Driving past a lawn display showing a beaming, light-filled Virgin Mary presiding over an equally light-filled manger, I found myself reflecting that many religions have a hard time with the concept of sex.
I can suspend a lot of disbelief when it comes to religion, because that’s pretty much the whole point of religion. Having faith. Taking things at face value. It’s just like James Bond staying the same age in the movies until it’s impossible that he ever operated during the Cold War. Are you supposed to think about these things? Of course not. The Holy Trinity and Q Branch are pretty much the same thing, in my book.
But I have a hard time believing that God, the Creator of Everything, really fathered a son through immaculate conception. I don’t mean to get all Leda and the Swan on you, but does the universe look like the product of someone unwilling to get down and go to business?
As a side note, I believe that if you subscribe to intelligent design then you can’t buy that story anyway. If God created The Big Bang, there’s no way he would say “You know, Mary, I think tonight I’d just rather cuddle. But don’t worry--we’ll still get to the same result.” He did the Big Bang for crying out loud. More likely, God would Bring It and Mary would say “Oh, Jesus!” and God would say “Hmm, good name; we’ll have to remember that.”
In reality, though, I think that Jesus was the product of Mary and Joseph, but Joseph didn’t have very good technique and Mary fell asleep during the whole thing. So when Mary got pregnant, she claimed that Joseph had nothing to do with it--and anxious to protect his reputation as a quality lovemaker, Joe agreed with her and the whole immaculate conception story got started.
It’s not just Christianity, either. There’s the radical martyr faction that believes if they blow themselves up in the name of God, they immediately ascend to Paradise and a reward of 70 virgins.
Who the heck would want 70 virgins? That’s an awful lot of upset phone calls the next day, followed by rambling text messages. Eventually you’d have to mail 70 cards with 70 bouquets of flowers with the exact same note: “It meant a lot to me too, but I didn’t mean to lead you on. I think we should just be friends. After all, I just got here and I have my whole death in front of me.”
The only men who want to have sex with 70 virgins are those who are uncertain about their own prowess, and so they’d rather have a partner without any experience and therefore no benchmark. Which gets back to the Joseph thing again. See the connection? Men who were insecure about their sexual abilities started all this nonsense and messed up some perfectly good religions in the process. It makes you wonder: is it possible to find a religion with a healthy view of sex? One that celebrates female sexuality and doesn’t let itself fall victim to male neuroses and hangups? One that encourages positive sexual relations without letting them negatively affect its members’ spiritual cosmology?
I mean...except for the Wiccans. Those people are just weird.
Posted by Greg at 05:01 AM. Filed under:
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You are so going to hell for this one. If you see me there, stop and say, “Hey.”
Good stuff.
Holy hell. For the first time ever, I think I’m glad you and I are on different coasts. I’m not likely to be in the line of fire when the lighting bolt shoots out of the sky to smite you.
I’ll miss you dearly. Also, can I have your readers??
Wiccans have nothing on Christians when it comes to weird.
Sorry.
greg just wrote apocalypse across the sky with his typing fingers.
i never feel more like god than when i am having morning sex in the mud.
Too true, Beth, too true.
Us Christians do have some pretty far out stuff to our name.
Oh yeah, and all the “YOU’RE GOING TO BURN IN HELL!” screeching at all who are different/has kids out of wedlock (HELLOOO ‘VIRGIN’ MARY)/is gay/has sex full stop /basically in any way different to us, apparently we’re supposed to do that too.
Guess that means I’m not really a Christian then, huh? I mean, I’ve met up with, spoken to, known and am friends with several people who are different/gay/has sex/has kids and is not married/is gay and is in any way different to me and not once have I ever told anyone that they are going to Hell.
Sniff. Shucks. I’m not a ‘real’ Christian. Now I bet I’ve made God mad…
...Oh and Greg; Mary DID have sex. With God in the form of His ‘Holy Spirit’. She was a virgin in the human sense, as in, no nooky with anybody with physical form, but yeah, God knocked her up.
I love the ‘Oh Jesus’ thing. Bet that happened. Yep.
Alice
PS: Love the site
Considering the careful upbringing you had, with regular attention to religious training, I can’t understand where that came from. Also, I think we should encourage the exploding martyrs thing. There are lots more non-Muslims than Muslims. Therefore, after all the exploding martyrs are done, the only people left will be non-violent Muslims and the problem will be (expensively) solved. In fact, instead of prosecuting Americans who contribute to terrorist organizations, perhaps the US government should be offering tax breaks for anybody who helps them. “Send a box of dynamite to a terrorist for Xmas” That sort of thing!
Okay, I am still picking myself up for the third time. No fair. You cannot post this stuff on work days.
Papa Goose, I have officially joined the contingent that loves you and wants you.
“Send a box of dynamite to a terrorist for Xmas” That’s so appealing. Of course, since they are Muslim - would they open a Christmas present?
I never thought I would enjoy such sacrilege.
