Chinese government tells people what they can watch on TV

[Treesh]

Instead of looking at it as taking away intercourse from reproducing, try to look at it as taking reproduction away from intercourse. If we're doing a wiping of the slate here and choosing what goes and what stays, keep the intercourse but it'll just be for entertainment value. Who knows, without the religions that say it's evil and without having to worry about ending up with a child (although I'm assuming disease will still be a concern), people will stop being quite so repressed and really enjoy themselves. It could be a good thing. You just never know.

Interesting, so instead of viewing my prose as intrinsically negative as I concluded, you take an optimistic viewpoint on the subject. Please explain, preferrably the bolded parts, because I can only see negative. I consider myself an optimist, despite not believing in altruism or god, however I see human natures requirement of increasing power as necessary to our mental health and well-being. It is our drive, and that concept has been capitalized in many science fiction shows. In summation, take away all the little things that give us survival (which we've grown to enjoy), and you are left with self-absorbed, power-hungry fiends.

This is basically some thoughts in the making here, so bear with me. Even with writing some of this out by hand earlier to get my own thoughts straighter, it's still a work in progress. I have the feeling y'all will get to see my thought processes forming here rather than me trying to convince anyone of anything. Aren't you lucky?

You say that human nature has a requirement of increasing power as being necessary to our mental health and well-being, but this current requirement is really only because of the struggle for survival. You've removed that struggle in your scenario, so that requirement should be gone as well. I really do wonder how the chemical reactions in the brain would be altered though. I'm assuming we would still have the pain reactions to keep us safe from environmental factors, but how would the pleasure reactions change? Would we still have them? Some, like the taste and smell of food, are survival based, but some aren't. If we keep the pleasure reactions, I can see us becoming more self-absorbed, but definitely not power hungry unless we just have our brain chemistry set up to give pleasurable reactions to gaining something that really has no place, no purpose. Since I just cannot conceive of me EVER wanting power just for the sake of power, in any scenario, I simply just don't think we would default to that. We'd all be the same so we'd all have to have our pleasure centers wired the same way and I just cannot even fathom me being power hungry so maybe that's part of why I can dismiss that part of your negative outcome so easily.

As to the lack of repression, a lot of the current and previous views on sex, and indeed, anything pleasurable to the mortal realm, has come about because of religion trying to explain STDs before germ theory was generally accepted, also the lack of hygiene and lack of paternity testing.

Sex is a sin! You have sex with more than one person, you get some very obvious, nasty symptoms that only seem to happen to anyone when they've had sex with more than one person, that means the Head Deity is punishing you for bad behavior. But now we can say it's because of diseases rather than an angry deity so you just protect against diseases and go have your fun!

A woman has to be faithful and pure to her husband. A woman always knows if the child in her womb is actually hers or not (before science introduced embryo transfers of course). A man doesn't know if the child is his or not (before paternity testing) and resources are scarce. Why waste resources on someone not in his bloodline?

Sex is dirty! Well, yeah, if no one bathes or brushes their teeth, there is definitely that, although this really doesn't fall under a religious issue, but around the same time as the religious ideas were being put into place, this was common so I'm lumping it in here regardless.

Without religion telling us sex is bad, wrong, and should be done only out of necessity to continue the species, people are more free to say, "Hey, this is really fun!" without having to feel so ashamed of feeling pleasure.

Oh, I forgot to mention some religions/sects/cults/whatever also denouncing that any pleasure in the mortal realm will cause trouble in the afterlife, but I'll have to go digging to remind myself just which ones those were before I can really get into that part of it. I know there was more that I was going to say, but between brain and pen/paper and brain and computer, it got lost. I'm sure it'll find its way home eventually and it'll come up in another post somewhere.

Edit: This scenario you've set up just intrigues me for some reason. You say we're all the same so that means body chemistry, brain chemistry and I really, really wonder just how that would affect music and paintings and writings. How much does just the struggle to survive impact the arts and our thoughts, ideals, morals? Thanks MEAT! =)

Edit2: Many people over the years have said that the only purpose to art is to woo women, to make yourselves stand out. If we are all the same, with asexual cloning going on, would we still feel the need to make art, in all its forms, to make ourselves heard, make ourselves be different? Would the need to make ourselves seem different become even more important? If you set all the biology identical and wipe religion, it really would be a case of nature vs nuture and I really wonder how that would pan out. It's just so foreign to me to think of everyone's chemistry reacting the same way. Would everyone feel the same level of fear, that exact same flood of chemicals? It'd even the field for sports and it really would come down to strategy and tactics and have nothing about the physical prowess of one team/person over another. Would that make it more or less interesting to watch?

Edit3: With everything being the same and all of our survival needs taken care of, including protection from the environment trying to kill us off, would that actually expand the arts instead? We wouldn't have to work if the needs were just all magically taken care of so we'd have nothing but free time. Even if we completely erased religion, complete blank slate, would we end up creating religions again? And just how would the different climates affect our world views? Even if the people are all the same, the world still has the environmental differences. It would be an actual nature vs nurture experiment, but how much would the nurturing actually differ between folks in a similar climates?

Yes, I know. I'm putting way too much thought into how such an impossible scenario would actually play out. I know it's just mental masturbation, but I never said there was anything wrong with that! =)