Uniting_Our_Prayers on Gab: 'BEAUTY IS NOT RELATIVE What is objectively, truly beautiful has a power over you; it grabs you and it rearranges your consciousness, so to speak. And when it does, it starts leading you on this journey upward and outward—toward God. See, the truly beautiful—like the Sistine ceiling, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, Notre Dame Cathedral's rose window—compels awe and imitation. You don't sit in judgment over the truly beautiful; it sits in judgment over you. The quoted picture is most certainly not something that judges us. If anything, it compels us to judge it because something deep inside us knows its perverse and wrong. And for the record, just because beauty is a category with fairly wide boundaries doesn't mean there isn't anything central to it. Aquinas for example has a good definition of it. He says the beautiful is what happens when integritas (a wholeness), consonantia (a harmony among all the elements), and claritas (a brightness, a clarity or splendor of form) come together. What about the differences between what people find beautiful, you ask? Initially we have a basic, undeveloped sense of what is beautiful, guided by a vague, inherent idea of beauty. This is what leads to mistakes in judging beauty; we might consider something beautiful that isn't truly so, simply based on it having a weak resemblance to genuine beauty. Now, as our taste matures and becomes more refined through experience and learning / practice and exposure, we then start to reject things we once thought beautiful but now see as not truly beautiful. Our ability to recognize real beauty improves, aligning more closely with our internal standard of beauty. Put another way, people can learn and teach what constitutes good taste, leading to a more refined appreciation. Don't fall prey to the crippled ideologies of our time that deceitfully insist on destroying ideals. There is an objective standard of beauty, and this is at the other end of the spectrum.'