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Old February 8th, 2019 #6
Nikola Bijeliti
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Pederasty was an important institution in Ancient Greece in which a young man was mentored by a slightly older man in the practice of virtue. Most people today equate pederasty with homosexuality, but they were not the same. Homosexual acts were actually forbidden to pederasts, as the following two quotations from Plato demonstrate:

Quote:
[T]he lover may kiss and pass the time with and touch the beloved as a father would a son, for honorable ends, if he persuade him. But otherwise he must so associate with the objects of his care that there should never be any suspicion of anything further, on penalty of being stigmatized for want of taste and true musical culture.
Quote:
[W]e must not forget that this pleasure is held to have been granted by nature to male and female when conjoined for the work of procreation; the crime of male with male, or female with female, is an outrage on nature and a capital surrender to lust of pleasure.
However, it is clear that some pederasts practiced homosexuality; otherwise, Plato and others would have had no reason to denounce it. It was probably only a small percentage. There are a certain percentage of men who are not homosexual by nature but who, in an institutional setting, will commit homosexual acts.

I think an analogy can be made with the Catholic church. The Catholic Church, along with its institution of celibacy for priests, was not created for the purpose of child molestation, although many people associate the Catholic church with child molestation. It is possible that, in the future, some people may use the word "Catholic" as a synonym for child molester, just as today some use the word "pederast" as a synonym for child molester, but neither pederasty nor Catholicism originated for that purpose.
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