Religion and pleasure

[Angrboda]

While Christianity adds its own spin to it with sin, I think there has historically been a tendency to separate out the bodily pleasures and experiences from the mental and spiritual, viewing the former, if not bad, as either dangerous or less valuable. I think one of the reasons Christianity places so much emphasis on it is likely a result of Plato's thinking as interpreted through Augustine. But even Aristotle, with his maxim about everything in moderation, and the Stoics, with their disapproval of impulsive and uncontrolled emotions, tended to frame the more hedonistic delights in a negative light. And you find similar themes in other religious and non-religious writings. The pleasures of the body have typically been identified with excesses and ruin, and for better or worse, ranked as inferior to those of the heart or the mind (or the spirit). I don't think it's specifically religious, but since much of religion is concerned with proscribing how you should and should not conduct yourself, any normative guidelines about the value of earthly pleasures generally is bound to be reflected in religion.

The paradoxical aspect is that, the pursuits which mehmet raises above the (mostly imagined) pursuits of atheists are just as determined by his biological nature and drives as sex or lust for good food. We are a social species, and as a result, we have drives built into our psychology which make the accomplishment of socially desirable goals pleasurable to us in and of themselves. So while mehmet may paint a distorted picture of atheists as only being obsessed with earth bound pleasures, he's also neglecting that the pleasurable pursuits which he trumpets as superior are every bit as tied to his bodily nature.