Catholic Answers: don’t even lie in the same bed . . .
Is it OK for unmarried adults to lie in the same bed, even if they don’t have sex. Quick answer: NO. That’s the advice I got here, at the Chastity Q&A. It’s a sexual catechism filled with all kinds of advice, such as how far you can go without committing a sin.
Is foreplay wrong? Here’s advice I had never before considered:
Image by orangeline at dreamstime.com (with permission)
Perhaps the easiest way to find out if our actions conform to authentic love is to imagine God sitting on a nearby sofa watching us. If his presence would cause immediate shame or the desire to stop dead in our tracks, we need to ask ourselves why.
How creepy! Would a married couple have sex if God was sitting on a nearby sofa watching? And, BTW, isn’t God supposedly omniscient? Aren’t good Christians supposedly to always assume that God is on a nearby sofa?
Is it OK for homosexuals to raise children? No:
The impact of a mother in her family is unrepeatable, and the same can be said of the father. Two moms don’t make a dad, and two dads do not equal a mom. This is the way nature has designed it.
Oh, and don’t bother using condoms, because they cause greater numbers of unplanned pregnancies:
The fact is, increased condom use by teens is associated with increased out-of-wedlock birth rates.”
You’ll also learn that merely looking at women in swimming suits is akin to pornography and that “porn trains us to have mental polygamy.”
All of this advice was provided by spin-off (”Chastity”) site linked to a Catholic website (”Catholic Answers“) that provided so much Catholic esoterica that it left me disoriented in 20 minutes. Truly amazing that so many people are willing to discuss, as one example of many, the difference (if any) between the “holy spirit” and the “holy ghost.” Here’s another interesting question: Should rock music be allowed at church? Absolutely not, because “If you were before Christ being crucified on Calvary, truly there witnessing it, would you start up a rock band and clap and dance?” The argument seems to be that as Jesus was bleeding to death on the cross, he would rather have someone nearby playing solemn music on an organ.
If you want to be more than simply a good Catholic, “Catholicy Answers” is clearly the site for you.
You know, the amazing fact is that people who are obsessed with controlling sexual activity in others are often more obsessed with sex period than people who simply accept it as a part of life.
This is painting with a broad brush, but how can you not in this instance since it’s an institutional approach. Consider Islam.
I was told once by a devout Muslim woman that according to Islam her response to a lesbian—whether she could be alone in a room with one—was to treat the lesbian as a man, which means that she could not ever be alone with a lesbian woman. The entire prohibition against unmarried men and women being alone together is the assumption that sex will ensue. I asked, “What about if neither of you is attracted to the other?” That wasn’t even included in any model of the concept.
I pointed out that I had many female friends, with whom I was often alone, and that wanting to have sex with them didn’t even occur to me.
She found that unbelievable.
Being so repressed leads to obsession, in this case. Islam accuses the west of being sex obsessed, but when you look at the number and bizarreness of their rules about it, obviously they’re thinking about it A LOT more than we are.
I think the same rough assumption can be made about any group that goes to these lengths to tell other people what they can and cannot do. It really is their problem (emphasis on “problem”) not yours.
I participated in “Catholic Answers Forum” in the run-up to the 2008 election.
I was cautioned for calling McCain a “Liar.” Dozens of others were not for calling Obama a “baby killer.”
I was soundly condemned for posting my DI post on “Why Practicing Catholics Should Vote for Obama and Not for McCain.”
http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/09/07/why-practicing-catholics-should-vote-for-barack-obama-not-for-john-mccain/
My post was taken down.
My defenses of the post were taken down.
I was, again cautioned not to make accusations that others were hypocrites and that the Church had to be aware of McCain’s wrong positions on life issues and traditional Catholic values and that the Church supported him despite his sinful policies because of money.
As many others had said of Catholic Obama voters, I said McCain voters would go to hell.
My post was stricken, I was banned from the website.
I later posted on DI about Catholic McCain voters and hell being in their futures.
http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/11/15/catholic-mccain-voters-are-going-to-hell/
The Catholic Answers Forum, and the website in general, is populated by persons whose critical unwillingness to actually participate in debate about issues before Catholics is unfortunate. The website is populated by far right wing neocon persons who call themselves “Catholic” but, like latter day Savoronolas burn down anything which they feel isn’t consistent with their extremely narrow neocon pre-Vatican II view of the Church.
It’s unfortunate “CAF” is there to cast doubts upon the sanity of Catholics, and to mislead non-Catholics into believing that the site somehow represents mainstream Catholic thought.
In my opinion, the views expressd on “CAF” are frequently so far outside the Catholic mainstream as to border upon heresy. And now we Catholics get it in the chin from others (who may yet be saved!)using the fallacy of composition to make mainstream Catholicism look as silly as “CAF.”
My understanding of the Islamic fundamentalist idea of separating men and women is that they don’t trust the men to keep it in their pants. Traditionally, it fell upon male family members to protect their wives daughters and sisters from all the other horny men out there, since there were no civilian police in olden times.
Since Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all descended from the same ancient Bedouin culture, their fundamentals are very similar. But over the centuries, the world has changed, and much of what was sensible in the context of prehistoric society is nonsensical in modern times. Perhaps the fundamentalists fail to understand the purpose of such laws and taboos because they attribute them to God and not to the men who wrote the laws so long ago.
Niklaus,
Just as once all these cultures found slavery okay, it’s now time for all of them to get over the idea that women are PROPERTY. That’s where it all stems from…
…and most of them still don’t ask the women if they WANT to be protected.
Mark, my point exactly. I grew up with fundamentalist neighbors that, although they were Christians, had very similar attitudes toward women. They decreed how the women should dress, who they were allowed to associate with, and exactly what their roles were, all based on various passages from the KJV Bible.
