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.