Religion has decisively influenced sex in all human cultures. Very often religion has taken the view that it should decide the morality of a culture. This means that religion that decides whether sex is good or bad, whether it is joyful or sinful, whether it is hidden or open, whether it is bound by heterogeneous sex or open to a wider of division sexualities. Since religion controls morality it determines laws and social customs to prosecute or persecute those who will not obey the sexual guidelines in a particular society. This has led to a myriad of instances moving from ostracism and physical punishments to death sentences throughout time.
In very recent times because of the Enlightenment and the age of science there has been an increasingly progressive freedom of thought. Generally the world has seen a drastic reduction in the commanding powers of religion, magic, and other superstition. The most important adjustment to sexual thinking in the 21st century is that religion has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. Like church and state, religion and sexuality should exist independently of each other in the modern world. History and anthropology show us clearly that morality and attitudes formed by religion are completely arbitrary.
Our entire planet remains captivate d by numerous opposing religious belief systems.
Each religion claims to be truth without any supporting evidence of their veracity. In essence the majority of humans believe in a system of fairy tales. They tell themselves a fairy tale that defies every known law of the universe just to get through each day. Priest and preachers encourage this capacity for self delusion and make belief in the impossible into a virtue called faith.
In our modern world, hundreds of millions of Christians, Muslims and Jews blithely ignore the evidence that the testaments of their religions are a mixture of tribal legends, fabrication, deliberate censorship and garbled versions of eyewitnesses, combined with immense amounts of material taken from foreign mythologies and philosophies. In a scientific age, religious people believe an astonishing mixture of superstition, magic, mythology, lies and profound teachings. For Christians, Muslims and Jews all this is enfolded around one primitive tribal war god and his creative followers. Believers allow their view on sex to be conditioned by these mythologies.
Religions practiced by other peoples of the world are little better. Even Buddhism, as practiced by the masses has taken much from other tradition and has strong mixtures of mythology, superstition and interpretations far beyond the ideals of the founder. In point of fact all religions are based on collections of myths, fabrications and customs that have been made into orthodoxy by custom and time. . Yet hundreds of millions of people today profess to believe in a bronze age barbaric deity created by men 3000 years ago. They go on to let the prelates of these bronze age gods tell them they cannot use birth control.
Religions generally create absurdities and ask us to believe. Was the world really created in seven days? Is the earth really only 6000 years old as believed by fundamentalist and good Catholics? Are all the millions of bones of dinosaurs simply our imagination? Is the strikingly clear evidence of step by step evolution the equal of creationism which has no facts at all to support it’s conclusions.? Are all the myriad of world religions simultaneously true or simply primitive explanations of incomprehension? If god was universal why would he she or it allow a myriad of approaches to belief and sexuality?
Religion is unable to answer any important questions. Why does an omnipotent and omnipresent god seem to be without any power whatsoever to create a good, safe world? Why did god create evil,? Why do children die? Why does god allow horrible disease, Why does god allow war? Why does god allow Satan? Why does god allow his churches to do monstrous evil? Why does god allow millions to be slaughtered in his name? How can such a god be good or just? Why would a just god want people to suffer? Why would god care what positions humans use for sex and how often they indulge? Why would a just god want people to live in guilt? Why would a just god need the threat of sin and hell to make people worship him?
The educated founders of the United States considered these questions logically. They were mostly Deist, believing that if there was a god, it had nothing to do whatsoever with human affairs. They believed revelations and miracles were ridiculous. They tended to believe that religions fell under the category of outright superstition. They did not even consider Christmas day a holiday for the first 65 sessions (years) of congress, and worked on that day. As time passed America took a more conservative spin and this information of the agnostic-atheistic philosophy of the founders was hidden. Thomas Jefferson‘s words were forgotten: “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe in nothing, than to believe what is wrong”
For a time the old world order will do anything to survive. They will burn or almost burn, scholars like Bruno and Galileo who wish to question antiquated theories. The old authority will order heretics or witches to be burnt in the hundreds of thousands or millions. In the 21st century they will put forward absurd notions like “creation theory” based on nothing more than wishful thinking presented as if it were scientific fact. They will issue fatwas, ordering their followers to kill those with opposing views. Against all rationality they will declare the infallibility of their corrupt religious leaders.
