Testify, my brethren.
Though I'm a Sci-Fi-Guy, I normally try to ignore a wretched little program called Lexx, but I've recently been forced to agree with one of its major themes: That true evil is rarely an aberrant desire to actively cause harm to others. True evil is when you act out of fear, out of ignorance, out of weakness, and out of selfishness. When you know what the right thing to do is, yet you don't do it because it's easier not to care, or easier not to look too closely at what you're doing, or easier to do what someone else tells you to do so that you won't have to face the burden of taking responsibility.
I put it to you that Scott's conversion stinks of fear. Fear of society and family condemning him as a perverted freak, fear of his possible fate in an afterlife with rules of entry apparently designed by an appallingly petty, irrational and capricious deity, and mostly fear that he's backed the wrong horse again and is desperate to convince us to join him so he can have reassurance through numbers. In the immortally wise words of Master Yoda, "Fear is the path to the Dark Side." I have never seen a single act performed out of fear that had positive results. Animals act from fear. Our Creator's greatest gift to us is the ability to reason and to think and to rise above our fears.
Is tickling evil? This is a case where the act itself is morally neutral, but the motivation has everything to do with it. I enjoy tickling when it's playful, affectionate, sensual, and basically a means to express love. Scott claimed that it was lust and only lust no matter what we called it, and no offense to anyone but I can see where some of the fiction (let me stress that, fiction,) could give someone that impression. To be honest, the "merciless tickle-torture of an unwilling victim" theme, popular as it is around these parts, leaves me cold. Some examples like the Nylon Dungeon series actively turn my stomach, but I recognize that that's because I'm upset by misogyny in any form. I know the BDSM people will say that non-consensual TK is really a kind of role-playing game about trust, power and control, and I can dig RPGs (as a Geek, I've got a dice-bag full of d20's that could knock out a frost giant) but my point is that underneath all of that you're still two people who care for each other and are expressing that love, even if it's through a rather ornate framework of stylized theatrical behavior. You're not actually going out and abducting innocent women to be your pleasure slaves for the rest of their lives, because I think, all fantasies aside, we can all agree that it would be wrong to treat somebody that way, to totally objectify and dehumanize them in the pursuit of your own satisfaction.
I can also understand why Scott would call simply discussing that evil, because he seems to have embraced some form of Catholicism (I don't know of any Protestant franchises that pay such heed to the Blessed Virgin and Her manifestations), and my biggest problem with Catholicism is that it claims God draws no distinction between performing a sinful deed and simply thinking about the sinful deed. The idea that you can be damned on the basis of having an abstract concept in your head without regard to the fact that you would never do it is a holdover from the Dark Ages, when much of Catholic doctrine was designed to keep the peasants in line through constant fear and not noticing that they worked a 160-hour week to keep the kings and popes supplied with solid-gold flatware. As a side note, Scott said on the old forum that he was once deeply involved in New Age and Alien Theologies (I haven't heard of this, but I suspect it's the Cultists who claim that the UFOs bear messages of peace, enlightenment, and environmental activism) which tend to be transparently inane twaddle created to separate the credulous from their money with brutal efficiency. If so, I'd politely suggest that he has a problem with gullibility that needs to be worked on before he goes any further with his new belief system, but I may be digressing.
I further understand that taking such fantasies and putting them into a written story is not an inherently evil thing, either. It's actually rather healthy; Jung called it "Owning your Shadow," recognizing that you have darker impulses, but not letting them rule you. Practically all occult traditions maintain that to name a thing is to gain power over it. By shaping and binding your Shadow side, and crafting it into the words of a story, you limit it and its ability to cause real harm in the real world. It's when you are afraid to face your Shadow that it gets out to cause trouble, because you don't want to look at it, let alone watch what it's up to. Fear of accepting your own darkside seems to be another item in Scott's anxiety closet. He also said that he felt that the constant masturbation was taking him away from God. (Never mind the fact that if you believe God is omnipresent, then there can be nowhere you can go that He won't be with you...) I have to say in rebuttal that if you're doing anything, whether it's masturbation, drinking, eating, or alphabetizing your CDs to the point that it dominates your life, then yes you have a serious problem. Only whatever it is you're doing isn't the real problem, it's only a symptom that you bury yourself in because you're afraid to face the cause. I'm not eating an entire Super-Size bag of Cheetos in one sitting because the Cheetos are evil and Satan is the CEO of Frito-Lay, it's because the satisfaction of a full belly is easier to attain than the satisfaction of my father's approval. I think Scott needs to ask himself whether his new faith is a real solution, or simply another form of fear-fueled avoidance behavior to distract him from whatever's really creating a void in his life. Like everything else, both tickling and religion only become unhealthy when taken to an extreme and become an end unto themselves rather than a means to an end.
On a final note, like WallStreet, I've gone to my local strip club and tickled several of the ladies there, and quite a few have tickled me back. I want to stress this point, that the tickling by itself isn't the point of the visit. The tickling has been done in a playfully affectionate manner, and has been part of a whole set of things I do for the ladies including foot-rubs, back-rubs, talking to them like human beings, respecting their dignity, making sure the experience is mutually enjoyable, and refusing to treat her as a dehumanized sex object. If a girl really doesn't like being tickled, I apologise and stop. The thing that I get so much enjoyment from is seeing them luxuriate in the only 5-15 minutes that week (or even month) when someone's concerned with making them feel good. I offer the image of a girl I had a session with last month: laying back on the couch, eyes closed, a blissful smile on her lips, giggling softly with contentment as I gently ran my fingers up and down her nylon-clad soles after she had just had a miserable night of being groped, leered at and indecently propositioned, and thanking me for being kind to her unlike the horde of drunken barbarians outside the couch dance room. I offer her real smile, the painted-on mask of the faux-seductive stripper persona fallen away, and her gratituide that somebody just once cared about the well-being of the woman inside the bustier and G-string, and I defy Scott and his fear-soaked, hatemongering vision of a god to tell me that I did evil to her.
