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From: CSvax:Pucc-H:aeq@pur-ee.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Premarital (gasp) sex
Message-ID: <285@pucc-h>
Date: Tue, 13-Sep-83 18:47:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.285
Posted: Tue Sep 13 18:47:15 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Sep-83 18:52:57 EDT
References: <1491@shark.UUCP>
Organization: Purdue University Computing Center
Lines: 56

Reply to Steve Den Beste:

I actually agree with much of what you say.  Sex, in the appropriate context,
SHOULD be fun.  At no point does the Bible condemn ALL sex.  "Therefore a man
shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will
become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24; quoted and reaffirmed by Jesus in Matthew
19:4).  That's obviously affirming and blessing sex, including its pleasure.
Somewhere in the Bible (probably in Psalms) is a phrase something like "at
Your right hand are pleasures forevermore."  Furthermore, I would be willing
to bet that the source of the ukase against positions other than man-on-top
was some medieval ecclesiastical MCP's; the Bible does not have any prescribed
or proscribed positions.  The Bible (particularly the New Testament) affirms
freedom, not a rigidly enforced set of rules.

One reason I can think of for restricting sexual intercourse to the context of
full commitment between the partners (i.e. marriage) is that, in this
imperfect world, no method of birth control is 100% effective (except outright
sterilization--a bit drastic for a couple just starting out).  Thus, there
is always the chance that a couple not yet sure that they want to make that
final, total commitment might inadvertently conceive a child.  This would
present them with the choices of: rushing into marriage; continuing to live
together without commitment and bringing a child into this tentative, insecure
environment; splitting up sometime before or after the birth of the child, and
thus putting it into a different insecure environment (as a child of divorced
parents, I can attest to the insecurity of living with a single parent); or
having an abortion.  Without expressing any opinion on either side of the
abortion issue as it affects the baby, I can at least hazard a guess that an
abortion would leave emotional, and possibly physical, scars on the woman,
and perhaps even emotional scars on the man.

I do not know from experience (never having married) whether cohabiting and
copulating before marriage would cause any long-term emotional problems for
the couple after marriage if their birth-control methods during the "trial
period" succeeded in avoiding conception.   However, when part of the Bible
has turned out to be true (see my "Christianity and Homosexuality" article)
in actual life experience, there is reason to suspect that other parts may
be equally true.  One comment I have read is:  "The difficulty is that one
cannot test marriage without being married."  The paragraph went on to state
that in the (again) tentative, insecure, uncommitted emotional context of
unmarried cohabitation, the total, free giving, indeed abandonment, of oneself
which makes for optimum sex is a terribly risky thing, so the sex between
unmarried partners, irrespective of the degree of physical compatibility, just
would not be the same (and particularly, would not be as good) as between
married partners, where each party knows that the other is committed to loving
her/him, where each party thus knows that s/he can totally trust the other,
or in sum, where each party knows that sex is not a risk.  (The book I read
that in was written by a good friend who had been married nearly 40 years, so
he had plenty of experience of his own; also, he is a pastor who has counseled
many couples in his long career, so he has plenty of data.)

In sum, I believe that God knew what he was doing when He told us not to do
certain things (after all, He was the design engineer on the Human Project).
He did not just arbitrarily decide to lay down a bunch of rules by executive
fiat; rather, the Bible can be considered a maintenance and upgrade manual.

-- Jeff Sargent/pur-ee!pucc-h:aeq