Speaking of Sex....

I was reading about a taboo subject today – sex! And particularly about the Christian understanding of sex. You all know what it is. Sex is bad. Or at the very least the slippery slope to sin. But have you ever wondered why we feel that way?

After all, it seems pretty much hardwired into us that it both feels good, and is necessary to make more of us. But that is the problem, when it feels good we think we are doing something wrong.

The person to blame for this is Augustine. He was one of the original, and earliest writers about what Christianity should look like. He was a Bishop in Africa some 300 years after Jesus. He wrote these massive books on the church, on faith, on belief, and his writings became the norm for our thinking about church.

But he had issues. Most of them having to do with sex. He had a mistress. He had boyfriends. He had an illegitimate child. He got in more trouble than all of these fallen mega church pastor's put together. And the root of his trouble was sex. Or at least, that is what he felt. He could not control his temptations.

And so he developed something you have heard of, but was never, and is not, in the Bible. Original Sin.

Yup, Augustine made that up to explain why he could not stop having affairs. Original Sin was lust, and lust was injected into us as unborn children because we were conceived through, gasp, sex. This was not natural, as most biologists would feel, but a result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Therefore every single person is born sinful – and every single person is incapable of controlling or accepting their sinful sexual urges.

This is a brief history lesson and ancient theological explanation but I just want you to have some background for the idea that our Christian views on sex and sexuality are actually crazy. They are not from the Bible, they are not from Jesus, they are probably not even from the Holy Spirit, they are from some guilt driven sense of remorse in one man's writing.

The absolute only thing Jesus ever says about sex is that if you are married, you should not have sex with someone else. That is it, the entire ethical standpoint of Jesus Christ as to what is good and bad about sex.

The fact that we took Augustine's views on sex and made them doctrine is the equivalent of taking Charles Manson's views on group dynamics and making them the law in terms of how we build churches. It is crazy.

I have felt this for a long time, but now a woman named Debra Hirsch has written a book called Redeeming Sex. In it she points out that all of this is based on the physical aspects of sex and ignores the emotional and spiritual component – it ignores how sex can be an act of love, of passion, of intimacy which brings two people together in an extremely close and loving way.

She argues for us to start over. For us to realize that everything the church taught about sexuality for the last 1500 years has been based on Augustine's guilt.

It is hard to change your belief about something mid stream. I doubt we can really start over. But it is certainly worth starting to admit that some of what we think is just weird. How can sex be something so terrible if it creates such cute babies, for example?

Even if we could just start to make the change to thinking, sex is natural and everyone does it, that might begin to swing the pendulum. Who knows what we could do if we stopped fighting about this!