Christianity condemns casual sex and masturbation as perhaps the greatest sin. It's one of the famed seven deadly sins, in fact, the sin of lust. Hell, Jesus said even just the thought of lust is a deadly sin.
On the other hand, it also champions the act of praying as one of the greatest virtues.
But consider the curious contrast between prayer and masturbation.
While Christianity sees casual sex as purely physical and devoid of emotion, the act of praying is purely emotional devoid of anything physical. One connects a person to their entire body and all of their sensations, while the other disconnects a person from their body and imprisons them in the tower of ideals within the locked room of their own mind.
Praying is a way of asking someone else (God or a saint or an angel or jinni) to do something on your behalf, while telling yourself there's either nothing else you can do anyway, or that praying is the best thing you can do regardless of whatever else you could do.
Christianity therefore condemns physical masturbation as a sin while championing emotional masturbation as a virtue, for if the former is mindless action the latter is mindful inaction.
No wonder Mary was "ever virgin" while Jesus had a thing for prostitutes.
It is also important to understand how sex and prayer reflect a difference prized in Ancient Rome, especially by the first Christians. Sex belonged to the physical body, which received pleasure during the act, while prayer emanated from the mind, which received pleasure during the act as well. Interestingly enough, both stimulate the release of dopamine in our brain, albeit using different triggers to do so.
But because Christians see human flesh as fallen and imperfect, as illustrated by the fact we eventually die, while their "God" is seen as wholly immaterial intelligence, deriving pleasure from the former is to delight in what is sinful while doing so from the latter is considered "holy."
To save oneself from dying the way the physical body is condemned to do so over the course of life, prayer is offered as a tithing to an omnipotent infinite immaterial consciousness that it may save our own ignorant finite immaterial consciousness from perishing like our flesh, and unify it with its own.
The sign that such a "God" intends to save the "souls" of such people is illustrated in God becoming "man" in the form of Jesus, and all so such a God could show such "believers" that he could, and would, save their immaterial minds the same way he resurrected Jesus's material body and brain.
How then can sinful flesh be made in the image and likeness of an immaterial intelligence, and what urge or need led the latter to create the former? And most of all, how can such an "act" of creation of imperfection be interpreted as the result of a perfect creators' "love"?
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