It is possible to get your virginity back after you have lost it

Thank you for coming to tonight’s debate. May you find enlightenment by reading this debate and pondering the arguments herein, and may you find hope and encouragement if you mourn the loss of your virginity and desperately wish to get it back. For, I am here to tell you that getting your virginity back is a real possibility, and I do not mean merely to offer you some platitude in which you can recommit yourself to a life of celibacy and call it ‘virginity,’ but that you can literally be a virgin once again.Let me begin with a thought experiment. Suppose that your neighbor has a wooden chair made entirely out of sticks. Each night, you sneak to his porch and carefully replace one of the sticks on his chair with a different stick just to see if he’ll notice. Night after night, you replace one stick at a time until eventually you have replaced every stick that his chair was originally made of. Having done so, there are now no original sticks in his chair. They have all been replaced by new sticks.Now, ask yourself this question: Is the chair on your neighbor’s porch really your neighbor’s original chair? Or is it a completely different chair altogether?Most people I have put this to have told me it’s a completely different chair. That is the correct answer. If that’s the answer that you came up with, then give yourself a pat on the back for being such a brilliant person with keen insights into the subtleties of metaphysics and ontology.But if you are unconvinced, let’s press the analogy a little further. Let’s say that having hid all the original sticks in your shed, you decide to bring them into your garage and assemble them into a chair exactly like the original chair (after all, your neighbor will want his chair back, and you’re not really a bad person). Now, the chair in your garage shares every property in common with the original chair that was on your neighbor’s porch, and it is made of all the same material that your neighbor’s original chair was made out of.Now, I ask you: Which is the original chair that belonged to your neighbor and sat upon his porch—the one in your garage with all the original sticks, or the one presently on your neighbor’s porch with completely different sticks?Hopefully by now you can see that if either of these chairs stands a chance of being your neighbor’s original chair, it’s the one in your garage (and it’s questionable whether even that one is the original chair, but that’s beyond the scope of this debate). The chair on your neighbor’s porch is a completely different chair. It may have the same basic shape and form, but it’s not the same chair because it’s not the same substance.In fact, it really doesn’t matter whether the parts were replaced one at a time or all at once. Imagine if they were replaced all at once by a supernatural being who instantly caused the entire chair to cease to exist, and in the exact same moment caused an identical chair to pop into existence and take its place such that if you saw this event, you would not even notice that it had happened. Well, surely it’s a different chair. But the chair in this analogy is not different than the chair in the original analogy except that whereas the parts were replaced one at a time in the first analogy, they are replaced all at once in this analogy. The result is the same in both cases—you have a completely different chair sitting on your neighbor’s porch.Well, the human body is exactly like the chair in the first analogy. It is in a constant state of flux. Cells die and new cells take their place. There is even replacement on the molecular level. After about ten years, most of the cells in your body have been replaced. The only cells that don’t get replaced are cerebral cortex neurons, heart muscle cells, and cells in the inner portion of the crystalline lens of your eyes, which last most of your life.[1] That means that within every ten years, you basically have a new body with only a few original parts. But certainly your penis or vagina is completely replaced, so you do not have the same penis or vagina you had ten years ago.If you go ten years without having sex, then you are a virgin. The reason is because the body you have after ten years will have never had sex. And certainly the penis or vagina you have after going ten years without sex will have never engaged in sex. That makes you a virgin.Thank you for lending me your eyes for reading and your mind for understanding. I look forward to my opponent's critique.[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com... Other sources say it takes 15 years or so to replace most of the cells in your body. http://www.newscientist.com... The argument is the same in either case.