No one who has not chosen to delude himself can be a scientist or rational man and believe in religion. The choice is a simple mater of mythology versus facts. Yet millions will allow these systems to determine their views on sexuality. The state will always use religions, safeguarding a system that tells the multitudes they will go to heaven if they obey the church and state. Historians are well aware that religion has consistently held humankind back, by allying itself with the rulers who are usually interested in maintaining the status quo
The Catholic church’s ridiculous stance of forbidding birth control on an overcrowded planet stems from this antiquated worldview. Woman is regarded as simply a vehicle for male sperm. The Patriarch Abraham promised to worship Yahweh. In return, Jehovah promised Abraham his seed would be as numerous as the sands of the sea. Thus a contract was formed between this war god and man. The Catholic Church says this contract formed 3500 years ago with a minor but jealous god cannot be denied. The real reason for this contract is because women have no right to determine what goes on in their own bodies because they are only Adam’s rib. The core belief to which Islam, Judaism and Christianity all adhere in different degrees is that women are chattel to be used in bearing more male children to worship this bronze age male god.
Religion has evolved out of fear of the unknown and death. This fear kept humankind imprisoned mentally and physically for tens of thousands of years. The revolution in Western intellectual and sexual thinking began with the Renaissance. It was stymied by the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation and their intransigence.
Nevertheless, since the Enlightenment, the sexual revolution has made steady, if slow progress, especially in the more affluent nations.
Today’s other great world religion (by population) Islam, focuses on a “submission to god“, which has come to mean an unquestioning belief in religious precepts of ignorant imams interested in maintaining the absurd women suppressing beliefs of 7th century Arabia and Persia. It is clear, as in Christianity, that the Qu-ran was pieced together by conservative Arabian friends and followers of Muhammad in a period stretching over 200 years after his death. Again, as with Christ, we have no idea how little or how much of Muhammad’s inspired wisdom ended up in the modern Qu-ran. What is clear from the facts is that a male patriarch society made woman chattels and enshrined a war god of ancient Israel to supervise their religious conquests.
Sex in the ancient world was looked on as man’s direct contact with the godhead.
Woman was a goddess through her ability to conceive new life. Man a god only when in union with the female and thus touching the godhead The penis and the vulva, were once enshrined as the symbols of the nexus of all creation. They represented the fecundity of all the earth revered by all ancient cultures as the embodiment of life. The early Catholic church decided to take a negative view of sexuality and labeled sexual desire as the hook of the devil. The penis and the vulva became, in Europe, the corrupters of all mankind, a shame and abomination, atrocity bringing only dishonor and hellfire.
This model survived well into the 21st century and caused tremendous harm to millions of individuals. Do we really want to continue to live with an antiquated model of human sexuality derived from two to three thousands years ago.?
In the East sex was traditionally regarded as a high art form worthy of respect The West tended to view sexuality as a devil inspired with many inevitable negative associations. Religion was central to both these divergent philosophies. In the former it made sex positive but reduced the woman to an instrument of man’s pleasure. In the latter religion made sex an absolute negative and reduced woman to a subhuman status where she was exploited.
Christianity and Islam have functioned as the greatest deceptions of the last two millennia. They serves to detach the human species from the natural world, and deny the personal connection with the godhead in favor of ritual, magic, authority, fear and intolerance. They encourages blind submission to authority and reduce human responsibility. Most importantly they empowers those who know the truth to use a fabricated myth to manipulate and control whole societies and sexuality.
What is the purpose of gods today? Are these supernatural beings supposed to reduce human suffering, prevent war, prevent disease, prevent death.? They do not do any of these things. What people do is empower these gods to diminish and disempower humanity by fostering superstition, myth and magic. And by promoting disbelief in an evidence based world they prevent progress in science, medicine, biology, mathematics and basically all human endeavors.
This period of planetary crisis demands a synthesis of dynamic and receptive, of creativity and acceptance of male and female energy principles. Western science is beginning to see the need to include vast areas that it had heretofore been irrationally outrageously and unscientifically dismissing. For its part, the East is opening its private, mystical esoteric researches to repeatable scientific controls to advance the larger Transpersonal-scientific-psychology which Timothy Leary is calling Exo- Psychology* (see Leary, Timothy, Neurologic, Exo-Psychology, Neuropolitics
Humankind, the creator of gods, must step forward to be his own creator and make his own associations. This period of planetary crisis demands a synthesis of ideas based on understanding and openness founded in non-mythological principles. For humanity to move beyond superstition mankind must divorce itself from religion . And for humans to experience free sexuality they must move beyond religious guilt or control.
Religion is after all only superstition. Superstition is defined as: A credulous belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge. Religious parishioners are simply superstitious when they indulge in unfounded beliefs in god, the devil, demons, hell, heaven, miracles, afterlife and numerous other gullible fairy tales.
Do we want our sexuality defined by superstition? No Here I offer a new alternative Tantra for those able to cast off the constrictions of religion and practice Spirituality without god.