I recently wrote an angry poem that centered on the evil of the whore. With everything going on in my personal life at this time, and the frustration and anger contained with it, those who know me may think that I have taken the road of the religious moralist in condemnation of the shocking hostility I have suffered lately. Further, previous posts I’ve written have shown an unreserved tolerance for, and even comfort with and advocation of, broad swaths of sexual expression that religious people should not be comfortable with. Finally, during my recent difficulties I’ve had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a really cool gay dude who has looked after me pretty well during my last three months of stress attacks, and I feel motivated to provide some clarity about some pretty heavy philosophical ideas surrounding the idea of sex and sexuality and religion.
It’s actually sad that religious communities really only straddle a few simple positions on the matter of sexuality. For the most part, only a man-woman monogamous position is acceptable, though most are fairly tolerant of a person who used to be a “sexual deviant,” but no longer is, while the more liberal strains of Abrahamic worship tend to proffer an “anything goes” attitude. Eastern religion focuses on a masculine-feminine interplay of all things, while the western, superficial renditions of these philosophies, along with pop occult worship, pipe this mantra as well while effectively advocating all things feminine and the unrestrained expression of feminine sexuality in all things and people, regardless of their actual gender. The masculine gets no such advocacy, however.
The truth is that in the world in which we live, there really is no actual answer to the question of success in sexual expression, and the only workable solution is to just know the “why” of all things, and with this knowledge, do the best one can. So with that in mind, we should explain what’s going on in the universe.
The first thing one has to understand is that the universe is actually a story written by the source of all things, an intelligent, living infinity that we call God, and that we are characters in this story. Further, we are all reading this story that we are writing for each other with our lives and constantly being programmed by it. This programming is especially pronounced in the case of children, who are acquiring their basic sense of life, the universe, and everything by absorbing their immediate environment.
Now in the case of gender relations, in the biblical and Kabbalist world-view, the male represents the power of the divine, and the female represents the splendor of the creation. In the sex act, the male (divine) enters the female (the creation), and life is created in this act of union and harmony of divinity in the creation.
This being the case, any malevolent power wishing to distort a person’s conception of the divine has but one simple task: destroy that person’s concept of the male and the male’s interaction with the female. In an ideal world, every male would be absolutely and totally devoted to the welfare of the female, totally committed and loyal, and every female for her part would be totally compliant to, receptive of, and loyal to the male. But one thing intrinsic to the story of our world is that things are not the way they should be. We also learn about the fact of evil: that things don’t quite work according to their intended purpose and plan.
The above forms an explanation for why over 80% of the prison population consists of males. It is a gender under siege. Fathers beat mothers and do the majority of the work in accomplishing every sort of failing under the sun, and humans the world over, particularly the little ones, have their concept of God wrecked in the process. Women do their thing too, showing us all the concept of a creation without God, or a creation calling itself God, though the majority of such sins tend to fall within the realm of the distasteful, as in the case of a woman who uses sex for advancement, while the sins of men, such as violence, rightfully earn prison time.
Overall, the picture we have is that the ideal for sexual relations is that of monogamous heterosexual interaction for life, which is the prescription of the Bible and all ancient religion. It is exemplified in the following:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 2:24
However, we read also that this prescription is attached to a world before a serpent came along and mucked everything up. Once upon a time, people were intended to walk around naked, yet only be attracted to their one mate. This is not our world. Men and women have notorious difficulty turning their senses of attraction on and off, and they find themselves attracted to every sort of thing under the sun. We have desires that come from our unconscious minds that we don’t control, and they go every which way. Humanity has always had the most difficult of times trying to make sense of and to know what to do with this.
Further, we see biblical heroes such as Abraham, Jacob, and David, praised by the God throughout the scriptures, invariably having multiple wives. The situation is so perplexing that numerous religious communities, the most famous of which being the Mormons, claim that God permits and condones polygamy, in contradiction to the verse above. They’ll say polygamy is just fine, since David and Abraham did it, but homosexuality isn’t, due to a small number of verses condemning that practice.
There is reference to King David, the original Messiah, called a beloved of God throughout the scriptures, acquiring more and more women without any sort of chastisement from God above until his lust gets so bad that he has one of his officers killed in order to take that officer’s wife. That was too much, finally, though in condemning the lusty king, God tells him that if he had not done something so egregious, he would have given him more wives! I’m not kidding! It’s right there in 2 Samuel 12!
It’s both sad and funny to see the theologians read the initial prescription for monogamy, then say David’s polygamy was okay, then turn around and say that polygamy isn’t okay today. They make less sense than the Mormons, really. Wouldn’t it be both more reasonable and just easier to conceive of to say that God was just willing to work with David where he was at?
Some of the things people do, they do because they don’t know any better. They’ll still suffer the consequences that naturally result from their actions, but they don’t have to worry about being hated by the divine in cases where they are innocent.
As for the rest, though, you have to pick your battles. We all know smoking cigarettes isn’t a good thing, but it’s hard to quit, and a lot of people just make the decision not to, or to table it for some time when they can get to it. Such folks are still going to have to run the risk of getting cancer, losing money, and annoying those around them, but we tend not to worry about being hated by God such that we hide from lightning bolts from the sky every time we light up a smoke.
