Bill Maher presents a basic advice aimed at those people who follow the lead of desert Gods:
Bill Maher: Sex always trumps religion
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:June 9, 2009
- Post category:Religion / Sex
- Post comments:1 Comment
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
I could say a lot here. I'd enjoy saying a lot here. But seriously…
The Catholics get an unfair rap on this topic. I've had more and healthier liaisons with Catholic women than any other denomination. The ones that scared me most as a young man were the rock solid Southern Baptists, who were happy as hell to sleep with you as long as you let them Save You.
The short and simple of this problem is this: Sex has become for the West (actually, for all the Big Monotheistic faiths) the repository for anything we don't want to deal with. It is a room marked Do Not Enter, into which we locked our discomfort with sexuality. The psyche, being the adaptive mechanism that it is, found this room early on and decided, without actually telling the conscience part of the mind, that there was no point in creating another room for stuff we don't want to deal with when one already existed—and look, there's plenty of room in there! So pretty much everything else we feel squirmy and slimy about gets put in there, too, where it gets all mixed up like a thick stew, and so intertwined that it becomes almost impossible to tease it apart. So for people with real hang-ups, it's never just sex that causes them problems, but sex and food disorders, or sex and excrement, or sex and hazing, or…
You get the idea. And since religions tend to not want to discuss sex except to say "Don't!" much of this remains unresolved, unexamined, and unexpurgated, often until it emerges (as all monsters in closets do) in some gruesome form that truly screws us up—like, perhaps, causing someone to kidnap a gay man, tie him to a post with wire, and beat him to death.
I think the cultures that ties sex into their religion had a better idea. But really, what is the big deal? Sex is a special kind of conversation. Imagine what we'd be like if we had similar prohibitions on just talking to each other.
Oh, wait. Some of us do.