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!

You Can't Make Me Go...

Religion Today Column for Saturday March 17th 2012, Times and Transcript

Why don’t you go to church?

Well, to be fair, if you are reading this you probably are, but why aren’t your kids?

I have spent a lot of time talking to kids, to teens, to young adults, and even middle age people about this; about why they don’t go, or why they don’t get involved, or where they give their money and the number one answer is because it is an obligation.

The next generations do not want to be obligated to do things; they want to do only the things they care about.

It sounds simple, but it seems to be true… pick a day, and say, "at 10 in the morning on your day off you need to go here"; and no one will.

And when you probe deeper you will find two things to be true, they don’t get anything out of Christianity and they don’t know where they fit into it all. There is no personal investment because it simply does not mean anything to them.

We pretend we don’t have answers to questions like this, but we do. And we also like to play nice and to be open and honest so we don’t point out some obvious truths.

Economic and educational class matter a whole lot. If you are poorer and less educated you tend more towards church participation. The conservative churches have messages geared to this demographic and have higher participation. 

The mainline churches are middle class and hyper educated and no one comes.

Again, it is a rubber meets the road why does this matter to me sort of attitude. The idea that heaven will bring you peace, happiness and riches sure does sound nice when you are struggling to put food on the table. There are no athiests in foxholes as they used to say.

But if you are self-sufficient, buy all the things to make you happy, spend your time thinking about social issues on your own, what difference does the message of faith make, really?

And even the conservatives have troubles now because the message goes against the general way we are socialized no matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old. Nowadays everyone is told we can make it on our own. That we should do what makes us happy. We are told that we just need the right car, or the right jeans to be popular. In fact, society is not only all about me, it is about me and my stuff.

Christianity says stuff does not matter. It drags you down. Christianity says you are just one person, that God loves everyone and so should you.

And what we have all failed to do, whether you are Catholic or Wesleyan or anywhere in between, is really, definitively, come up with an answer to this. We are not fighting back.

Why should you not be self-centred? Why should you not be concerned with material things? Because God says so? So what?

Until we can look the younger generations who are struggling with identity and purpose  in the eye and tell them truthfully, "You are not going to be happy till you start looking outside yourself", with the greatest of conviction, we are not going to convince them.

And they won’t listen anyway; people spend billions ensuring this. If cars do not make you happy, then the auto industry, the economy, and life as we know it is in jeopardy. So trust me, the auto industry alone is throwing more energy, money, and intelligence into creating a value system then the church ever could.

What we need to do, is be there to pick up the pieces. We need to accept that we can be a dissenting voice in society, but like the parent of any teen, it is going to take years of experience before they realize we had something to say in the first place that made sense.

Young people are not the future.

They will be the future of church and religion later, when their kids have died in car accidents, when their friends succumb to Alzheimers, when their marriage falls apart because of indifference and self-absorption.

As sad is it might seem, we have an answer to the meaning of life that no one hears till they are brought to their knees by the failure of their current life.

And having that answer is one of the most important things we are about. We preserve the truth of life, of the Divine nature of the universe, we are hope incarnate. And we will be here when you need us…

The Times and Transcript has made its online copy a "pay to see" service. So I am going to resume posting my columns on this site after the fact.

FAITH TODAY - Times and Transcript - December 2011

Most of us self-identify in some way. We are happy today, or sad; we are young, or old; we are male, or female.

Some of those identifications get thrown onto us, like whether we are part of the lower economic trenches or the middle class, or wealthy. When people say someone is poor, they have an image in their mind, and whether or not you fit into that, you are labeled.

Some of them are classic genetic differences that we cannot really do anything about, like being left handed; or fitting more into the world as an introvert or an extrovert.

So you are religious or atheist, right?

The best line ever in my education was this story about one of our professors. He was teaching a first year religious studies class at university; those classes are almost always filled with hundreds of curious students by the way and one very angry young man confronted the teacher after a lecture.

“I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said, “I don’t believe in God!”

To which the wise professor replied, “Tell me about this God, perhaps I don’t believe in them either.”

This is what always gets to me when I read books like Christopher Hitchins “God is not great” where he argues against Christians as being silly. Well, I have been ordained for 16 years, I went to church for a couple of decades before that, and I have undertaken four university degrees in religious studies; and you know what, I think the Christians he is talking about are silly too.  

He picked one narrow definition of someone who is religious and attacked them as the stand in for everyone.

Pick any issue of the faith that you are concerned about – were we created or did we spontaneously erupt from protoplasm, for example, and there will be people in the church, the synagogue, the mosque or the temple who will believe every single scientific and philosophical variation of this issue possible.

In other words, religious people are just as human and just as different as anyone.

I guess I mention this for two reasons: the first is that when I say I am a Christian, I am often judged, and judged in a way that is not very accurate of who I am. Most Christians for example, seem to argue I am not. 

Which is neither here nor there, just that we do not all come from a cookie cutter mould.

The second reason is that one of the things that has brought religion to its cast off state is this precise problem. People in the church think everyone has to be the same, or think the same, and act the same. We assume when people come to worship they are all looking for one thing.

Think about it, for the majority of people worship is: 200 year old music, liturgical moments where the leader does something almost magical, prayers that sound the same as they always have.

Now, on the plus side, tradition evokes emotion and allows us to easily enter into the experience. On the negative side, they are all cookie cutter moments designed for one type of person.

Within the pews of my church as an example, I have six generations of people. Some of them grew up listening to swing music, some to hippy folk music, and some to techno pop. What music should I play to inspire an emotional response from them?

There are people out there who firmly believed that moral issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality and the like are so bad we should not even talk about them; while the people younger than me cannot even fathom why these should be issues.

And when it comes to faith my parents grew up in a world where a Catholic would not talk to a Protestant; by the time I was maturing that seemed silly, but there was no way a Muslim or a Jew or Buddhist was right about anything. For those born today they will not be able to fathom why we thought there was such a big difference between any religions.

Whether we are talking about church or culture, the one thing we need to do as soon as possible is realize that almost everyone is different. So let’s respect that and incorporate it into how we do the things we do. 

Then, perhaps, we can turn this world around.