That they were some of the same ones that promoted hate against Arabs. To me it seemed a case of the pot calling the kettle black. If one is to believe they are leading by example, just what is the example they are setting?
Is it alright for Priests and Nuns to sexually molest and beat young children???? . . . Ask some of the abused in Ireland, and more than likely, wherever the Church was in charge of children! The [Catholic] church is the last organization to set standards of morality!
That’s the elephant in the vestry, isn’t it? This Vatican obsession with controlling other peoples’ genitals, while choosing to more or less look the other way when so many of their own employees can’t control their own (or when “approved” genital usage leads to HIV epidemics), sticks out like an erection on a nudist beach.
I guess the other, larger yet slightly less visible elephant standing next to it is the celibacy vow itself, arguably a major source of the kind of sexual repression and immaturity that leads to obsessive behaviour or can exacerbate unhealthy sexual attitudes. Would the Vatican ever admit that enforced celibacy is not clearly Biblically sanctioned (as pretty much all other branches of Christianity do) and was instituted, in true Papist style, to ensure priests left their property to the church and not to any heirs?
Slight tangent: it stuns me that so many gay-marriage opponents, Catholic or otherwise, claim that letting Adam & Steve getting hitched will lead to increases in sexual crimes like rape and incest and paedophilia, yet when they see the disproportionate numbers of child-rapists employed by the repressively anti-gay & anti-sex Vatican, they have a blind spot so big you could reverse-park a bus in it.
Addendum: I must agree with Mark. Most reasonable people just see sex as a normal part of life. An important part, certainly, and a part which must be approached with maturity and intelligence, but not something to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped in ignorance. The more you obsess over sex and place walls around it, the more likely you’ll just create ignorance, immaturity and unhealthy attitudes, which as anyone can see can express themselves in very destructive ways.
“sticks out like an erection on a nudist beach.”
Hank, you’ve outdone yourself with this colloquialism . . .
Hank writes:—”Slight tangent: it stuns me that so many gay-marriage opponents, Catholic or otherwise, claim that letting Adam & Steve getting hitched will lead to increases in sexual crimes like rape and incest and paedophilia, yet when they see the disproportionate numbers of child-rapists employed by the repressively anti-gay & anti-sex Vatican, they have a blind spot so big you could reverse-park a bus in it.”
You have to think perversely to understand it. The mindset says, “If we legalize gay marriage, the next step (logically) is legalize all the other stuff We Find Offensive, which includes rape, incest, and pedophilia.” It’s not that gays getting married will change anything, it is that our allowing it signifies a “moral shift” which will eventually allow anything and everything because clearly we can’t take a moral stand anymore.
And as for the degree of problems with the Church? Well, if you think it’s bad NOW, just wait till all this stuff is LEGAL.
See how easy that is? All you have to do is twist your mind into a tessaract.
Have you heard that gays are responsible for the economic collapse of the United States? http://www.businessinsider.com/oklahoma-pol-blames-gays-for-the-bad-economy-2009-6
Thanks Mark, I get it now.
Except for the “tessaract” part.
Hank. I can’t BeLIEEEEVE you don’t know what “tessaract” means.
[translated: Thanks for asking, because I thought I was the only one who didn't know]
I’ll go out on a limb and assume it’s related to tesselations, those killer maths-nerd mutating repetitions that MC Escher was so good at producing. I could just google it but sometimes I like to learn stuff ol-skool - such as waiting for someone else to tell me stuff.
Y’all need to read Heinlein’s “And He Built a Crooked House”. (wiki)
(Whole story online here)
My 8th grade geometry teacher handed me a mimeo of it to keep me quiet while the rest of the class finished a test.
All I know is the tessaract caused a lot of trouble in A Wrinkle in Time. And it has to do with math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract
I read “A Wrinkle in Time” many years ago. Great and imaginative story.
Hank a tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. A square is a segment of a plane bounded by 4 line segments. a cube is a space bounded by 6 squares. A tesseract then would be a hyperspace bounded by 8 cubes.
The problem with 4-dimensional geometry is that it is difficult people to visualize. Even though the math does not give any indication of the existence of 4th dimensional shortcuts across 3-d space, It has been used as a convienent plot device in many sci-fi stories as a method of faster than light travel.
Navigating a tesseract literally requires thinking outside the box where familiar rules may not apply in the usual ways. However when some people think outside the box, they assume none of the rules apply and feel obligated to freely invent their own.
Pretty much the Star Trek modus operandi
Definitely Star Trek mode.
Over the centuries, it seem the Catholic Church, with it missionary work taking Christianity to the “unenlightened around the world, sort of borged everything up on the way. In many cases, the teachings f the missionaries were combined with the local beliefs and resulted in religions like Santeria, Voodoo, and Obeah. Much of the Catholic dogma delegated the “heathen gods” to positions of leadership among Satan’s minions, but much of the ceremonial aspects remain.
The traditional Wedding ceremony contains non Christian rituals (throwing rice, flowers, the white wedding gown) as do the ceremonies and traditions of Easter and Christmas.
Troughout the practice of Christianity there seems to be an obsession with denying the animal nature of mankind. It seems that all animalistic traits are considered evil. Animalistic traits which we can’t deny are “sanitized” through ritual or practiced in private.
So…
Reproduction is sanitized through the ritual of marriage, but actual procreation is a necessary evil and must be hidden away. Genetalia are also evil (as are breasts ) and must be kept hidden.
Eating and drinking are somewhat ritualized in a social setting, and elimation of bodily wastes are kept private.
It sends a subliminal message to the faithful that the body is evil because of it’s animalist attributes and to transcend the animal on must control the animal within, which is very difficult where the sex drive is involved.