Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!ukma!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: sex, marriage, sin Message-ID: Date: 27 Mar 91 02:28:08 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 36 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , brendan@cs.uq.oz.au (Brendan Mahony) writes: > Jeff Fields writes: > >You may put off learning how to discuss sex (itself, how it applies to > >your own sensory experience, how it affects the other ways people interact > >socially), or even (gasp) put off Applied (as well as Theoretical) Sex, > >until some "marriage" with Mr or Ms Right; but the "growing pains" > >involved in learning one's way in such a relationship are no more > >intrinsically soul-rarefying than riding a bicycle. > > I would just point out that some would see the relationship as the point > of the exercise rather than the "awakening" of one's sexual awareness. I'd like to point out something else. There is no need to *perform* sex in order to learn how to *discuss* sex. Some of you may remember my postings last year "may a Christian visit a brothel". The background to that was that my engagement had broken up over the issue of whether it was right to have sex with someone you didn't love in order to "explore your sexuality". My intended said that it would be "ingratitude to God" not to do so, and she expected me to admire her for having put this idea into practice. The funny thing is that she _acted_ as if she knew nothing about sex, and regarded my talking about it as showing that I had a "dirty mind". I was trying to find anyone who would explain her views to me, which no-one posting in this group did. Well, as of the 17th of this month, I'm engaged again, this time to a Church of Christ woman who has the same view of sex outside marriage as I have and has lived it. When I quote the Song of Songs to Jeanene, she thinks it's romantic, not "dirty minded", and she quotes back. We're able to be more explicit than that, too. I'm _almost_ glad that we'll be in separate countries until the wedding. The moral of the story is that "Applied Sex" is neither necessary in all cases nor sufficient in all cases to prepare someone for a relationship. -- Seen from an MVS perspective, UNIX and MS-DOS are hard to tell apart.