God and Sex

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I've been told by Wrong Planet members that Religion and Sex seem to be my two greatest interests. While I don't know if that's exactly true, I don't consider it an unflattering claim about me at all. I do notice, though, that atheists and agnostics seem to imagine God -- "assuming He exists", as they put it -- is / would be basically saying: "WHAT was I THINKING?!?!" when He notices sex going on down on Earth, before quickly hiding His eyes and thinking about any quick diversion He can to spare Himself any further grief.

Okay... setting aside some Baptists and other Puritanical offshoots which view sex as little better than a morally-reprehensible necessity, it is mostly the non-religious folks who say they view the biblical God as being absolutely opposed to sex.

Of course, we have a whole book of the Bible devoted to the pleasures of sex, in lavish detail (Song of Solomon), and, of course, the Bible claims the Saved will eventually have intimacy with God in Heaven the likes of which we cannot even fathom -- read: greater intimacy than occurs in sex. Indeed, the Bible parallels the relationship of a man and his wife to the relationship between Christ and His Church. And it's an easy mental feat to see, from that, that God based marriage and the sex within it on the greater intimacy of our spiritual relations with God -- both present and, especially, future. So, sex, as incredibly intimate as it is, is only the pale shadow of the kind of ultimate togetherness that exists in Heaven.

So, who's frowning on sex? Not God -- that's for sure. It is certain that God frowns on the ultimate physical intimacy being done half-assed, by which is meant out of marriage; if you're going to do the ultimate physical intimacy, then properly mate it with the ultimate relational intimacy: the mutual loving trust and commitment that is marriage. I firmly believe that, once married, God absolutely smiles upon the couple being total sluts with each other in bed! If you don't think God is the God of pleasure, and Satan the god of pain, then you haven't read the Bible closely enough -- because that is clear throughout.

David to God:
"Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore."
Psalm 16:11

Jesus to His hearers:
"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."
John 10:9-10

My wife and I pray to God, naked and aroused, right before sex. And we pray about sex without holding back. If you have any problems with that concept whatsoever, you haven't understood God the way the Bible reveals Him to be.

(If the moderators feel that all philosophical discussion among mature-minded individuals should be G-rated -- or that minors will be corrupted because my thread mentions sex (which is already being taught at young ages in schools) -- feel free to move this thread to the Adult area. I am perfectly happy in both areas, but felt this topic to be primarily a religious and philisophical one.)

Those are the only two options?!?

I think not.

Assuming the existence of God, I was created as I am--sexuality and all. To suggest that God smiles upon sex only within the context of marriage immediately implies that God does not smile upon sex between two people of the same sex. If He created me, then He created me gay, and fully intended for me to express my sexuality.

"Assumption" about God can enlighten a person as much as God's actual words in the Bible?

It would be taking the low (and ignorant) road for me, as a straight person, to attempt to explain to you aspects of being gay, falsely pretending that I understand them. Therefore, the Bible is not there for me to preach from it, as much as it is for you to read it and to draw your own conclusions. Read what God says about homosexuality, and honestly derive the meaning for yourself. It doesn't take a whole lot of interpretation. In the general, though, I can comment: The Bible is clear that not everything we are born wanting to do is right, and that no one is born with only good desires.

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us."
1 John 1:9-10

"Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."
1 Cor 6:9

I cannot, nor would I try to, sit here and deny any certain way that you were born feeling. But as I stated, we all are born with great impediments, hurdles to overcome -- chiefly among them, the universally-present human desire to sin. But life is about learning, and eventually overcoming our individual hurdles through that learning and sustained effort. No one's born at the finish line of life.

You're going to be tempted to say what is often said about Christians: that I am pronouncing judgment as a self-righetous hypocrite -- when, actually, you'd just be regurgitating past claims from some people about other people. Actually, I haven't changed a single word of these verses, and if you don't think they have any real meaning for you, that opinion is freely yours to have. I don't know you; why should I attempt to judge, or apply anything to your specific situation? After all, I am to "judge not, lest I be judged" (Matt 7:1). The Bible is crystal-clear about the fact that God is the judge.

History is clear enough that whatever scripture's value as a moral guide, it cannot be the unadulterated word of God. Too many committees have sat, over the millenia, to make decisions about what is canonical and what is not for us to labour under any misapprehension that the content of scripture is wholly and entirely the word of man--acting, perhaps, from the best of intention, but not as the unerring mouthpiece of the Almighty. The words of John are the words of John alone; the words of Paul are the words of Paul alone. They are to be understood in the context of the time and place in which they were written, secure in the knowledge that if scripture is to provide a moral guide for all time, then it must do so in a fashion that recognizes the inevitable evolution of human society.

To greater or lesser extent Christian thought has encompassed the emancipation of Christian women. It is morally reprehensible for it to do any less for queer Christians.

As for my own relationship with scripture (leaving aside the fact that I am Jewish), it is certainly clear to me that I am responsible for my behaviour. Further, I recognize that I am regularly tempted into behavior that I know to be wrong. But I am perfectly capable of recognizing the difference between my sexual attraction to a man that is not my partner, and my sexual attraction to men in general. The former is a temptation to misconduct which I am enjoined to resist. The latter is an inherent part of my human existence.

