Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (22 page)

With the coming of the British Empire and the collapse of the Mogul empire, Christianity infected India. While it did a poor job of converting people, it did a good job of reinforcing Christian sexual mores throughout India, especially on the aristocracy. What Islam started, Christianity finished. Today India is a bastion of sexual conservatism. All media are highly censored for sexual content, even kissing in public is forbidden as Richard Gere learned in 2007 when he kissed the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty on stage. An arrest warrant was issued for this infraction of public decency.
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Does that sound like a culture that produced the Kama Sutra?

Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them – fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systematically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices. Women and children are most affected, but it impacts men in many ways as well.

In this section we explored many different cultures and practices from hunter-gatherers to Greeks and Romans to the current major religions. Hunter-gatherer women were generally not seen as property and had much more freedom. Agriculture had a decided impact on sexual practices as a result of property ownership and labor needs. Today’s religious sexual maps are deeply rooted in the property and inheritance ideas of ancient people.

In the next section we will look at the psychological tools these religions use to ensure sexual conformity. How does religion distort sexuality in our culture today? Why are religions so opposed to sex education? What happens to your sex life when you leave religion?

116
See “Arrest Warrant Issued for Richard Gere Over Kiss,”
People Magazine
, 26 April 2007. Available online at
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20036905,00.html
.

Religion uses natural emotional, psychological and biological processes to distort and shape our sexuality
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Christianity was founded on sexual ideas and practices that were designed to create guilt and shame around what is a perfectly normal drive. As a result, when the Christian religion infects a culture, it immediately creates a sex-negative environment.

Tribal religions generally say nothing about other religions, except “my gods are better than your gods.” They are specific to a given tribe and make no claim to universality. Religion and the culture are indistinguishable. One must be born into the culture to practice the religion.

The notion that there are universal religious principles that supersede any individual culture emerged around 600 BCE. Zoroastrianism may have been the first universal religion in the West. It grew, developed and declined in Persia from about 600 BCE to 100 BCE, but it continued to be a significant influence for another five hundred years. About the same time, Buddhism began in the East and spread rapidly, its universal message often replacing tribal religions wherever it went.

With Christianity in the first century and Islam in the seventh, universal religion became a permanent part of Western culture. Local custom and practice was superseded by the idea that a single god created humans with one sexual style. Obedience to that god meant following one narrow set of sexual practices; all others were sinful.

You may be thinking, “That fits Islam and Christianity, but not Buddhism.” But in a practical sense, Buddhism functions much like any other religion. Mosr Buddhist monks and nuns are celibate. The current Dalai Lama follows the traditional Tibetan Buddhist assertion that inappropriate sexual behavior includes lesbian and gay sex, and any sex other than penis-vagina intercourse with one’s own monogamous partner, including oral sex, anal sex, and masturbation.

The universal religions proposed a revolutionary idea, that religion supersedes culture. Behaving like an invasive species, universal religions decimated tribal religions and infected the minds of tribal cultures, often with the help of armies and diseases. The conquistadors of Spain not only brought armament and missionaries but also devastating diseases. The combination can be very convincing to a people.

One of the most important propagation methods was sex. We find examples of sexual practices similar to those of Christianty or Islam in many tribal cultures, but the idea of a Supreme Being capable of knowing your
every thought and watching you at every moment was a huge step beyond what tribal religions claimed. Tribal religion looked more like a partnership between the tribe and its gods, although they could be as sex negative and oppressive as the universal religions. Universal religions enforced one sex-negative patriarchal standard on anyone infected with the religion, regardless of past tribal traditions and practices. As a result, as soon as a tribe adopted Christianity, for example, there was strong pressure for the tribe to adopt male dominance patterns even if the tribe was once matriarchal.

Whether the tribal religion was more sex positive or sex negative, it became much more sex negative when infected with the universal religion. To most tribal cultures, notions of sin, obedience, spiritual kingdoms, eternal life and heaven made little or no sense when people had lived thousands of years with local gods that brought them rain, crops, game and fertility. The Spanish missionaries worked for 150 years to convert the Hopi with little success. The Hopi eventually revolted, burning churches and killing priests. The Animists of the Sahel desert have successfully resisted conversion for centuries. The Celts of Northern Europe resisted infection for centuries and often secretly kept their rituals and beliefs long after their official conversion. The universal religions have little to offer these cultures. So how do they get converted?

Political and military power and disease led to conversion. Islam swept out of Saudi Arabia and imposed its will on the great, but weak and failing, Persian empire. In the process, it largely supplanted Zoroastrianism. The Persian empire was famously tolerant of all religions, but with Islam’s conquest, local populations were coerced into conversion because non-Muslim tribes were taxed and their influence limited.

Disease was the best ally of Western religions as they sought to infect new cultures. When explorers and missionaries arrived in North and South America, they brought foreign viruses and germs. Conservative estimates are that 80% of the population was killed over just a few decades.
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Measles, influenza and small pox combined to devastate entire nations. One well-documented
example was the Wyandotte (Huron) tribe. In the 1630s, smallpox killed over half of its people.
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Many tribes interpreted this devastation as abandonment by their gods, and the missionaries encouraged such thinking. Just as the small pox or measles attacked the immune system of individuals, Christianity attacked the cultural immune system of these tribes. In this way, the population of much of the Western hemisphere was converted or eliminated.

