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by Not too long ago, a minister in Florida encouraged followers to have sex for thirty days as a means of tightening marriage bonds and improving quality of life. A genuine movement is afoot within the American Christian community to undo centuries of sexual demonization. A Christian psychotherapist from Texas describes the difficulty many believers have struggled with, "It's a real hard shift for people mentally to go from an entirely prohibited activity to do it all the time." Pastors and ministers involved indicate many of their followers were seeking ways in which to to enjoy themselves without feeling guilty and dirty from the manner in which religion had depicted sex. As such, many have gone as far as re-interpreting biblical passages via the standard poetic tools of allusion in order to take solace that couples taking pleasure with one another are not committing sinful acts. The awakening is summarized best from a popular Christian website, "We discovered that God’s Word is holy and hot … filled with invaluable wisdom for our sexual relationship."
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Why This Bothers Me by VnutZ :: NR8 :: on 21 April 2008
I'll be quite happy if the movement succeeds and Americans as a whole stop being such prudes. I mean c'mon, your parents "did it" and their parents "did it". It's natural - enjoy it.
However, the fact that it takes a minister to make it "OK" and needs allusive re-interpretation of the bible irritates me.
1) Can you really not think for yourself? Do you only do things your pastor tells you to do - ie, when you look in the mirror do you see Ned Flanders? Religion can be your guide to better living ... but if you are incapable of surviving without the equivalent of a tribal leader blessing your every decision than the genetic lifeguard needs to blow a whistle and take you out of the big gene pool while so the adults can swim around for awhile.
2) The very fact that the bible is getting "re-interpreted" for the sake of appeasing a mortal desire is everything that is wrong with modern dogma. When the bible serves as your guide for some ethical dilemmas here and there, re-interpretation may not be such a big deal. But when the bible serves as the truth, it is absolutely reprehensible for one not to be furious that its meaning is being altered. Truth is timeless. If truth needs to be updated to fit contemporary times, than either it wasn't true, people don't really care if its true as long as its someone else's call, or society really has strayed that far from the truth. For everyone that's ever claimed - "no, it is the unchanged word of god" - well, you're looking at exactly why I don't buy into religion. In order to keep the flock, the shepherds are changing the meaning to keep them satisfied. How many times over the course of the centuries do you think this has happened? Lots.
So I find myself wrapped in irony. I want the American prude to relax and let themselves have a little fun. But at the same time, the mechanism by which they seem to be achieving that should be infuriating anyone that has ever made the argument that the bible's word is irrefutable. The message can't change because you want it to or need it to in order to to make some action "okay".
RE: Why This Bothers Me by NomadSoul :: NR5 :: on 21 April 2008
"Amen" to that -- it is a little disturbing that people need to get permission from their priests. But one step at a time. When a whole group of people has been so closed off for so long, it's understandable that they need some reassurance. As their faith opens up they'll become more self-reliant and eventually it will be a matter of free and healthy dialog with their ministers and with Truth. That's the thing with truth, it really can't be expressed in words, and so a book like the bible can only point at it, it should never be mistaken for the truth itself--just as the word "rock" isn't actually a rock.
RE: Why This Bothers Me by scottb :: NR7 :: on 21 April 2008
I second the observation of the irony here, but I think it's a little more complicated.
First, I don't really think you've captured quite what's going on here. It's not that the traditional, hard-line, literalist bible assholes have started "reinterpreting" the bible to see sex as being "ok".
What's really happening here is what always happens. People "shop around" for religion, and it's a buyer's market. The last decade has been one in which many people found the hard-line literalist religions to be attractive, and fundamentalism has grown. But I think people are finally starting to get tired of how the bullshit tastes, and they're shopping around again.
This time, they're starting to again hear the more liberal interpretations that have been there all along. Karl Wojtyla (better known as Pope John Paul II) gave as his first major papal teaching, nearly three decades ago, a generally sex-positive series of lectures called the Theology of the Body.
Liberal theology is on the rise again. That's a good thing - not as good as dumping theology entirely, but better than a fundamentalist shutting off of the rational faculties.
Where I've always found the irony is that the fundies are so adamant that humans are different in some essential way from animals. And yet the one way in which we are observably quite different - our capacity to reason - they want to put to an end.