Of sex and religion

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
RELIGION and sex make strange bedfellows but, make no mistake, bedfellows they most determinedly are.
Both seem as far apart as our perception of good and evil but rare is the case when they are indeed separate.
Sex is perhaps the biggest taboo in religion and yet religion seems rigged out for sex. Religious ceremonies are conducted in ankle-length garb yet there is something ridiculously sexy in religious ceremonies. Devotees, eyes turned heavenward, utter such language in praise and song that would pass equally happily in private bed chambers.
“Come in to my house. I love you. I worship you. I cannot live without you. We will sing a song of love.”
At certain religious gatherings congregation members press themselves together and hug and sing and dance in wild abandon. It is not uncommon that congregation members often end up in each other’s arms quite naked in profane actions quite blasphemous to their earlier declarations of divine devotion. In extreme cases devotees of some sects proceed from religious celebrations to sexual orgies.
Sexual relations outside of marriage is declared a cardinal sin and until 1951, the Catholic Church held sexual relations to be reserved exclusively for the purpose of procreation. It made no mention of love or pleasure.
Yet sex and religion are intertwined, inseparable, linked together. Quite rare is the event when responsibility to sustenance of the species disturb lovemaking. It is mostly later that responsibility kicks in and most often than not conception is an afterthought, an unwanted occurrence which never entered both participants’ thoughts when the fire took hold of them to get going.
It would pain most of us to think we are here by an accident of nature but many of us most definitely are.

Be fruitful and multiply
Before good and evil can enter the world of a person, the person must first be born. Birth, before in-vitro fertilisation, gene splicing and cloning were discovered, requires physical union of the male and female members of the species.
Religion and sex began together in the garden of Eden.
To every creature, including the first man and woman, was given God’s most powerful first commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply. Bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply in it.” – World English Bible.
To go forth and multiply and fill the earth is the first divine edict to procreate, to mate, to have sexual intercourse in order to beget offspring and ensure the species was sustained in perpetuity.
There is no commandment more noble, none more powerful. Little wonder then that a stallion will bust its corral to find the mare in heat and all other creatures great and small, including man, follow in like fashion.
There are no questions or protests to this order. God did not need to repeat his creative genius every era because It provided seeds in the first act and commanded each creature and plant to flower, make seeds and ensure they were planted in right proper fashion, repeating the creation story each generation.
Despite its divine origin sex has become a degraded, debased aspect today, a dark secret which shocks and shuns all whenever it crashes into the daylight every so often. Sex has perhaps acquired its quaint taint because its seems to enter into Eden with the first sin.
All animals including Adam and Eve are naked but our first parents did not recognise the fact or if they did it did not bother them until they sinned. It is only after they had taken from the tree of life in direct disobedience of God’s directions that their eyes “were opened” to the fact of their nakedness and they sought to hide.
Is sexual impropriety implied in the first sin? Why were their eyes opened to the fact of their nakedness? Why did the first couple hide their nakedness?
God’s punishment has a strange sexist slant to it too. Man is condemned to labour by the sweat of his brow but the woman is condemned further to labour in child birth and be bitten by the snake, her mortal enemy.
Labour which is a very natural progression from his earlier “multiply and fill the earth” blessing becomes instead a painful curse after sin entered the world.
Sin seems blamed on woman. Man seems only her unwilling accomplice. (No questions required here as to which sex kept the Bible accounts flowing.)
After the first sin it is all downhill for the woman. She is clearly second rate and treated as inferior or a temptress to man throughout the Old Testament until we arrive at the New Testament where is introduced one woman who is declared without Original Sin, untainted by Eve’s sin. This is found in Mary, the mother of Christ Jesus.
She conceives Jesus outside of God’s first commandment, by the working of the Holy Spirit in the Immaculate Conception. That is of course an aside from the central theme of this discourse which is the pervasive impact and curious interplay of sexual and religious life down through the centuries to its controversial emergence today in the life of the biggest Christian church on earth.
Author Chapman Cohen puts it boldly in his book Religion and Sex: “Sexualism, instead of being something to be glorified, and,… becomes something to be hidden or decried. Ignored it may be. Decried it may be; but it will not be denied. That is a practical impossibility in the case of so powerful and so pervasive a fact as sex. We may disguise its expression, but only too often the disguise is the equivalent of undesirable and unhealthy manifestations.”
Elsewhere the same author states: “From the beginning it strove to suppress the power of sexual feeling. It was an enemy against whom one had to be always on guard, one that had to be crushed, or at least kept in subjection in the interests of spiritual development. And yet the very intensity of the efforts at suppression defeated the object aimed at. With some of the leaders of early Christianity sex became an obsession. Long dwelling upon its power made them unduly and unhealthily conscious of its presence. Instead of sex taking its place as one of the facts of life, which like most other facts might be good or bad as circumstances determined, it was so much dwelt upon as to often dwarf everything else.”
It is not a thing to be spoken of or written about in the past tense.
With a toxic mixture of unadulterated sexism in public discussion and displayed unashamedly across the media today, religion seems immersed in sex as it has always ever been and will be for ever more until life itself ceases.

• Next: Of gods and aliens