Hello,
1. Brown's list of universals, a compendium of cultural norms across all cultures includes sexual modesty and some attribute of clothing. How much clothing is worn varies from culture to culture(I.e. topless natives s seen in Nat. Geo.) but the genitals are typically covered in one form or another. This suggests some sort of inborn sexual vulnerability.
2. We would not have evolved hairless skin, losing our insulation, without clothing because we would have died. Wearing clothing must have come first or developed with the loss of our fur. This suggests an innate instinct to wear clothes.
3. People spontaneously become self conscious about nudity. My son, 7, was comfortable running about the house naked until recently. Now he gets upset if his sister looks at him getting out the bath. This switch again suggests something innate about feeling vulnerable when naked.
So, there are several lines of evidence to suggest an innate desire to cover our nudity. See the nudity of others reminds us of our own sexual vulnerability.
On to religion: God (the Hebrew word lis the title for a judge) creates us naked and declares it good. We then gain knowledge of good and evil, which in his genesis of me lectures Jordan Petersen interprets as knowledge of our vulnerability, and feel ashamed naked. God remedies this with clothes so we feel better. The Hebrew word rendered clothes or covering is a really the word for a belt or girdle: symbols/expressions for strengthening oneself.
The verse in Deuteronomy occurs together with other verses that have to do with Baal/Astarte worship: the celebrants would cross dress, present a bird with its eggs in a nest etc... As such the verse is better understood as forbidding any of the practices of Baal worship. Specifically
so as concerning the celebrations linked to the planet Venus whose Ptolomeic epicycle resembles a pentagram... It is important to remember that men's fashion the. Was essentially a dress... What constitutes men's/women's clothes varies from society to society so the verse is not stipulating a particular dress code and likely does not have cross dressing/sissy play in mind.
I for one feel uncomfortable naked in my own house and can barely watch naked people on tv---all the more if they are sexually unattractive. I do wonder if my latex fetish has got to do with my uncomfortableness with nakedness. (I don't enjoy regular porn but hot women in latex catsuit... Wow. They have my full attention.) With latex I get the release of near nakedness without the vulnerability of being naked. I can feel the difference, which again suggests society's predilection for clothing is innate and evolved rather than a cultural construct.
Tt4n
Errata. My recollection of the context of Duet 22:5 is incorrect. The Astarte worship cross dressing is correct but has nothing to do with the context of the verse. The context is ethics of honesty and consideration for the other person. As such I would regard it as a prohibition about a person of one sex passing themselves off as another. See
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/q...t-accurate for a phrase by phrase explanation. But one should start reading at v1 for context.