Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (23 page)

Hundreds of statues in U.S. courthouses and capitols contain the “blind lady of justice” with one breast showing. It is often a classical Greek or Roman likeness that was virtually unnoticed for decades until in 2002, when then U.S. attorney general, John Ashcroft, ordered a statue in the U.S. Justice Department covered. Perhaps, he felt it was pornographic. The art deco statue has stood since the 1930s in the Justice Department and one day the extremely religious Protestant attorney general decides it is pornographic. This is the same mentality as the Taliban in Afghanistan or Muslims in India or Pakistan destroying ancient Hindu or Buddhist art because it shows nudity.

Such is the mindset of large puritanical segments of all the major religions. Whether Hindu, or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, these groups thrive on demonizing sex. These, among many other signals, infect children and sexualize things that are not necessarily sexual.

For thousands of years, cultures have used physical marking and circumcision to denote membership in the group. Many religions have adopted this practice to signal religious membership and mark the child from birth or early adolescence. It is no coincidence that the primary marking method of Judaism, Islam and Christianity deals with male sex organs primarily and female sex organs less often. Many cultures use tattoos, scarification or other markings, but these religions have reduced the ritual marking of children to the genitals. It is a strong indication that sex and sexuality belong to the religion and supersede local cultural ideas.

Many religions attempt to mark children from an early age. While the psychological indoctrination is insidious, the physical marking can be horrendous. Male circumcision is seen as “normal” among Christians and is mandatory in Judaism and much of Islam. For Islam and Judaism, it marks
one as a member. The uncircumcised may be considered unclean and may not be allowed to marry members of the religion.

An atheist couple who are cultural Jews refused to circumcise their boy. While both sets of grandparents are not religious, they were extremely upset, leading to disruption of communication between the parents and grandparents for many months. The message from the grandparents was, “Be an atheist if you want, but get your child circumcised so he can remain a member of the tribe.”

In male circumcision, Jewish parents are making the choice that their child will be Jewish. While some Jewish groups, including humanistic and reformed Jews, have declared that circumcision is not necessary for Jewish identity, that is not the stance of orthodox and other conservative Jewish groups. In one television interview about circumcision, one rabbi stated, “It’s painful, it’s abusive, it’s traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn’t in a covenant, they ought to be put in prison … I do abusive things because I’m in covenant with god.”
¹¹⁹

It is an amazing admission that belief in an invisible, voyeuristic god gives license for criminal abuse of an infant.

In many Muslim communities, male circumcision is considered a sunnah, or practice instituted by Mohammed himself. Parents who refuse to circumcise their boy would be seen as unfaithful Muslims and could be ostracized or in danger. It is a permanent mark forced on the child by a religion he did not voluntarily join.

In addition, Muslim male circumcision is most generally done when the boy is around 12 years old. The pain and trauma of infant circumcision may not be remembered later in life, but it is for a 12-year-old. How is that not mutilation? How much does that affect the boy? In my family I have seen the damage this practice does. My grandmother forced my father to become circumcised when he was 12. It traumatized him at the time and left an emotional scar for the rest of his life. Even discussing it later in life, it brought back painful memories that he associated with his sexuality.

Circumcision was not common among Christians in North America until around 1900 when several threads of thought came together to increase and encourage its practice. Religious concern over adolescent masturbation
led John Harvey Kellogg
¹²⁰
to start a campaign for circumcision. He believed that circumcision decreased male adolescent response and inhibited male masturbation.

Other religious groups started preaching that an uncircumcised penis is dirty and unclean. While they often used fallacious medical arguments to convince parents to circumcise their children, the roots of the idea were religious. The fact that women bought into this idea and were often the persons making the decision to circumcise their sons meant that they began to see the uncircumcised penis as unclean. They passed the idea along to their daughters. Today, many women will not date an uncircumcised man. Some on-line dating sites even ask if the man is circumcised.

Female circumcision was practiced by tribes in the Arabian peninsula at the time of Mohammed. According to the Hadith, Mohammed apparently approved of the practice, though he cautioned against severe mutilation. The practice was adopted as a way to mark a woman as a Muslim, subject to Allah, her male family members and eventually her husband.

Some Islamic authorities believe that Mohammed was very clear in his instruction for both men and women to be circumcised.
¹²¹
Others argue that the practice is not a commandment or Sunnah from the Prophet. In any case, those who practice it today do it as a religious requirement based on dogma. While it may not have originated with Islam, it has become an integral part of the religious practice in many regions tied to notions of male dominance and control of female sexuality.

An estimated three million girls worldwide are subjected to genital mutilation and 500,000 in the immigrant communities of Europe.
¹²²
Various
forms of female circumcision are practiced by different communities; nevertheless, the practice always involves cutting a woman’s genitalia in ways thought to reduce or eliminate sexual desire. The procedure is most generally done without anesthesia to girls age 10-12. They are kept in the dark about the procedure and may be deceived into thinking it is harmless and painless until the day it is done. It is difficult to describe such a process in words, but others have written about it in great detail. For example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book
Nomad
gives an excellent, though horrifying, description based on her own experience.

The practice of female circumcision has grown in recent decades. Communities in Africa that never practiced it have been infected with more fundamentalist Islamic ideas that include stronger control of women. Further, the rapid increase of the practice in European Muslim communities is seen as a product of fundamentalist immigrants spreading conservative religious ideas. It is also seen as an attempt to control Muslim girls who may be tempted to become secular.

The practice has no value except in the context of religious control of women. In many African countries, it is illegal but often tolerated by authorities that look the other way. In Europe, entire Islamic communities conspire to hide the practice from the authorities, making it hard to find and prosecute.

