I am just curious and would like to open a discussion on Religion and Sexuality.
This is a topic that really makes the poisons hatch out of the mud, but if you want a truly great book on the topic, there is none better than Peter Brown's
Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. He teaches late antiquity and medieval history at Princeton.
What is fascinating about the book is his discussion of Greek medical giants like Galen, who believed that brain matter, bone marrow and semen were all the same stuff. They were all gooey, light grey, and had the same gelatinous consistency. So the Greeks and Romans called the material "psyche" and assumed that when you ejaculated, you lost a little bit of your brain and bone matter. The proof of this was that men grew weaker and shorter with age, after all that lost semen. There was no concept at all of hormones and secretion, and even Leonardo da Vinci drew anatomical charts with tubes running from the brain down the spine into the little holding tanks called testicles. So it made perfect sense that losing too much semen, for silly reasons, was a very big deal, even if it did feel good.
Brown makes an implicit claim, I think, that what really impressed the Romans and laid the groundwork for adopting christianity as the imperial religion was the teachings of Origen, who was a very influential early theologian. Origin not only believed what Galen taught (as did every other intellectual), he believed that Jesus' teaching was about establishing a new creation. Since the Romans were very hierarchical and ordered, if "new creation" had been interpreted politically, as a revolutionary proposal for full, actual equality between men and women, free and slaves, there would have been complete chaos and barbarism. So clearly that was an image that could not be taken literally. No image, religious or scientific can ever be taken literally, for that matter.
Instead, Origen taught that it was Adam's sexual desire that made him rebel against nature, and the punishment for that was expulsion from the garden of paradise on earth, and a terrible life ending in death. Christianity's "new creation" was about reality, not fantasy, and its most importation part ("salvation" comes from salus, which means health or well-being) was about preserving actual physical, psychological and moral strength & health. So the best way to do that and to live into a vigorous, strong, healthy old age was not to waste your brain matter and bone marrow by frequent ejaculations if you were a man. (He was less clear about why women should be celibate, but was also convinced that was medically sound for truly heroic women leaders who needed to remain sharp). Origen chopped off his own balls so he would not lose his mind or strength. But the church thought that was a little bizarre, so he was never canonized. And other theologians pointed out that the human race would die out pretty quickly without any sex at all--so there was a controvery about how to manage it.
You can see why this is a great book. It explains a lot about why the Romans loved the idea of celibacy, and why it remained so important for such a long time. The stoic philosophers were especially thrilled that even the christian women were willing to embrace celibacy. They saw this as a supreme sign of strength, since women were weak, and they thought that people who could be that tough could certainly rule an empire if not the world. So it makes perfect sense why Constantine would want his soldiers baptized and turned into christians. It would make them unstoppable.
You certainly can hear a lot of speculation about about sex and religion (and Brown does not look at other religions or cultures). But a lot of it is just hot air--people just trying to give their own assumptions more weight than they probably deserve. I think it's sort of silly to imagine that all other human beings are or were idiots, and we alone (esp in the US) are the only ones who know anything. For me, that's kind of the small brain syndrome.
I think a great topic deserves a little work, so I would start by reading somebody like Brown. He commands a lot of respect among people who aren't impressed primarily with themselves or their own assumptions.
Good luck, so low.
