When you are raised your entire life to think about nothing as much as your religion, your salvation, and your God, becoming an atheist does not mean you suddenly no longer think of such thinks anymore. On the contrary, once the conditioning has formatted our minds to work a certain way, over the course of several decades, it is only possible for us to start looking at the horse from the opposite end.
In doing so, one can see that the war between sexuality and spirituality, which religion claims is so natural to us all, is actually one that religion alone is responsible for both framing and fostering, much to its sole benefit.
When St. Augustine and St Aquinas mercilessly attacked women as perhaps the most evil harlots God could have ever vomited forth into the world, their sentiments were not simply the byproduct of their time and place in history, as Catholics often like to suggest. Rather, these men were no doubt influenced in their loathing of women by many cultural ingredients indeed, but there is no doubt that religion gave their holy rage the lingering scent of divinity.
Of course, Catholic women all deny this, or ignore it, or do any sort of mental acrobats necessary for minimizing it, even as many claim that Islam is so oppressive toward women, which it so often and clearly is. But for such women, Catholicism today is a kinder and gentler form of subservience to an old boys club that still gets to tell women their place, which is certainly not in the role of a Catholic priest.
Does the fact that women cannot become priests ever suggest to such ardent Catholic women that there is something chauvinistic about their religion? Not for a second! They willfully accept that, while God made men and women "equal," he also made them separate. That such an idea proved only to be a tool to divide the races, is completely ignored by such women. And the the fact that they ignore the lessons of history, especially of slavery, is why so many men feel it is their godly duty to hold women in such contempt in the first place.
Yet all of these differences, that too many Catholic women are only too willing to ignore or make allowances for with any number of theological excuses, is at the very heart of the war between sexuality and spirituality. And that is a war that not only grows exclusively out of religion, but is one who's fires religion is forever stoking for it's own financial gain. Indeed, religion sells salvation by selling people on a fear of sex.
There are Catholics the world over, for example, who think the act of fellatio is something that God would gladly throw them into a lake of fire for all eternity, just for even thinking about it. Never mind that we are far less than mere amebas to such a God, and extremely poorly designed and admittedly flawed amebas at that. Such a fact is completely inconsequential.
Sex is the greatest gift in the world, a learned Catholic will tell you (in accord with their programming), but it must be used in an extremely specific way, for extremely specific circumstances, and always with God in mind. That such a mental ménage à trois is part of the spiritual reality of religion leaves one to wonder how anyone can really ever enjoy sex, at least when they are religiously inclined, since they are conditioned to always fear that they may be having too much fun in the processes. And that if they are, their burning passions may only lead them to burn in hell.
Such ideas only make sense, not intuitively, but after a lifetime of trying to make sense out of what makes no sense at all. That a person is tasked with having to sort out such rubbish, over the course of an entire lifetime no less, makes all organized religion operate like the Church of Scientology, with the more you put into it, the more one is taught to expect they can get out of it in return. And by "get out of it," I simply mean that they "believe" they will only ever grow in greater understanding of God's views and rules about proper sexual conduct, even though they know fully well it will not in any way come close to the Karma Sutra.
In doing so, one can see that the war between sexuality and spirituality, which religion claims is so natural to us all, is actually one that religion alone is responsible for both framing and fostering, much to its sole benefit.
When St. Augustine and St Aquinas mercilessly attacked women as perhaps the most evil harlots God could have ever vomited forth into the world, their sentiments were not simply the byproduct of their time and place in history, as Catholics often like to suggest. Rather, these men were no doubt influenced in their loathing of women by many cultural ingredients indeed, but there is no doubt that religion gave their holy rage the lingering scent of divinity.
Of course, Catholic women all deny this, or ignore it, or do any sort of mental acrobats necessary for minimizing it, even as many claim that Islam is so oppressive toward women, which it so often and clearly is. But for such women, Catholicism today is a kinder and gentler form of subservience to an old boys club that still gets to tell women their place, which is certainly not in the role of a Catholic priest.
Does the fact that women cannot become priests ever suggest to such ardent Catholic women that there is something chauvinistic about their religion? Not for a second! They willfully accept that, while God made men and women "equal," he also made them separate. That such an idea proved only to be a tool to divide the races, is completely ignored by such women. And the the fact that they ignore the lessons of history, especially of slavery, is why so many men feel it is their godly duty to hold women in such contempt in the first place.
Yet all of these differences, that too many Catholic women are only too willing to ignore or make allowances for with any number of theological excuses, is at the very heart of the war between sexuality and spirituality. And that is a war that not only grows exclusively out of religion, but is one who's fires religion is forever stoking for it's own financial gain. Indeed, religion sells salvation by selling people on a fear of sex.
There are Catholics the world over, for example, who think the act of fellatio is something that God would gladly throw them into a lake of fire for all eternity, just for even thinking about it. Never mind that we are far less than mere amebas to such a God, and extremely poorly designed and admittedly flawed amebas at that. Such a fact is completely inconsequential.
Sex is the greatest gift in the world, a learned Catholic will tell you (in accord with their programming), but it must be used in an extremely specific way, for extremely specific circumstances, and always with God in mind. That such a mental ménage à trois is part of the spiritual reality of religion leaves one to wonder how anyone can really ever enjoy sex, at least when they are religiously inclined, since they are conditioned to always fear that they may be having too much fun in the processes. And that if they are, their burning passions may only lead them to burn in hell.
Such ideas only make sense, not intuitively, but after a lifetime of trying to make sense out of what makes no sense at all. That a person is tasked with having to sort out such rubbish, over the course of an entire lifetime no less, makes all organized religion operate like the Church of Scientology, with the more you put into it, the more one is taught to expect they can get out of it in return. And by "get out of it," I simply mean that they "believe" they will only ever grow in greater understanding of God's views and rules about proper sexual conduct, even though they know fully well it will not in any way come close to the Karma Sutra.
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