From fear of death to sexualizing the normal and marking children, religion is hell bent on creating an environment that is sexually negative – an environment that systematically and arbitrarily restricts options for people. Regardless of the biological map of an individual, religion will do its best to impose its map. The map is almost always focused on what
not
to do. Since humans can rarely, if ever, live up to such a restrictive standard, it gives religion a huge opportunity to develop guilt and shame, leading the person back to the religion for relief.
The map bears no resemblance to human sexuality.
It is an artificial and arbitrary set of rules imposed by the religion on its adherents. The result is oppression of women, sexual misinformation, fear of death, repression of homosexuals and much more.

117
Jared Diamond provides this estimate in
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
, (1997), p 357.

118
See, for example, Ronald Robertson's discussion in
Rotting face: smallpox and the American Indian
, (2001), pp.107-108.

119
From the film
Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision
. For additional information, see
www.cutthefilm.com/Cut_Website/Home.html
.

120
Of Kellogg cereal fame.

121
The following is often quoted as justification for female circumcision: "Um Atiyyat al-Ansariyyah said: A woman used to perform circumcision in Medina. The Prophet (pbuh) said to her: ‘Do not cut too severely as that is better for a woman and more desirable for a husband’” (see
http://www.religioustolerance.org/fem_cirm.htm
). A recent example is referenced in the article “Cleric Says Female Circumcision Recommended by Islam” available online at
http://www.rudaw.net/english/culture_art/3347.html
.

122
World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNFPA, et al. “Eliminating Female genital mutilation: An interagency statement,” Geneva, 1997, updated 2008. Available online at
http://web.unfpa.org/upload/lib_pub_file/756_filename_fgm.pdf
. In addition, see
Onze verborgen tranen
(Our Hidden Tears), (2005), by Waris Dirie.

Each religion has its own unique distortion pattern. The pattern combines with the historical and ethnic roots of the adherents to create their sexual map. Such a map is filled with conflicts that lead to guilt, shame and anxiety, all of which influence behavior and sexual satisfaction
.

When should a person start having sex? Religious groups are pretty clear about this one. You should have sex only after you are married and only with the person you are married to. But what they profess and what they do are two different things. Religion does not stop adolescents from having sex; it only makes them feel bad about the sex they do have. If they feel guilty, they will keep coming back to their church to get relief from the guilt the religion taught them.

A decade of research shows that religiosity has little or no impact on the onset of sexual activity. From masturbation to petting to oral sex and intercourse, religious kids start about the same time as secular children. U.S. government research on abstinence-only programs comes to the same conclusion.
¹²³
Religious training delays sexual activity by months at best.

Why do religions preach against sex before marriage? They say it is to prevent disease and pregnancy. Some try to convince teens that sex before marriage damages the marriage later. Others say, “God says sex is sinful outside of marriage and you will burn in hell for violating god’s law.” Mormons and Muslims say sex is a sacred possession of woman that she gives only to her husband. These ideas inject guilt and shame into the young victim.

Open, fact-based sex education is among the biggest threats to religion. Knowing the facts about sex reveals the myths that religions preach. That is why most religions oppose secular sex education. Sex education also raises very uncomfortable questions for religious parents. Thus, good sex education will reveal that most people, including one’s parents, masturbate, have sex before marriage, experiment with same sex partners, fantasize and use porn.

The vast majority of religious parents had sex before marriage, yet preach abstinence loudly to their children. It is rare that parents ever let their child know that they were sexually active before marriage. Instead, they tell their children of the hazards and horrors of having sex too early, never addressing the obvious question, “Mom or Dad, how did your premarital sex damage you, as you claim it will do to me?” If they ever answer that question, it is almost always in terms of religious guilt.

Humans have had premarital sex for most of the existence of the species. No credible evidence shows that premarital sex has any negative impact on sexuality, marriage or parenting ability. In Europe, the vast majority of
teens have sex when they decide they are ready, and European civilization has not fallen apart.

European parents generally don’t threaten, kill or beat their teenagers for engaging in sex. They educate their teens with some of the best sex education in the world. Teens are given the information to make their own rational decision about when to begin sex.
¹²⁴
Adolescent sexual health outcomes are consistently better in France, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries than in the United States.

Every life is a set of competing drives and goals. Achieving balance creates greater happiness and satisfaction. Sex requires balance as well. If one loses a sex partner, sexual feelings and behavior are disrupted. Eventually, sexual urges and desire will drive most people to do something about it. They may masturbate more, go out to places to meet possible partners, join an online dating service, etc. These behaviors are driven by natural sexual urges, so ignoring them is not an option for most people. Even those who say they can ignore or reduce their sex drive may not recognize it is being expressed in some other area of their lives.

Having a good sex life with a loving, caring partner or partners helps reduce stress and allows us to be more productive and creative in the other areas of our lives. It helps us create balance between our biological lives and our social and mental lives. Conversely, ignoring or distorting our biological map often leads to problems in our social and mental lives.

Using this naturalistic philosophy as a baseline, let’s look at how different religions distort sexuality away from our natural tendencies.

What did you know about sex before you started engaging in intercourse? That is rhe level of knowledge a priest has unless he is cheating with another man or woman, or both. People don’t learn about their sexuality from books or discussions; they learn mostly from personal experience in bed with themselves or someone else – the opposite of what a priest is taught to do.
Even if a priest is actively engaged in sex, it is illicit, by definition. What does secret, illicit sex teach you about sex and sexual relationships?