Lust

Whereas passion, regardless of its strength, is maintained to be something God-given and moral, because the purpose, actions and intentions behind it are benevolent and ordered toward creation, while also being governed by the person's intellect and will.

Though, like all things which God has made, the yetzer hara (evil inclination) can be manipulated into doing good: for without it, man would never marry, beget a child, build a house, or occupy himself in a trade.

For example, from the American Standard Version the same word is used outside of any sexual connotation: According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, a Christian's heart is lustful when "venereal satisfaction is sought for either outside wedlock or, at any rate, in a manner which is contrary to the laws that govern marital intercourse".

[5] Pope John Paul II said that lust devalues the eternal attraction of male and female, reducing personal riches of the opposite sex to an object for gratification of sexuality.

[9] Gregory the Great placed luxuria as one of the seven capital sins (it is often considered the least serious of the seven deadly sins), narrowing its scope to disordered desire,[10] and it was in this sense that the Middle Ages generally took luxuria, (although the Old French cognate was adopted into English as luxury without its sexual meaning by the 14th century[citation needed]).

In Romanesque art, the personified Luxuria is generally feminine,[11] often represented by a siren or a naked woman with breasts being bitten by snakes.

Prudentius in his Psychomachia or 'Battle of the Soul' had described[12] Luxury, lavish of her ruined fame, Loose-haired, wild-eyed, her voice a dying fall, Lost in delight....For Dante, Luxuria was both the first of the circles of incontinence (or self-indulgence) on the descent into hell, and the last of the cornices of Mount Purgatory, representing the excessive (disordered) love of individuals;[13] while for Edmund Spenser, luxuria was synonymous with the power of desire.

[14] For Gregory and subsequent Thomists, the 'daughters' (by-products) of Luxuria included mental blindness, self-love, haste, and excessive attachment to the present.

So he can abuse his position as President by messing around with a girl who is hardly younger than his daughter, he can engage in all kinds of sexual activities with her, but because he technically doesn't have intercourse he can hold up his hands and say, 'I have not had sex with that woman.'

In sufi psychology, according to Robert Frager, nafs is an aspect of psyche that begins as our worst adversary but can develop into an invaluable tool.

[18] In the Quran there is a passage when Zuleikha admits that she sought to seduce prophet Joseph (Arabic: Yousuf), and then prophet Joseph said: "Yet I claim not that my soul was innocent -- surely the soul of man [nafs] incites to evil -- except inasmuch as my Lord had mercy; truly my Lord is All-forgiving, All-compassionate."

[21] In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, an Avatar of Vishnu, declared in chapter 16, verse 21 that lust is one of the gates to Naraka or hell.

Then Krishna said: It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world.

Thus the wise living entity's pure consciousness becomes covered by his eternal enemy in the form of lust, which is never satisfied and which burns like fire.

Therefore, O Arjuna, best of the Bharatas, in the very beginning curb this great symbol of sin—(lust) by regulating the senses, and slay this destroyer of knowledge and self-realization.

For example, the headlong pursuit of lust (or other "deadly sin") in order to fulfill a desire for death is followed by a reincarnation accompanied by a self-fulfilling karma, resulting in an endless wheel of life, until the right way to live, the right worldview, is somehow discovered and practiced.

Beholding an endless knot puts one, symbolically, in the position of the one with the right worldview, representing that person who attains freedom from lust.

According to Brahma Kumaris, a spiritual organization which is based on Karmic philosophy, sexual lust is the greatest enemy to all mankind.

[22] [23] For this reason followers do not eat onions, garlic, eggs, or non-vegetarian food, as the "sulphur" in them can excite sexual lust in the body, otherwise bound to celibacy.

Thus, in lust there is the accentuation of separateness and suffering, but in love there is the feeling of unity and joy...The most famous example of a widespread religious movement practicing lechery as a ritual is the Bacchanalia of the Ancient Roman Bacchantes.

[28] From Ovid to the works of les poètes maudits, characters have always been faced with scenes of lechery, and for time out of mind lust has been a common motif in world literature.

Many writers, such as Georges Bataille, Casanova and Prosper Mérimée, have written works wherein scenes take place at bordellos and other unseemly locales.

Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal, had once remarked, in regard to the artist, that: The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses.

The damned who are guilty of lust, like the two famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, receive in Hell exactly what they desired most in their mortal lives, only to find that their passions will give them no rest for all eternity.

In Purgatorio, of the selfsame work, the penitents choose to walk through flames in order to purge themselves of their lustful inclinations.

According to him, this directly explains the sentiments of shame and sadness which tend to follow the act of sexual intercourse; for, he states, the only power that reigns is the inextinguishable desire to face, at any price, the blind love present in human existence without any consideration of the outcome.

Aquinas says the sin of lust is of "voluptuous emotions", and makes the point that sexual pleasures, "unloosen the human spirit", and set aside right reason (p. 191).

Aquinas restricts lust's subject matter to physical desires specifically arising from sexual acts, but he does not assume all sex-acts are sinful.

Lust is best defined by its specific attribute of rape, adultery, wet dreams, seduction, unnatural vice, and simple fornication.

Lust is a sin of sexual activity, and "...a special quality of wrong that appears if a maid still under her father's care is debauched" (p. 229).