiritual authority, that provides no healthy framework for the integration of sexual energy, and that concentrates unsupervised access to vulnerable populations in the hands of sexually repressed individuals is not a system that was unlucky. It is a system that created the conditions for exactly what happened. The suppression did not eliminate desire. It diverted desire into shadow forms, where it metastasized into predation. Chapter 18's analysis of structural evil applies here with devastating precision: the institution that claimed to protect the innocent became the mechanism of their exploitation, and the surface of sanctity was the camouflage that made the predation possible.
The Syriac Alternative
There is another tradition within Christianity -- older than Augustine's, closer to the scriptural sources, and theologically richer in its treatment of embodiment. The Syriac Christian tradition, and particularly the theology of Ephrem the Syrian, provides the alternative that the Augustinian framework suppressed.
Ephrem, writing in the fourth century -- roughly contemporary with Augustine -- uses erotic and nuptial imagery throughout his theological poetry in ways that would be unthinkable in the Augustinian tradition. For Ephrem, the relationship between God and creation is not one of spirit struggling against flesh but of lover and beloved, bridegroom and bride. The imagery is not allegorical in the sense of a sanitized spiritual meaning overlaid on embarrassing physical content. It is theological in itself: physical desire, physical intimacy, physical pleasure are modes of participation in divine creativity. The body is not the obstacle to theosis (divinization). It is one of its primary vehicles.
This matters for the personal dimension of the theology I am building. Grace's Maronite tradition is the direct inheritor of the Syriac theological world. The Maronite Church traces its lineage to Maron, a Syriac monk, and its liturgy preserves Syriac theological sensibilities that the Latin tradition lost. The cultural expression of this theological inheritance is what I have experienced in Lebanese Maronite culture: a relationship to embodiment that is neither the repressive anxiety of the Augustinian West nor the commodified exhibitionism of post-sexual-revolution secular culture, but something more sophisticated than either. Discretion rather than abstinence. Wisdom rather than prohibition. Not hypocrisy -- the gap between public norm and private practice that critics identify -- but a culturally intelligent recognition that some things are sacred precisely because they are not displayed, and that privacy is not shame but dignity.
The Incarnation is the theological anchor for this position, and it is non-negotiable for any Christian theology. If God became flesh -- if divinity inhabited a human body, with all its appetites, vulnerabilities, and desires -- then the body cannot be opposed to the divine. The Incarnation is the ultimate theological affirmation of materiality. A theology that affirms the Incarnation while condemning the body's desires is incoherent. It affirms the conclusion (God in flesh) while denying the premise (flesh is capable of bearing the divine).
The Eucharist extends the point. In the Eucharist, the sacred is accessed through the physical: bread and wine become (in the various theologies of real presence) the body and blood of Christ. The material is not transcended in the Eucharist. It is consecrated -- taken up into a higher order of meaning while remaining fully material. This is the template for embodied theology: not the escape from the physical into the spiritual, but the consecration of the physical as the vehicle of the spiritual.
The Complexity Science Framework for Sexual Ethics
If the scriptural sources do not support categorical sexual prohibition, and if the Augustinian distortion is historically contingent rather than theologically necessary, what framework replaces it? The answer must be consistent with the epistemological engine developed in Chapter 10 and the Riemann sphere theology of Chapter 17.
Chapter 12 argued that the Fall is the initialization of the trajectory -- the moment consciousness emerges, including awareness of body, desire, and vulnerability. The prohibitionist response to this emergence is the attempt to return to Eden: suppress the desire, deny the body, restore the pre-Fall state of innocence. But the entire argument of this manuscript rejects the return to Eden. The Fall is felix culpa. The trajectory cannot go backward. The New Jerusalem is a city, not a garden. The task is not to undo the emergence of desire but to integrate it into the approach toward the point at infinity.
Integration, not suppression. This is the key move, and its implications for sexual ethics are precise.
Consider sex through the framework of active inference that Chapter 10 developed from Friston's free energy principle. In active inference, two embodied agents engaging in sexual intimacy are engaged in a process of mutual prediction and response -- each generating a model of the other's states, each minimizing prediction error through continuous adjustment. Good sex, in this framework, is a state of coupled active inference: two generative models achieving mutual attunement, prediction errors minimizing across both systems simultaneously, a shared state of low free energy emerging from the interaction. The narrative self-model -- the explicit, language-mediated representation of self that normally consumes significant cognitive resources -- attenuates. Precision-weighting concentrates on embodied, sensory processing. Two people enter a shared generative model.
This is a flow state. Chapter 10 described flow as the condition where the generative model is optimally matched to the task environment -- prediction errors present but manageable, the system running at its optimal operating point. Sex at its best is precisely this: embodied flow between two coupled systems.
Bad sex, by contrast, is high free energy. Failed prediction, misattunement, the generative models failing to couple. The experience of disconnection, performance anxiety, the narrative self-model intruding rather than attenuating -- these are all descriptions of high free energy in active inference terms. The experience is bad not because it violates a categorical rule but because the system is not achieving what it is oriented toward: mutual attunement, shared generative modeling, coupled flow.
