Lust is one of the seven deadly sins first identified by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. He nailed them all: Lust, anger, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride, and greed. It's a cornucopia of bad living.

But hold on! A leading philosopher at Britain's Cambridge University says lust has been wrongly branded as a vice and should be "reclaimed for humanity" as the life-affirming virtue that it is.

Professor Simon Blackburn told the London Sunday Times that lust has gotten a bad name from bad ideology that has hindered its "freedom of flow." His quest is to rescue lust, arguing it has been wrongly condemned for centuries. And he has a prestigious backer: The Oxford University Press, which will publish Blackburn's project on the modern relevance of the seven deadly sins, including lust.

Blackburn told the Times that he wants to save lust "from the denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessor, and the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to drag it from the category of sin to that of virtue."

How does he plan to do this? He defines lust as "the enthusiastic desire for sexual activity and its pleasures for its own sake." But if lust is reciprocated, that leads to pleasure and "best flourishes when unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology...which prevent its freedom of flow."

Here is Blackburn's logic at work: Thirst is not considered sin, nor is it criticized. But thirst can lead to drunkenness. In the same way, lust should not be condemned just because it can go unchecked.

"The important thing is that generally anything that gives pleasure has a presumption in its favor," Blackburn explained to the Times. "The question is how we control it."

From Kevin Kelly's blog, comes a review of the book Art and Fear which includes this point:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality," however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Blogging vs. writing books, among many other lessons.