Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (13 page)

The net result of this system is that Catholic clergy, charismatic preachers and imams can do no wrong; their word is god’s word. Childhood infection creates an invisible, protective shield around and unquestioning blindness to the leaders of a religion. The shield does not necessarily extend to other religions. Protestants can see the immoral behavior of Catholic bishops protecting pedophile priests but be blind to the immoral or illegal behavior of their own minister.

Now let’s add a second component of the collective mind – anesthetization. If the majority of adherents in a religious community are trained in this fashion, they are positioned to ignore the aberrant behavior in the leader. Karl Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses. His analysis was not far off. Religious people can ignore massive amounts of information in support of their religion’s view of the world.

For example, most Protestants understand that the Catholic church has a major, institutional, endemic problem with sex abuse by clergy. They can even identify reasonable causes, like celibacy or protection coming from the hierarchy. Many cannot believe that Catholics are not more outraged at the continual, non-stop scandals. They are surprised that people continue to
attend and give money to the Catholic Church. In other words, a rational observer can often see the problem with clarity.

At the same time, ask Catholics as they are leaving mass about these same issues. The answers range from “One bad apple spoils the lot” argument to “It’s is a big problem but the Church is 2,000 years old and has seen worse,” to “The Church is under attack by the secular world,” to “My priest would never do anything like that.” That refrain was heard for years even from people whose own children were being molested by priests.
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Even as the scandals become public and well documented, nothing could stop these people from attending mass, giving money and praying for the priest. Their minds are anesthetized so effectively that no rational process will influence them.

The mechanisms of such anesthetization can be traced back to the childhood indoctrination. Most children don’t question their religion. It would not occur to a child to ask, “Why aren’t you teaching me Islam rather than Catholicism?”

That same childlike acceptance resides in the minds of most adults of the faith. Once installed, the religious map prevents critical thinking about itself, though critical thinking about other religions works fine. With sufficient people infected, there is little chance of a clergy being accused, let alone caught. Reading Irish reports on 80 years of Catholic sexual abuse in schools and orphanages, it is clear the mostly Catholic police were as good at ignoring complaints as the bishops, often discounting victims reports and even threatening the victims.
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While a Protestant police officer in the United States does not have the same religion, he does have the same clergy blindness. Whether a Baptist minister or a Catholic priest, the victim often has less standing than the clergy and, therefore, less credibility in the eyes of the authorities.

Fortunately, times are a-changing for the better. The more secular a society becomes, the more difficult it is to maintain a collective religious mind. As a result, decades of abuse are finally beginning to be exposed.
Police are better trained and have a healthy skepticism as they document cases. The Internet allows people far more information about the church and the predators within and more opportunities to communicate across distances.

Catholic church attendance rates have fallen since 1990 and 10% of U.S. parishes have closed, along with a 24% decrease in active priests. Growth in U.S. Catholicism is almost entirely fueled by immigration, and many new priests are immigrants themselves.
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According to a 2009 Pew Research study, among American-born Catholics, four have left the Catholic church for every new convert.
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Some of this decline may well be attributable to the sex scandals. Others may reflect the Internet generation coming of age. Even highly anesthetized minds may awaken as a result of the avalanche of evidence revealing church complicity.

Unfortunately, people who were abused often stay deeply loyal to the institution that allowed and hid the abuse. On the face of it, it is irrational to stay loyal to an organization that has ruined your sex life, caused untold emotional anguish and abuse and knowingly protected predators for years.
The Unbreakable Child
(2010) by Kim Michele Richardson is the story of a woman who was sexually abused for years in a Catholic orphanage. She and 40 other women were the first to gain a settlement from Roman Catholic nuns. It is a horrendous story, yet she remains a loyal Catholic and even sends her children to Catholic schools. Such is the power of childhood infection and abuse. One reviewer says, “Hers is a beautifully told story about strength and an enduring faith that can lead but one place: to forgiveness.”
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Why would forgiveness even be considered except in the context of religious infection? The primary purpose of forgiveness, in these kinds of cases, is to allow the victim to continue in the religion. The church perpetuates the notion that failure to forgive means something is wrong with you. Forgiveness is an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance for the victim. It doesn’t work and takes the focus off of the perpetrator. Only by forgiving can she justify
her continued membership, giving her money and putting her own children back in the system!

This chapter focused mostly on Catholicism, but the same analysis could be done on Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism and Protestantism. The problems are not unique to Catholicism, just more obvious at this point in time. Visit
StopBaptistPredators.org
or read the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Black Collar Crime Blotter to see thousands of cases from other denominations.

While the religious are certainly anesthetized, we might help stop this pattern by asking, “Where is the outrage?” We can make it difficult for the religious to hide or ignore the sexual abuses and escapades of clergy in any religion. How to do this? By highlighting news stories in social media, letting friends know about local abuses and keeping the issue in front of people. The statistics show that there is not one bad apple but thousands in every religion. Don’t let religionists downplay the devastating harm that religious leaders perpetuate on their followers.

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Such as the stories related in 2 Kings, 2:23-24 and Deuteronomy, 21:18-2.

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We will further discuss the importance of imprinting in child development in
Chapter 10
..

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See essay by Richard Dawkins, “The Emptiness of Theology,” available online at
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/88-the-emptiness-of-theology
.