Boyd's framework from Chapter 10 provides the ethical dimension. Boyd distinguished between closed systems (which degrade toward entropy by the second law of thermodynamics) and open systems (which can maintain or increase their organization by exchanging energy and information with their environment). The OODA loop -- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act -- is the mechanism by which open systems maintain their organization against entropy.
Apply this to sexual expression. Sex that loops inward -- compulsive, disconnected from relationship, oriented toward the relief of internal tension rather than toward encounter with another -- is a closed system. It increases entropy. It does not generate the kind of creative destruction and reconstruction that Boyd's framework identifies as the mechanism of growth. Pornography consumption that becomes compulsive, sexual behavior driven by addiction rather than desire, the reduction of another person to a stimulus for one's own internal loop -- these are closed-loop dynamics, and they degrade the system over time not because they violate a divine command but because closed systems degrade. This is thermodynamics, not moralism.
Sex that opens outward -- toward deeper knowledge of another person, toward creative energy that flows into other domains of life, toward the kind of mutual recognition that generates genuine novelty -- is an open system. It is Boyd's creative induction operating at the bodily level: the destruction of existing frameworks (the dissolution of the defended self in intimacy) and the creation of new ones (the shared understanding, the deepened capacity for vulnerability, the creative energy that genuine intimacy releases into other domains).
The criterion is neither procreation nor institutional sanction. The criterion is trajectory. Does this expression of sexual energy contribute to movement toward the point at infinity? Is the derivative positive? Compulsive consumption -- whether of pornography, of casual encounters driven by addiction rather than desire, of any sexual behavior that closes the loop rather than opening it -- points the derivative away from infinity. Embodied mutual exploration -- sex that deepens knowledge, that practices vulnerability, that generates creative energy flowing outward into the rest of life -- points the derivative toward infinity.
This is not a permissive framework. It is a demanding one. It demands more than categorical prohibition demands, because categorical prohibition requires only compliance, while trajectory-based ethics requires wisdom, self-knowledge, and the ongoing capacity for honest assessment of where one's life is actually heading.
On masturbation specifically: the prohibitionist argument (Aquinas, following Aristotle's teleology of the reproductive act) is reductive because it defines the purpose of sexual energy solely through its procreative function. If sexual energy is a creative force -- and the entire argument of this chapter claims that it is -- then healthy expression takes many forms, and the criterion remains trajectory, not category. Masturbation that is integrated into a life oriented toward growth, creativity, and relationship is not the same thing as masturbation that has become compulsive and closed-loop. The first is compatible with a positive derivative. The second is not. The distinction is one of wisdom, not of categorical prohibition, and it requires the same ongoing discernment that every other aspect of the moral life requires.
The Male Loneliness Crisis
This framework has direct application to the crisis I will address at length in Chapter 24: the epidemic of male loneliness and the collapse of healthy masculine identity.
Sexual repression and shame are major drivers of male loneliness, and the connection operates causally, not merely correlationally. A culture that simultaneously hypersexualizes every surface -- advertising, entertainment, social media -- while shaming authentic sexual desire creates a double bind that is psychologically devastating, particularly for young men. The message is: desire everything, act on nothing, and hate yourself for wanting what you are constantly shown. The incel phenomenon is partly the product of this double bind: men who have internalized both the hypersexualization (I should be having sex) and the shame (my desire is predatory and wrong), and whose resulting paralysis curdles into resentment.
The manosphere -- the red pill, pickup artistry, the Andrew Tate phenomenon -- is the psycho-class capture of this genuine suffering (Chapter 18's framework applies directly). The suffering is real: male loneliness is an epidemic with measurable consequences in suicide rates, substance abuse, and political radicalization. The manosphere's diagnosis is partially correct: something has gone wrong in the relationship between men and their own desire. But the manosphere's prescription -- instrumental manipulation, the reduction of women to objects of conquest, the commodification of intimacy -- is the closed-loop response. It increases entropy. It points the derivative away from infinity.
The theology I am building offers an alternative that neither represses nor commodifies but integrates. Sexual desire is creative, not shameful. It is part of the strange loop's engagement with reality, part of the embodied generative model's interaction with the world. The task is not to eliminate desire but to orient it -- to ensure that the derivative points toward deeper knowledge, genuine encounter, creative expression, rather than toward compulsive consumption or instrumental manipulation.
This is not pastoral advice; it is a structural claim about the relationship between sexual ethics and civilizational trajectory. A culture that shames desire produces repression. Repression produces shadow forms. Shadow forms produce the very predation and exploitation that the original shaming was supposedly designed to prevent. The causal chain is observable, and breaking it requires not more shame but better integration -- a framework in which sexual energy is understood as creative force to be wisely directed rather than dark impulse to be suppressed.
The Embodied Theology Synthesis
Let me now state the synthesis as clearly as I can.
