Why is it that religious people get all messed up, sexually?
We expect it from goofy sects, even large, goofy sects, such as those Mormon holdouts who refuse to end polygamy. What is astounding is how the largest Christian church in the world--the Roman Catholic Church--is wallowing in shameful sexual practices. They are not alone. Maybe it just began early in church history, and subsequent subdivisions of the church inherited some of the goofiness and criminality.
At the very beginning of Christian religion, people claimed that a virgin gave birth to a god-baby. Well, at first it was not quite that wild and unimaginable, but it gradually became that: Mary was impregnated by the Spirit of God, which is a very spiritual kind of mystery, and had a baby. It was not even a claim for parthenogenisis: the father was a spirit. Mary was a virgin.
Sure!
Jesus never married. He was the ideal man. In subsequent centuries, the priests of the church were also required to be celibate. (In Eastern Orthodoxy, ordinary priests could marry, but bishops had to be celebate.) Something similar evolved for women. Some of them--the holy ones, the ideal ones--swore to celibacy, too: nuns, deaconesses, or whatever you wish to call them.
Now that is a screwed up notion of what an ideal human life should be! Poverty, chastity, and obedience: all of them are bad ideas. It is no wonder that Good Pope Benedict XVI, the first among a whole lot of screwed up equals, is spending most of his time apologizing for a church that has abused little boys for centuries. This has nothing to do with being gay: it has to do with sexually abusing children. It has to do with a hierarchy of human life that affirms male domination over women; that abuses women, too.
It is not simply a Christian problem of abuse, either. When armies everywhere go on a rampage, they abuse women. They rape and kill them in order to show everybody who the strong men are. In many Muslim countries, little girls are forcibly genitally mutilated, by women, in order to please the men.
Even politically, in the twentieth century, men stand up in Congress and debate, or demand, what it is that women may or may not do, sexually, reproductively. I do not understand how people like Bart Stupak can stand there, demanding that health care be denied to millions of people until he is satisfied that absolutely no public money will be used to fund abortions, for whatever reason--rape, incest, health of the mother, the ability to support the child--and not be ashamed of himself.
No, I do know why. He is the successor to a millenia-long line of men, not only who have assumed themselves to be more like God than women are, but who are surrounded by volunteer eunuchs, sexually criminal priests, and a Church hierarchy that has a persistent and shamefully long history of covering up for each other. Even the Pope.
We expect it from goofy sects, even large, goofy sects, such as those Mormon holdouts who refuse to end polygamy. What is astounding is how the largest Christian church in the world--the Roman Catholic Church--is wallowing in shameful sexual practices. They are not alone. Maybe it just began early in church history, and subsequent subdivisions of the church inherited some of the goofiness and criminality.
At the very beginning of Christian religion, people claimed that a virgin gave birth to a god-baby. Well, at first it was not quite that wild and unimaginable, but it gradually became that: Mary was impregnated by the Spirit of God, which is a very spiritual kind of mystery, and had a baby. It was not even a claim for parthenogenisis: the father was a spirit. Mary was a virgin.
Sure!
Jesus never married. He was the ideal man. In subsequent centuries, the priests of the church were also required to be celibate. (In Eastern Orthodoxy, ordinary priests could marry, but bishops had to be celebate.) Something similar evolved for women. Some of them--the holy ones, the ideal ones--swore to celibacy, too: nuns, deaconesses, or whatever you wish to call them.
Now that is a screwed up notion of what an ideal human life should be! Poverty, chastity, and obedience: all of them are bad ideas. It is no wonder that Good Pope Benedict XVI, the first among a whole lot of screwed up equals, is spending most of his time apologizing for a church that has abused little boys for centuries. This has nothing to do with being gay: it has to do with sexually abusing children. It has to do with a hierarchy of human life that affirms male domination over women; that abuses women, too.
It is not simply a Christian problem of abuse, either. When armies everywhere go on a rampage, they abuse women. They rape and kill them in order to show everybody who the strong men are. In many Muslim countries, little girls are forcibly genitally mutilated, by women, in order to please the men.
Even politically, in the twentieth century, men stand up in Congress and debate, or demand, what it is that women may or may not do, sexually, reproductively. I do not understand how people like Bart Stupak can stand there, demanding that health care be denied to millions of people until he is satisfied that absolutely no public money will be used to fund abortions, for whatever reason--rape, incest, health of the mother, the ability to support the child--and not be ashamed of himself.
No, I do know why. He is the successor to a millenia-long line of men, not only who have assumed themselves to be more like God than women are, but who are surrounded by volunteer eunuchs, sexually criminal priests, and a Church hierarchy that has a persistent and shamefully long history of covering up for each other. Even the Pope.
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