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See the documentary
Deliver Us From Evil
(Lionsgate, 2006), about the decades-long abuse by Father O’Grady in California.

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The Irish Government Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Orphanages and School for the Deaf, available online at
http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/ExecSummary.php
.

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“The Disturbing Trends behind Parish Closings” by Joseph Claude Harris, May 2005. Available online at
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=4164
.

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“Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation,” 2009, revised 2011, available online at
http://pewforum.org/Faith-in-Flux(3).aspx
.

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Amazon.com
review by Mary Francis Wilkens,
http://www.amazon.com/Unbreakable-Child-Kim-Michele-Richardson/dp/1933016914/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321375789&sr=1-1
.

It is impossible to understand sex and sexuality without a minimal understanding of biology. To ensure that we are fair and balanced in our approach, we will first look at religious biology, then examine scientific biology
.

Bible biology begins with all creatures coming from nowhere. The first man, Adam, was created out of dust. Adam was given the responsibility for creating a classification system for all the animals by naming them. Adam was a bit lonely so he was put to sleep and a rib was extracted to create a “help mate.”
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In Genesis we find that at least one snake can talk and two trees have supernatural powers – the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Humans could live for hundreds of years (Adam lived 930 years with Methuselah taking the prize at 969).

We also know that animals were sexual creatures, hence Noah’s task of bringing all the animals on board the Ark in twos. (There is no mention of asexually reproducing salamanders or lizards.)
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We are also told:

• Bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19).
  
• Rabbits are among the ruminants that chew their cud (Deuteronomy 14:7).
  
• Insects are four-legged creatures (Leviticus 11:2-23).
  
• Locusts, crickets and grasshoppers are acceptable to eat because they have legs above their feet (Leviticus 11:21).
  
• In Genesis Adam and Eve had two sons, one of whom murdered the other. The survivor, Cain, somehow acquired a wife and fathered Enoch. (Where the wife came from no one seems to know.)
  
• Only women are barren (men are never infertile). Fortunately, biblical biology trumps infertility. Sara, wife of Abraham, was over 80 years old when she conceived and “bore a son to Abraham” (Genesis 21:1-2).
  
• In the New Testament Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake while stranded on Malta (Acts 28:8-9). Never mind that there
  are no poisonous snakes on Malta and no evidence they ever existed on that island.
  
• In First Corinthians, Paul tells us that only a dead seed can germinate (15:36).
  
• People rose from the dead, including Lazarus. After Jesus was crucified, many holy people’s tombs opened and they walked around Jerusalem (Matt. 27:52).
  
• A fig tree withered instantly when Jesus cursed it (Mark 11:12-14).
  
• Jesus multiplied fish to feed five thousand people (Mark 8:19).
  
• An epileptic boy was instantly cured with a single command from Jesus (Matt. 17:18).
  

From the Hadith, we learn a good deal about embryology. The process of gestation begins with male and female sperm for 40 days, the embryo becomes a clot for 40 days, then puts on flesh for 40 days. No mention of bones. In 86:6-7, the Koran says, “He [man] is made from a gushing fluid which issues from between the loins and ribs.” No mention of ova.

In the area of botany, the Koran says (20:53) “… with it We have produced diverse pairs of plants each separate from others,” failing to mention that many plants don’t come in pairs but have both sex organs on one plant.

We could have looked at the Book of Mormon and found that horses existed in America before Columbus arrived (although the Indians didn’t seem to discover them until after Columbus came). Or we could read the Zoroastrian Avesta to find that all creatures were created from seeds.
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There simply isn’t much biology in these religious texts and what there is is remarkably inaccurate. In the next chapter we will examine a wealth of information, not only about human sex but also of many other species, none of which shows up in any holy text.

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As an interesting side note, many animals have a bone in their penis called a baculum. We will discuss this later, but the ancients may have noticed that while many animals have a baculum, humans do not. Some have theorized that god did not take a rib from Adam, since men and women have the same number of ribs, but instead took his baculum. And thus, men have no baculum.

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Asexual reproduction is a mode of reproduction by which offspring arise from a single parent and inherit the genes of that parent only.

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Fargard II 27 (70): “Thither thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, of the greatest, best, and finest kinds on this earth.”

Homosexuality is found in over 1,500 species. Homophobia is found in only one. Which seems more unnatural?

-Effox comment on HuffPosts

We have all heard the saying “Follow the money.” In sexuality, it is important to follow the biology. To understand what religion is doing to us sexually, we need to understand what our natural biological tendencies are.

To understand human sexuality, we can study how the sex organs of other animals have evolved. Why are they so different from ours? Why are some large, others small? Why do some species have female sex organs that look like male organs?

Sex organs are among the most dynamic and adaptive organs in any species and give us a framework for understanding how evolution has shaped us and how we compare to other species. This study will help us understand the impact of religion on sexuality and provide some ideas for non-religious sexuality.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the “father of modern biological classification,” noticed that flowers were most easily classified by their sex organs: the pistil, stamen, petal.
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For this reason, some said he was obsessed with sex. Modern evolutionary biology has confirmed that sex organs are important for classification, largely because they evolve and change more rapidly than most other organs. This rapid change allows us to make fine distinctions and shows how almost identical animals may be entirely different species, based on sex organ differences. Sex organs tell us a lot about what is going on in the world of sex and sexual selection with a particular species.