I think you left out the possibility of Jesus being the end result of a prematurely interrupted hand-job on Mr. & Mrs “Virgin Mothers” couch and a poorly thought out plan to hide the ‘evidence.’
wow, after reading Papa Goose’s comments, I’m impressed that you ended up with such a culturally sensitive and socially appropriate sense of humor.....
i think, truly, that the universe looks like the product of a fumbling, first timer: lots of awkward mistakes and a few brilliant moves pulled out of no where.
I thought Buddhism was the sex religion. Aren’t they the ones who wrote the Kama Sutra? And why do you think those gods had all those arms for (or are those Hindu gods)? Whole lotta touchin’ goin on.
Christianity, originally, was all about the sex - it came out of judiasm, which is dripping with stories of seduction, polyamory and some fairly pungent b & d. Noah walked funny for years after that incident on Ararat. Just look at how Jesus had two Marys - a mother and a whore. Freud didn’t have to be jewish to piece together some powerful themes here. Throw in a virgin, twelve guys in dresses, and some thick-thighed centurions, and you’ve got the outline for the iron-age version of a Harlequin Romance.
It was only after DaVinci built the pyramids out of the earth-mother’s dowry that the Nicean Council repressed the biblical nookie. Dan Brown figured all this out several million copies ago. The truth has set me free.
Michael- It’s the Hindu god (they believe in one god with many faces, so technically, god isn’t plural unless speaking of the three faces collectively) with all the arms, and the Kama Sutra came from Hindu writers. Either way, yes, a “whole lotta touchin’ goin’ on.”
hmm. i’m surprised romy hasn’t already hopped on your virgin birth/immaculate conception confusion!
for the record, the immaculate conception refers to the idea that mary was conceived without sin. this is not the same thing as the virgin birth.
here endeth the lesson.
matt has just taken care of that detail for me.
as to the rest of the post - no comment.
I hope that you and all my other heathen friends can all sit together in the same section of Hell. I’d like there to be a few seats between us, though, because my personal Hell would be having to hear bad puns for eternity.
And you should totally open yourself up to Wiccans, Greg. With your feminist sensitivity and predilection for hippy-chicks, you could “Bring It” like Zeus to all those 20-year-old Berkeley wannabe-witches.
The name of your first book should be “God would Bring It” and Dan’s should be “Thick-Thighed Centurions”. Million-sellers, both.
Also, Scientology is the sex religion. Gay sex.
so… are you going to start your own church now? i think i’d really enjoy your weekly sermons.
mmmmm, sacrilicious!
~chuckle~
I am SOOOOO with you on this one,but I came to grips with going to hell a LOOOOOOOONG time ago!
That’s where all of us fun peeps will be
.
I got nothing!
Funny post.
Hilarious!
But what sort of schmuck is Joseph? He falls for the some diety knocked up my girlfriend line and also agrees to no action himself for the rest of his life after he gets a bad dream. Notice the Bible has no word whatsoever on what happened to him.
Just to let you know, we aren’t taking any of this personally, and at least 50 of us are looking forward to the “benchmark.” Salaam, Greg.
Buddhist are all about guilt free sex. You will not, however, find enlightenment if you are still searching for physical pleasures. If you aren’t ready for enlightenment, go on with your bad self. And nobody has anything on the Hindi for strange sex and offspring. There are some colorful dieties in that pantheon.
i love it when you pinko left coast liberal san fran types get all non-pc. it’s refreshing really.
Sacrilicious is my new favorite word
exploding martyrs is the name of the punk band i am not going to start.
papa goose, you rule.
Sacrilege? I’ve heard a lot of theories way wackier than the idea that organized religion has some basis in male sexual insecurity. Isn’t there even some locker room banter in one of the Psalms?
You have to admit, Intelligent Design has a sexy ring to it.
wow—someone’s clearly still upset by the “special popsicle” he got from the priest for christmas in 1978 ...
Don’t you mean popesicle?
Personally, I don’t think you have taken this whole critique far enough. It’s not just about bad sex, it’s about bad psychology, and you can find it right at the beginning. The Big Guy provides a whole bunch of trees and says, “You can eat the fruit of any tree EXCEPT THAT ONE”—and then gets all excited when they eat it. Well, WHAT DID HE EXPECT?
You could try to excuse this as the mistake of a first-time parent, but I spotted the flaw in that story when I was four.
No Wiccans, huh? Okay then, how about Discordians? Now THERE’s weird!
Mary most surely DID NOT remain a virgin for the rest of her life. Jesus had little siblings; one of them, James, was an important early Christian who was Paul’s main rival.
And I’ve read that the original word for Mary’s condition means unmarried, not virgin, but I’m not a Biblical scholar. I’m an Irish Studies scholar, so I can tell you the joke that begins, “how do you know Jesus was an Irishman?” with complete confidence.
Well, how dumb can you get, mate! The Immaculate Conception doesn’t refer to the conception of Jesus you dill, it refers to the conception of His Mother. It means she was conceived free from sin so she could be the Mother Of God. See, you’re so screwed up about sex you thought it had to refer to conception without sex. And you reckon the Church is weird. ROFL.