Comments on: Sin, Sex, Secret Societies

By: Niklaus Pfirsig

Niklaus Pfirsig — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:49:08 +0000

I think the Judeo-Christian ideas of sex and sexual morality have nothing to do with the religion, but stem from the church when it was a governing body. Th Judeo-Christian belief set mankind apart from the animals, and sex is the most obvious reminder that we are animals in the physical sense.
Much of the attitude toward women actually started as something else. In the earliest nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, women were considered more important than men, as they were the one who bore the children. I battles between warring tribes, the women and children would be taken into the winning tribe. Therefore, women were to be protected. As the nomadic lifestyle gave way to the agrarian cultures, this concept of protection turned to something more like enslavement. This was heighten in the cultuers of ancient greece and in the Roman empire, which child bearing as a weakness instead of something important to the survival of the people.
The Christian faith came into existence during the time of the Roman empire. As such it reflected a mixing of both Judaic and Roman cultural memes, At the time, both cultures had stories of men being weaked by wiley women, to the point that by the time of Christ, both Roman and Judaic mythology view women as weak-willed and easily controlled by the less wholesome concepts of greed, selfishness, and petty ambition.

By: Mark Tiedemann

Mark Tiedemann — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:22:39 +0000

Dan,

It was anthologized in Asimov’s Vampires, link below. Used paper is cheaper than a kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Asimovs-Vampires-Gardner-Dozois/dp/0441003877/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200874701&sr=1-1

By: the chaplain

the chaplain — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:15:51 +0000

Great post. I enjoyed both the book and the movie, notwithstanding Dan Brown’s shortcomings as a writer. Christianity and Islam have done a huge disservice to humankind by demonizing sex. Even when I was a Christian, I had no difficulty with the idea that Jesus may have been married. The idea actually raised my estimate of him since, as you pointed out, it would have been evidence that he was fully engaged in the human experience and therefore able to speak about it more authoritatively.

By: Dan Klarmann

Dan Klarmann — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:11:56 +0000

I got and read Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code back when churches began forbidding their congregations to read the latter. The pair in hardback cost me just a dollar from a book club. I enjoyed them, much as I enjoy books by Tony Hillerman and John D. MacDonald. Brightly painted adventure stories wrapped around murder mysteries. I found it refreshing to have a popular book treat the idea of Jesus as a man rather than as a gay godling. (No, I am not suggesting that Jesus, if he existed, was homosexual. But look at his lifestyle.) I have no interest in seeing the movie: I am always disappointed in the compromises that a movie has to make in telling a story first presented in a novel. Too much is inevitably chopped out. I suspect that the action, the motivations, and the character depth (such as it is) of the book were all diluted. btw: I'd like to read Drink, but don't want to pay almost the price of a fully functioning low-end laptop computer for a hardback sized reading gadget.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:51:16 +0000

“a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones”

Blaspheme!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Kingdom_of_the_Crystal_Skull

By: Vicki Baker

Vicki Baker — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:42:13 +0000

Your last paragraph is very lyrical, by the way. Enjoyed reading this.

By: Vicki Baker

Vicki Baker — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:40:40 +0000

It’s unfortunate that some of the ideas about sexuality and Christianity in “The Da Vinci Code” got buried under Dan Brown’s unfortunate prose style. I agree with you that Jesus was probably not hung up on sexuality as some of his later followers. One interesting idea that I read somewhere was that St. Paul’s more misogyist statements and policies were a backlash against women having too much (comparatively) power in the early church.