Here's where I think that scripture has it absolutely and unequivocally wrong: it relies on behavioral determinism to define innate characteristic. Now some Christian and Jewish thinkers have taken a step forward, claiming that there is no sin in homosexuality, but only sin in homosexual activity. To this I say, "utter rubbish." A loving and mericful Creator would never create a person with an innate sexual orientation and then forever condemn the expression of that sexuality.

Many, many Christians have already reached such a reconciliation of their faith with sexuality. It remains only for that seed of acceptance to flourish and grow.

Life is about learning? That's about the biggest sucker punch I have ever heard a christian give about homosexuality. There is no desire for sin in a Man having sex with a Man, because it is a chief fact of life that forcing everyone to be Heterosexual is against nature. The thing is that not having homosexuals in a species with two genders is highly abnormal.

The reason is that Human Homosexuals have been so thoroughly presecuted is based completely on them being in the minority and subject to the arbitrary will of pointlessly strict authoritarians who feel a Deity is on their side.


Regurgitating somehow makes it sound like something that wasn't made for the right reasons. It also sounds defensive, because visagrunt hasn't acted that way at all. You're not a hypocrite, and you're not proven as self-righteous. You are ignorant though, possessing the complete lack of any reason why anyone should call gays or homosexual activity bad in any way and putting instead your faith in ideology. I put my faith in reason and sense.


No thing that I can dispute as not existing can freely judge me, especially when it is clear that the God of the Tanakh and the New Testament has been such a hypocrite, a God of peace that slaughters the innocent and arbitrarily too.

That you try to pronounce this deity as being my or anyone's judge is an imperious assertion. Why don't you leave good and innocent people in peace rather than darken them with false warnings and words of black clouds on the horizon?

If God exists, which I seriously doubt, I think it made sex for the comedy value.

Maybe God just has a perverse sense of humour.

It does sound like an advertisement for masturbation.

Actually, being perfect, or righteous, or sinless is against nature. That's the entire basis of the Gospel message. We fail by our very nature, therefore we need God.




In whose reason and sense do you place your faith? That's the question. Yours? Mankind's? I don't trust in either, but rather I chose to follow the Bible's recommendation to distrust man's wisdom and trust in God's instead. (I assume you don't need/want those Scripture referrences.)



You know it is not I that make that pronouncement; it is part of the biblical Christian religion. You act as if I somehow stand alone in everything I've written in this thread, and that I invented it, when you clearly know enough to know better.

In that we agree completely.



Philosophically self-contradictory. The biblical God which we are referencing -- God defined as a Person, Who is also the end-all and be-all of everything -- cannot be perverse, because there is nothing for Him to be perverse from (or relative to), except Himself. Logically, no matter how something changes, it can never be its own contradiction. Satan is the author of perversion, and thus is perverse relative to God, the absolute standard.

To the ignorant, it most certainly does. But "right hand" being an antiquated term denoting power, the verse simply refers to God's power to provide pleasure.

so it was his right hand?
stranger danger

How convenient. Your God is either a psycho who enjoys watching people toil or not a God or not existent.



I place my faith in things that I feel make sense. Things that I can prove. Things that I can back up without using my faith in them as a reality warping bubble to hide behind. I don't follow the Bible's reccomendations, because the Bible tells me that its God's existence should be self-evident, which it isn't. So why should I trust it?

[/quote]
I do no such thing! What I say is that you dare misjudge and pronounce a warning upon people for what they are based on your faith in something somehow giving you a right to make a warning of peril!

WHat? That doesn't make sense. A god who does a certain action is perverse for doing that action. Yet you say that because GOd is everything he cannot be perverse because what can he be compared to? That's a load of rubbish. Either something is preverse or it isn't. Whether the thing in question is all of creation isn't perverse.

Say, since you say god is everything, doesn't that mean that he's satan as well? And so doesn't that mean that Satan is not perverse?

I don't consider the metaphysical when I'm getting physical in a sexual way, but I will answer based on the Bible.

If any God exists and created us, the lust and desire we have are actually that God's lusts and desires, it all comes from that God. I don't see the point of a God sitting in judgement of himself. Then again, I don't see any logic in the idea of that same God, in order to reach that judgement, sending himself on a suicide mission in order to prove to the other form of himself(the holy ghost) that he is worthy of himself. And if he isn't, if he finds himself lacking(which he apparently did, since he killed himself) then he probably would've liked to have gone back on the whole be fruitful and multiply dictum.

No, actually, you cannot "just be perverse". Perversity is a measure of something relative to something else. You can't have one thing all by itself, and that thing be perverse. Two things are required: the standard, and the deviation from said standard. One might as well say "the way to Leipzig is east". There is utterly no meaning to that statement, unless a point of origin is specified. God is sovereign. He can do whatever He wants, and by definition it's righteous.*

*This would be, and has been throughout history, a HORRIBLE thing to say about a human (various supreme leaders of countries, for example). But to say it about a God Who is infinite in time, space, knowledge and power -- that's logical. He is that standard of perfection by which everything is judged, and to whom everything is compared.