The body is not an obstacle to transcendence. It is the primary vehicle of transcendence. Every major theological commitment of the Christian tradition affirms this: the Incarnation (God inhabits a body), the Resurrection (the body is raised, not discarded), the Eucharist (the sacred is accessed through physical consumption), theosis (the Orthodox doctrine that the human being, body and soul, participates in the divine nature). A theology that affirms all of these while treating sexual desire as inherently disordered has not taken its own commitments seriously.
Sexual union between two people who genuinely recognize each other -- not as objects to be consumed but as subjects to be encountered, as strange loops whose generative models can achieve mutual attunement -- is participation in the creative principle. This is not metaphor. In the active inference framework, genuine interpersonal coupling IS emergence in the technical sense: a higher-order state (the shared generative model, the coupled flow) that is irreducible to its components and that has genuine causal powers not possessed by either individual alone. Chapter 6's account of strong emergence applies directly: the coupled state is as real as the individuals who compose it, in the same way that consciousness is as real as the neurons that compose it.
Procreation is the most literal form of this emergence -- two generative models producing a genuinely novel third. But procreation is not the only product of sexual intimacy, and a tradition that reduces sex to its procreative function impoverishes both sex and theology. Deepened understanding, creative inspiration, emotional healing, the capacity for vulnerability that transfers into every other relationship -- these are equally real products of genuine sexual intimacy, and they are equally real forms of emergence. The derivative can point toward infinity through many expressions of the creative principle, not only through reproduction.
The personal dimension. I am in a relationship with Grace that crosses cultures (Ukrainian and Lebanese Maronite), traditions (post-Soviet secularism encountering Syriac Christianity), and cognitive architectures (we are both technical minds with different intuitive frameworks). Our relationship is not an appendix to this theology. It is one of its primary data points. The integration I am describing -- intellectual and physical intimacy as expressions of the same creative force oriented toward the point at infinity -- is not an abstraction I arrived at through scholarship. It is a lived reality that the scholarship subsequently formalized. The Syriac theology of embodiment that I discovered through Grace's tradition gave me the language for something I was already experiencing: that the deepest intellectual work and the deepest physical intimacy draw on the same energy, oriented in the same direction, and that the attempt to separate them diminishes both.
I will not say more about the personal dimension than this, because the dignity of the topic requires it and because Grace's privacy is not mine to spend. But the theology would be dishonest if it did not disclose that its claims about embodied love are claims tested in lived experience, not merely in textual analysis.
The Falsifiability Clause
The theology of this chapter is falsifiable, and I want to specify the conditions precisely.
Condition 1: If communities organized around integrative sexual ethics (neither repressive nor commodifying) show worse outcomes on measurable indicators -- mental health, relationship stability, creative productivity, prosocial behavior -- than communities organized around strictly prohibitionist sexual ethics, the framework is wrong. The claim is that integration produces better human flourishing than suppression. This is testable.
Condition 2: If the active inference model of sexual intimacy fails to predict the experiential phenomenology -- if coupled flow states do not correspond to the conditions the model predicts (mutual attunement, attenuated self-model, minimized shared free energy) -- the framework's scientific grounding is wrong.
Condition 3: If the causal chain from sexual repression to shadow expression (compulsion, predation, institutional abuse) cannot be empirically demonstrated -- if repressive sexual cultures do not show elevated rates of sexual pathology compared to integrative ones -- the causal argument of this chapter fails.
Condition 4: If the scriptural exegesis is wrong -- if credible scholarship demonstrates that the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran do in fact contain the categorical prohibitions that the Augustinian tradition reads into them, and that my reading is the distortion rather than Augustine's -- then the historical argument collapses.
These conditions are genuine. They could fail. If they do, this chapter is wrong, and the theology must be revised accordingly. A theology of embodiment that cannot survive empirical testing of its claims about embodiment is not a theology worth holding.
What Follows
This chapter closes Part 3 -- the metaphysical core of the manuscript. The trajectory from consciousness emergence (Chapter 11) through the felix culpa (Chapter 12) through redemption (Chapter 13) through the strange loop of the Trinity (Chapter 14) through the convergence of traditions (Chapters 15-16) through the mathematical formalization of the Riemann sphere (Chapter 17) through the structural evil that the trajectory must navigate (Chapter 18) arrives here, at the body. The body that falls, the body that desires, the body that God inhabits, the body through which the Eucharist consecrates, the body through which two people participate in the creative principle that the trajectory is oriented toward.
Part 4 will turn from metaphysics to praxis -- from what is the case to what must be done. The Republic of AI Agents (Chapter 20), the free will framework (Chapter 21), and the apostolic task (Chapter 22) will translate the metaphysical claims into institutional, technical, and ethical architecture. But the praxis is grounded in the metaphysics, and the metaphysics is grounded in the body. If the body is not sacred -- if desire is not creative, if intimacy is not emergence, if the physical is not a vehicle of the divine -- then the praxis has no foundation and the technology has no purpose.
The body is sacred. The desire is creative. The derivative, if oriented wisely, points toward infinity. And the wisdom required for that orientation -- the ongoing discernment of trajectory, the honest assessment of whether one's life is approaching or receding from the point at infinity -- is the moral content of the embodied life. Not compliance with a code, but navigation by a star.