In the cultures that were not eliminated, the survivors quickly learned that following the god of the conquerors was the best way to avoid future disaster. Much of the message sent by both Islam and Christianity was about abandoning old sexual practices and adopting those of the new religion. Missionaries to Hawaii preached that the devastating epidemics of cholera, measles and gonorrhea were part of divine judgment. From 1779 to 1848, up to 80% of the population died of Western diseases, inadvertently brought by the missionaries and traders.

Once converted, people’s enthusiasm for their new religion could be remarkable. Hence, the Maori of New Zealand are much more fervently Presbyterian or Mormon than the island’s European descendants. Central American Indians practice Catholicism more devoutly than the Spanish who initially gave them the religious disease. Blacks in the United States are more devoutly Christian than the whites who held them in slavery.

The religious conversion process continues today, and it is tied closely to sex. In Africa, Catholics and Evangelicals preach that condoms do not work. Those who distribute condoms or teach their use are vilified as instruments of the devil, encouraging people to have sex. The message is, “You will die of AIDS if you do not conform to Christian notions of monogamy.” When people get AIDS, it is seen as evidence of sinful behavior and divine retribution for not following Jesus.

Throughout history, religion and illness have worked together. Through prayer, religion promises healing from disease and heaven if the disease wins. In every way, religion wins. All too often doctors don’t get credit because missionaries say god guided the doctor’s hand. Missionary doctors are among the worst at spreading this idea.

Many hunter-gatherer tribes have no afterlife concept. The idea of an "afterlife" probably caught on with agriculture and took on many different forms. It may mean reincarnation as a lower or higher being, eternal torture or bliss, promise of heaven and many virgins, or your own planet. There are many afterlife ideas and little agreement on what it may be.

Why do the major religions focus on the afterlife? What benefit do they derive? How is it tied into sex?

With the concept of an afterlife, religion creates a portal to infect people by means of terror and fear of death. Recall our discussion of the Toxic Trio in
Chapter 1
. If one has no concept of an afterlife, then fear of eternal punishment means nothing. But once one is thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea of living forever, then the fear of torture and punishment becomes an effective way to convince people of the need to perform specific rituals and live a certain way.

It is a brilliant psychological tool that leads to death neurosis, an excessive or irrational fear of death. As conscious beings, we are capable of understanding that we will die some day. We also have the ability to imagine a world after we die. Religion hijacks this ability and injects fear of eternal torture and abandonment as well as the promise of eternal bliss. A perfect carrot and stick approach. The ability to imagine what is beyond the horizon of death is what allows religion to take control and make us do unnatural things.

People who have a death neurosis will spend fortunes building monuments to their god. They will pray and ask invisible beings to help them escape punishment. They may pay priests, auditors, ministers or imams huge sums to ensure they get into the next level or go to heaven, etc.

A neurotic person behaves in unnatural ways. Once one is convinced of the idea of eternal life or death, the person may do almost anything to achieve the reward or avoid the punishment. He may fly an airplane into a building or become a missionary to another country. She may become a celibate nun or vow to raise a quiver full of children and homeschool them according to her religion. At the very least, the person will attend church regularly, give money, pray and do other things to ensure good standing with the deity. The root of this action is the hope for a reward and avoidance of punishment.

The entire edifice of the major religions rests on the concept of an afterlife. To make the idea stick in the minds of the followers, there must be an omniscient being who audits your thoughts and behavior to determine if you conformed sufficiently to the rituals and proscriptions to be given the reward or if you failed to do so and, therefore, are sent to punishment or oblivion. This creates the notion of a god watching all the time. It is simple to convince a small child that Jesus is watching her, that angels are present or that some god audits her thoughts. Children already believe that adults have huge powers; it’s not hard to believe that a god does as well.

Using the death neurosis, religion ties your sexual thoughts and behavior to possible reward or punishment. In essence, it says, “You will die eternal death if you have the wrong kind of sex,” extending our natural fear of death into our sex life. What is the psychological effect on a person when he is taught all his life that sex is not only bad but leads to death? How much does death programming lead to sexual dysfunction, fear of sex, sexual impotence and the fear of having too much fun in bed?

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the primary purpose of the human sex drive is to connect people to one another and to the culture. Death neurosis disrupts the joy of sex and reduces the connection that sex brings to people. Loss of positive sexual connection has consequences, including depression and inappropriate sexual expression.

Humans love sex. Both men and women are wired to be sexually responsive. Sex is the social glue of the human species. It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human’s sex drive.

Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty. The Adam and Eve story is taught to young children even though they have no way to know what it means.

Next comes the sexualization of breastfeeding. Most tribal religions pay little or no attention to a mother nursing a child. With the religious fear of nudity, however, breastfeeding is carefully hidden. Thus, one of the most natural things a human can do is turned into something shameful. A simple Web search of “breastfeeding scandals” yields a trove of controversy over this simple and natural act. Read the anti-breastfeeding comments, and it
is quickly apparent that many people see it as a sexual act or a provocation, partly because it is associated with bodily pleasure.

Breastfeeding was not seen as sexual in earlier Christian culture. Medieval and Renaissance religious art is replete with pictures of Mary breastfeeding Jesus. If we are to take that as an indication of the attitude to breastfeeding in that day, it appears that breastfeeding was not sexualized.