Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality Read Online Free PDF Page B

Many religious people find the old rules ridiculous and simply ignore them in favor of more interesting and varied eating experiences.
    The same is true of sex. The breadth of sexual behavior is enormously varied across cultures and time. Your individual sexual map is tiny compared to the knowledge, experiences and practices of other people and times. Unfortunately, because of religious interference, our sexual maps are not only restricted, they are inaccurate.
    Just as some religions restrict foods or dictate their preparation, most religions restrict sexual practices and dictate holy and unholy, clean and unclean practices.
    Religious sexual maps are based largely on Bronze- and Iron-Age tribal ideas, but for most of us, that’s what we know. No one is born with an understanding of sex and sexuality. We learn it from explicit teaching and more important, from the myriad signals in our environment. Starting as infants and toddlers, we may get messages like, “Don’t touch yourself down there!” or we feel the disapproving hand of a parent when we show curiosity about our own anatomy. Jokes from adults and peers instruct us on how to think about sex. We observe dress and absorb comments like, “She is dressed like a prostitute.”
    As a 19-year-old church camp counselor, I was asked to take a camper aside and read certain scriptures to warn him against masturbating. He’d been a little too enthusiastic the night before and one of the other campers had complained. It was a difficult assignment, since I masturbated regularly myself, to my great shame. In the same camp, I witnessed a young girl runcrying across the campus after being told by the minister that she was dressed like a slut. Over the course of the next years, that same minister was caught twice having affairs with women in his church.
    These kinds of experiences help us build our sexual map. Maps are somewhat different depending on whether you are a Muslim or Catholic, Orthodox Jew or Episcopalian, but they have one thing in common: They bear almost no relationship to the reality of who we are as sexual creatures. None is based on biological or evolutionary fact. None draws upon anthropological knowledge or neurological studies of brain development and sexuality.
    These religion-based maps only get updated when the culture forces it. For example, birth control was considered sinful by virtually all religions just 100 years ago. Today, most religions say nothing about birth control for married people. Even the Catholic Church looks the other way while still disapproving. It was almost unthinkable for a woman to wear pants 100 years ago, especially inside a church. If all the women wearing pants were kicked out of church today, most churches would stand empty. Sex before marriage was very sinful 100 years ago. Today, 95% of all Americans have sex before marriage. 11 Churches still preach against it, but the statistics show most people aren’t listening.
    Religions are slowly modifying their maps of sexuality, but not without a fight. These modifications still have nothing to do with who we are. They are based on the Koran, Bible, Book of Mormon or some other obsolete text. Religion’s success, for much of the last three thousand years, depended heavily on sexual myths. Today is no different. It’s just more difficult to perpetuate such myths when so much contrary information is available on the Internet or from books in the library.
Religious Maps
    The sexual map we acquire in youth includes body image, masturbatory guilt, sexual preferences and more. From what turns us on to what turns us off. From attitudes about menstruation to the right of women to wear certain clothing. But using this guilt- and shame-ridden map as a guide to sexuality is like using a map of an ancient city sewer system to locate the fiber optic network.
    What if the only map we had of a city was made 2,000 years ago? How useful would it be today? My city was an open prairie 2,000 years