Nasty dirty old sex

[Argus]

I've been musing of late about the attitude of most of the world's major religions towards sex. I find it all a bit confusing. For example, Lust is one of the seven deadly sins. But isn't lust just another word for arousal, and if we didn't have arousal would we have children? Probbably not. So God made people horny, or at least the men, which was all that used to matter, so we'd have children. So then why is lust a sin? Shouldn't lust be celebrated as the reason for continued human existence?

Yet most religions don't seem to want men to be horny. The prevailing attitude among Muslims, for example, is that you need to cover women up as much as possible so as to not inspire lust in men. It's a workable theory, but it seems to fail in that the instant men get the chance they seem to turn into groping, raping fiends even in places like Egypt or India where women dress extraordinarily modestly. What causes such lust when all they see is a shapeless, faceless black figure?

Now the interesting thing is that human females don't have a 'heat' cycle. Women only go into heat after watching Justin Bieber dancing on stage, or something like that. In the animal world, things are different. There's no lust there, just a normal animal function driven by the female's estrous cycle. And the only time they have sex is during that period. God didn't use the same pattern for humans, which would have enormously limited sex, for some reason I don't quite get.

So anyway, if anyone can tell me what's so sinful about sex and lust I'd like to hear it...

[Shady]

No offense, but this topic sounds something that might have been discussed 20 years ago. I'm not sure that it's all that relevant, at least in our area of the world. However, the way our culture has become so much more sexualized at a younger, and younger age, I'm not sure having a counter to that in our society is such a bad thing. Not that anyone really listens much to any counter anyways.

[Argus]

No offense, but this topic sounds something that might have been discussed 20 years ago. I'm not sure that it's all that relevant, at least in our area of the world. However, the way our culture has become so much more sexualized at a younger, and younger age, I'm not sure having a counter to that in our society is such a bad thing. Not that anyone really listens much to any counter anyways.

While we in the west aren't cutting off clitorises or killing girls for being seen walking unchaperoned with a boy, we are still wrapped up in the anti-sex culture of the church in a variety of ways. Take the Catholic Church, for example. It teaches that sex is bad, bad, bad. It tolerates it, but only barely, and only in consecrated relationships for the purpose of procreation. Everything else is bad, bad bad. That's why gays are bad. They have sex and it's not for having babies. Bad, bad, bad! Porn is bad! It's all about sex! And not for having babies! And of course, it keeps its own nuns and priests (theoretically) pure of the taint of sex by forbidding them to have sex even within marriage.

And while the Protestants are mostly okay with sex for their preachers, they're not so okay with sex, which is why there are so many protests against sex education in schools, to say nothing of providing birth control information to teenagers, especially in the US. And it doesn't matter if statistics consistently show that those areas which are most religious and have the least amount of sex education have the highest levels of STDs, teen pregnancies and abortion. Sex is bad, bad, bad!

[cybercoma]

I wouldn't say our culture is strictly anti-sex. In fact, our culture is hyper-sexualized, but dysfunctional in a Madonna-Whore Complex sort of way.

[Argus]

I wouldn't say our culture is strictly anti-sex. In fact, our culture is hyper-sexualized, but dysfunctional in a Madonna-Whore Complex sort of way.

Our complex is a result of religious beliefs. That's why you get teenagers killing themselves because some people saw them naked, and why so many people wind up broken and twisted because of sexual events in their youth.

[Mighty AC]

The root of guilt and general anxiety many people have towards sex is likely religious based but the religious certainly do not have a monopoly on molestation. It seems that men have a cornered that market though. I'd guess that both secular and religious folk experience similar rates of incarceration for sex crimes.