The Separation of Sex and Church

 

From Atheist Evolution, a book by Michael J. Vaughn

 

The Vise Grip

In my personal life, I operate by what I call the John Lennon Rule. That is, when it comes to other people’s belief systems, my attitude is, Whatever Gets You Through the Night. Far be it for me to completely comprehend what someone else is going through in their life and what they might need for basic survival.

         That said, I do think the human species needs to eventually rid itself of religion in order to get on with its evolution. The reason being, once a religion is created, it operates very much like a corporation: soulless, concerned only with its own survival, and willing to run over anyone who gets in its way.

          For a robust, worldwide view of religious toxicity, I recommend God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007, Hachette Book Group). When I first read this book ten years ago, it was like someone had set fire to my brain. Here, backed up by a lifetime of religion-focused journalism, were all my darkest suspicions on the subject, explicated in fierce, brilliant arguments. Although I will try to describe these manipulations in my own terms, it would be a mistake not to acknowledge the paths that Hitchens burned through my synapses.

 

The Original Sin Shell Game

The primary con of the church, writes Hitchens, is to maintain strict control over its followers by ensnaring them in a game they cannot possibly win, a vise grip of ill logic. The ace up their sleeve is original sin, the idea that a baby pops from the womb with demerits already ascribed to its permanent record. This is because you, Mr. Newborn, are culpable for the actions of your ancestor 6,000 years ago, a young lady who listened to a talking snake and wrongfully took a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. (And why was this bad? Because religion wants you to be as stupid as possible.)

          Just to make sure that no one ever clears this imaginary slate, the church concocted sins that are blatantly unavoidable. A perfect example is the Tenth Commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

          A pretty interesting list! Note how the wife and servants are listed as property, on the same level as the ox and the ass. But anyone who understands the free-firing nature of the human brain knows that the negative action of not coveting is impossible. The mind simply goes there, and Voila! The Unavoidable Sin. I can still hear George Carlin’s voice saying (and I paraphrase), “If you’ve lusted after your neighbor’s wife, well save your car fare, man, you’ve already sinned!” (I might add that this is a sin near and dear to my heart. As a fiction writer, one of my greatest assets is a brain that always goes there. It’s called imagination.) Put another way, what we have here is a religion that doesn’t ask for much, they simply want to control your every thought.

          It’s not really the church’s aim, with the coveting rule, to catch you in a misdemeanor. The goal is to make you feel bad about yourself, and to guarantee that you will not spend five seconds of your life as a non-sinner (in fact, if you did manage to grab those five seconds, you’d be guilty of the sin of pride). The only possible way out, say the gatekeepers, is to cart your sorry uncleansible soul to church for regular maintenance, and while you’re there it wouldn’t hurt to put some more money in the offertory. Sucker.

          Perhaps the most obnoxious Christian idea is that Jesus died for our sins. To which I posit a few questions. 1) Who asked him to? 2) Why do you continue to refer to everyone as sinners when his death wiped out all of our sins? 3) Why is Jesus’ death any greater or more painful than the death of any human ever born? 4) So God declared us sinners for being exactly who he created us to be, then tried to make up for it by killing his own son? What kind of a sick fuck is this guy? (See Old Testament. Oh, right.)

 

Fifty Shades of Circumcision

What could be a richer arena for manipulation than sex? Our higher mind is already plenty conflicted about these guttural, noisy, messy things we do when nobody’s looking. How easy would it be to throw a little gasoline on the fire and send one’s followers into that same no-win vise grip?

          As with original sin, the sociopaths of religion can’t bear to leave the babies alone. Welcome to circumcision, a barbaric ritual (descendant of the blood sacrifices of paganism) in which the intelligent design propagandists of the world turn to their god with knives unsheathed and say, You got this one little part wrong. And slice off the foreskins of their defenseless newborns.

          In recent years, medical science has finally overcome the frightening lobbying power of the church and declared this procedure to be completely unnecessary. This clarifies the actual aim of this vandalism, which is sexual repression. Without the protective foreskin, the head of the penis becomes less and less sensitive. What happens next has a sort of elegant irony. The sexual urges remain the same, while the outlet for those urges has been damaged, creating a kind of bottleneck. Recent studies show that circumcised males compensate for their lowered sensitivity by pursuing ever more dangerous sex acts, increasing their chances of contracting and spreading sexually transmitted diseases. This completely blows up the already weak argument that circumcised penises are more hygienic. (Here, try this. We call it “soap and water.”)

          Armed with information from the radio doctor Dean Edell (a personal hero of mine in the realm of logic-driven thinking), I once wrote a letter to the editor on this subject. A Jewish friend read it and accused me of being antisemitic.

          “But I’m not Jewish!” I responded. “I was born in a secular American hospital to Christian parents. Why was I circumcised?”

          I lost that friendship over this discussion. Which is just as well. Having one’s dick sliced up is a bit far to go to prove you’re not antisemitic.

 

The Unspeakable, Obvious Act

One of the supreme ah-ha! moments in Hitchens’ book is his discussion of masturbation. Given the super-redundancy engineered by evolution, the average male reproductive system will produce 525 billion spermatozoa over a lifetime. This kind of overabundance creates a great amount of pressure. Fortunately, evolution has provided a convenient means for release: appendages that result in our hands dangling directly next to our genitalia.

          The church, of course, saw this irresistible, natural act as another chance to place its followers in the vise grip. Do that, they said, and you’re going straight to hell. But even the threat of eternal torment wasn’t enough, so they added all manner of folk myths about hairy palms and gradual blindness. (This is a basic truth about religion: it consistently treats the realities of nature as the enemy.) If a female is caught masturbating (an act pursued more blatantly for pleasure), the slut-shaming goes on forever.

          In one area – birth control – the church is wildly pro-nature, seemingly doing every stupid thing they can to encourage breeding. The realities that they purposely ignore bring disastrous results.

          The first reality is a growing gap between the age when a female can reproduce and when they should. Given the increasing income equality of the U.S. economy, it’s not possible for a couple to support themselves and a child till their mid-twenties.

          The church, self-serving, patriarchal sociopaths that they are, see just one more vise grip. Thou shalt not use birth control, thou shalt not use abortion – yes you, our follower, are expected to defeat billions of years of reproductive evolution (and raging hormones) through sheer power of will. But here, here’s a 2,000-year-old made-up story about a nice Jewish carpenter to help you.

          If pro-life fundamentalists actually wanted to prevent abortions, they would do their damnedest to encourage birth control, but here’s where Christianity’s unnatural view of sex deals another blow. The mere thought of their children fornicating is enough to send them to their rosary beads, accompanied by a complete amnesia about how horny they were at that age. Birth control, it seems, is seen as an admission of defeat. As for the church, they just seem to want to breed as many followers as possible, even if all of them are miserable and impoverished.

          Given religion’s misogynistic tendencies, the issue of abortion is a dandy opportunity to control half their followers by using their own bodies against them. And it enrages them that the U.S. has granted women sovereignty over their own reproductive systems.

          You will meet many pleasant, admirable people who work for religious institutions. Indeed, it’s a wise atheist who judges people as individuals, not for their affiliations. That does not change the fact that religions are soulless entities, ones that are perfectly willing to wreck lives in the service of their own survival.

 

 

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of twenty novels, including the popular atheist novel The Popcorn Girl.