When it comes to sex, though, we have to think of ourselves as perfect. We let this channel us into cultures that hate God because these cultures are at war with other cultures who try to serve God by striving for impossibly high standards of sexual behavior. Seriously, if I get on Reddit one more time to find some Catholic asking any given internet rando if they are going to hell for masturbating, I’m going to throw up.
It’s not just homosexuality that falls into the whole sex/guilt/anger at God dynamic. Religious culture likes to beat people up just for feeling aroused because they are trying to meet a standard given in the Garden of Eden. As mentioned above, they’ll welcome you with open arms despite any atrocious thing you may have done in the past, which is good, but you have to instantly change the totality of your bodily function or get tarred, feathered, and run out of town. The reaction to this, for many, is to reject the divine altogether and run to a culture that refuses to admit personal imperfection at all in an effort to wage war against the religious. God isn’t considered at all.
As for me, I was raised in a secular environment and didn’t come to religion until I was in my twenties. But looking back on my life, my wildest adventures happened to me AFTER I became religious. God never stopped loving me or teaching me through them. I’ll tell a story about a recent one.
So being trapped in a living arrangement in a promiscuous environment where I didn’t want to be promiscuous, more on that in a subsequent post, the reaction of the people around me was to slaughter me as a dirty old man. The power of the evil forces around me was ubiquitous, and I got to the point where I looked to heaven and told the Almighty in the sky that I was going to go down to Tijuana to reaffirm my manhood. Ask any given rabbi or priest, and they’d tell me I was playing with the fires of hell.
Shortly after arriving in the town I went out to grab a wad of cash with which to get myself into trouble. On the way back to the hotel I found a spectacular young lady on the street plying herself to the men walking by. Now my years of peak testosterone are three decades behind me, and this alone is enough to give me pause when it comes to the prospect of being promiscuous. Like a young woman who has yet to hit her time of max sex drive in her thirties, I need to get warmed up a bit if I am going to get excited, and I get turned on by the heart at this point, needing intimacy, trust, and comfort if everything is going to go well. I’d brought a bottle of viagra down with me as an insurance policy against soul-crushing catastrophe, but I didn’t have it on me as I hadn’t planned on doing anything until the next day.
At the sight of this girl, however, I decided not to wait. She had a sweetness about her that struck me. The eyes of a doe and the voice of an angel. The experience that would ensue was in no way normal and in every way miraculous. The fifty-year old man with an anxiety condition and reservations about strange young women got a boner, and used it well. It was the best sex I’d had in years, intimate passionate, only to be described as a complete merging of souls.
For her part, things were not what one would expect. Normally this is the type of the situation where you negotiate for $10 off if she keeps one pant-leg on, and you get shooed out the door the instant the biological processes are complete. But this time there was powerful connection in our eye contact. She playfully toyed with my arm hair when we were together. Instead of pushing me out the door, she laid with me naked and sweaty, her legs draped over mine, and we talked about her life.
I asked her age. 21 was the answer. When I asked if she had kids, she said she had a son. Three years old. I commented that they got her pregnant at 18, and she finished my sentence: “that’s why I am here.” Human trafficking is often done subtly. No one put her in chains to drag her to Tijuana, but rather a boyfriend got her pregnant and convinced her to turn to sex work to feed her son.
The thought of such a young diamond of a person, of a mother, in such a situation hasn’t left me to this day. When I left, I handed her my card and told her to send me a WhatsApp. I never heard from her again. If I had, given my current condition, it’s quite likely that the young lady would have had a rescuer. But I was no longer there looking her in the eye, and distractions and spirits governing her life caused her to go in another way. I still think of the situation like Oscar Schindler crying because he couldn’t fit another Jew on his list.
Obviously God had a lot to do with these goings on. If not, how is it that I had the most intimate sensual encounter in ages? It’s like God really DID know that I needed to be validated. But further, he used the situation to show me the heartbreaking situation of the young mother.
In addition to supporting David and other heroes despite their polygamy, God actually told the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute. Now I have already taken the route of the prophet Jonah, and I have already stood at the resting place of Moses. Perhaps one day I’ll follow in the footsteps of Hosea. We don’t know the details of HOW God told him to marry a prostitute. Perhaps, suffering from a bleeding heart, the prophet wanted to rescue one. In any event, I am sure if I had wound up with this young lady who called herself “Tiffany,” she would be a lot more appreciative of my presence than the women of California that I have met so far.
The point of relating this story, though, is that I’ve never been one to walk the straight and narrow. This has gotten me into a bit of trouble, but I’ve been surprised that most of the time I have at least learned from my adventures and misadventures, but also seen that the powers of heaven have blessed me in a number of strange situations that would perplex most religious people.
That God is infinitely understanding, merciful, and loving is rarely on anyone’s mind these days as humanity is consumed by the fighting between two cultures, those who are consumed with following religious commandments that they haven’t bothered to try to understand and an opposing culture pretending that humanity as it is is simply perfect. I think anyone would only have to ask Tiffany about humanity to know that this is not the case.
The above said, I don’t have an answer about the issue of sexuality. I can only say that if one is going to find God, looking to human culture, religious or otherwise, is not going to be extremely helpful. One does have to accept themselves as they are, though we also have to understand that gay, straight, or otherwise, we all don’t quite measure up to the way humanity was originally intended. We will all take individual paths on how we deal with these things. None of these paths should ever distract us from the fact of God’s infinite love and mercy, however. That’s really all I can say on the subject.