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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Sexual Attitudes (questions about Stuart Gathmans article)
Message-ID: <1092@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 15-Sep-86 05:36:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1092
Posted: Mon Sep 15 05:36:34 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Sep-86 05:33:50 EDT
References: <54@houligan.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 34

> Why is it that religious types say things like, "God created man in
> his own image", "The body is a temple", "Sex between a married couple
> is the most beautiful experience", and others like that. Yet, movies
> and pictures of naked people, whether sexual acts are depicted or not,
> is called filth, trash, sewage, garbage, sick, perverted, and so on.

Until very recently, very few Christians would have made the concessions to
modern attitudes about sexuality that you mentioned.  Almost all would have
been quite overt about feeling that sex was at best a neccessary evil.  This
is the attitude throughout the New Testament, which recommends at least
celibacy and at most self-castration.  (Squeamish moderns will deny that
Jesus really advocated castration, but he openly supported men "making
themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" - castration was
a fairly common practice in various religious sects of the day, and if this
were meant to be figurative, Jesus would certainly have inserted a warning
to that effect.)

Christianity has always been prudish and anti-sexual, and the recent
concessions concerning sex within marriage being good even if not for
procreation (which a few Protestant sects have made) sit very uneasily with
most Christian leaders.  The majority attitude within the fundamentalist and
Catholic worlds, as well as most Protestant church leaders, is still that
sex is evil and disgusting.  When concessions are made to the beauty of sex,
their motive is obviously to slow down the drifting away from Christianity
that has been caused in large part by more enlightened sexual attitudes.
These attitudes result directly from the efforts of humanists like Sanger,
which were viciously opposed by all mainstream Christian denominations.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot and Self-Assigner of Pretentious Titles
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)

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