Atheism and Sex

Sex is one of my favourite topics. I spend a great deal of time thinking about it and I don't just mean in the sense of erotic fantasies, although I can't deny that a I do do that too. If you read the newspapers and the billboards you might think that Australian society generally is quite comfortable with the topic of sex... but my experience has generally been the opposite.

Sure, I can sit down with most men and have a discussion over which women are the most attractive, which quickly turns into an argument in my case because I'm quite comfortable pointing out that my tastes in women are not conventional, but if I wanted to bring up a more emotional topic like how I feel at the point of ejaculation then no way! Australian men quickly turn into prudes far too uncomfortable to talk about sexuality with any degree of insight or seriousness.

Strangely, Australians will often criticise foreigners, such as muslims, for being sexually repressed. Yet some of the 'sexiest' people I know are muslims. 'Sexiest' is in parenthesis because really, I don't think many people seriously think about what sexy is... I will get to this in more detail shortly. What I want to make clear at this juncture is that when it comes to talking about emotions and sex Australians are as repressed as that undifferentiated mass of muslims they like to contrast themselves against.

I can see that comment upsetting a lot of people already... good that's part of what I do here. :)

Where religion comes in for me, well I was raised catholic and I was left without any doubt that sex was a disgusting thing. Sure no one ever said explicitly to me that sex was disgusting. But at the same time no one talked about it except in awkward and uncomfortable tones... or in jokes as a rude topic. When ones only exposure to sex (because it is a taboo subject) is from dirty school yard jokes one starts to think that sex is just as unspiritual and dirty as those jokes.

But as a teenager, deeply interested in sex, I came across wicca and paganism. They treat sex in a completely different way... sex is a beautiful, sublime and spiritual experience. Both men and women are encouraged to think of their sexuality as divine and a beautiful aspect of themselves. Whereas catholicism was bent on convincing me that my sexuality was sinful and the pathway to the devil.

Although I am an atheist now I learned a great deal from my reading of wiccan texts on sex. Far more than I ever learned from the Bible... which seems to focus on the proverbial sexual appetite of King David to the point of ridicule and the justification for Lot's multiple acts of incest with his underage daughters. Jesus is a sexless or homosexual figure whom I never felt connected to as a sage on sexuality.

I feel that dogma has deeply harmed our sense of sexuality... because there is no aspect of humanity more involved in creativity and imagination than sex. Dogma stifles creativity and for this reason I feel the religious dogma is usually doomed to be sexophobic in the long run.

Why is sex a creative act? Firstly, the best sex is in ones head. Sure, 1 in 50 people have a face and body that just screams "great sex" but often they have a personality that screams "get stuffed" too. No, for most of us the key to great sex is in our imaginations: in love letters, poems, stories, pillow talk, sexting and erotic fantasy. When I first read about some of the testimony from the witch trials I vividly recall being in the school library feeling profoundly uncomfortable. I was reading about accused witches describing sexual encounters with the devil in graphically detailed confessions, after being tortured of course, and it was giving me powerful erections. I never told anyone this because I felt embarrassed and disgusted with myself. But clearly, there was something in those sexual fantasies created by these poor sexually repressed women that was exciting. Yes, sex with the devil must have been a lot of fun: dangerous, forbidden, exciting and unrepressed.

This brings me to one of the biggest problems of relationships today is keeping sex interesting. Think about this, we as a species have relationship problems because we don't know how to keep sex interesting. If you think this doesn't sound absurd then you've probably been living in a sexually repressed culture all your life. We are surrounded by a huge variety of entertainment forms and we don't ever get so bored of them as we do with our sexual partners. We can keep ourselves going to movies all through our lives, because although our tastes in films might change as we get older we never get bored of new movies so long as they're different, creative, dramatic and interesting.

And yet we get bored of sex? Something that we actually have an orgasm over? Something in my head just screams *crisis* whenever someone hints to me that they aren't satisfied with their sex life.

Again, we don't talk about it, we don't ask about it, we don't give each other practical advice on how to make sex better. Instead we suggest people modify their bodies artificially or through diets and exercise to achieve a sexiness that will rescue us from our woeful sex lives.

In church, no one asks for a genuine prayer from the heart like:
"Dear God, please relieve our poor humble sex lives of their boredom. Send me and my friends passionate sexy and considerate lovers who are not clingy yet deeply respectful. Make sure they are free of STDs and no unwanted pregnancies result. Teach them to touch us in just the right way to maximise the pleasure of our orgasms and find happiness through the bodily means you so generously bestowed on us for this purpose,"

No one would feel comfortable saying that out loud in a church and nor would anyone in the audience likely feel comfortable listening to it... but really... who doesn't secretly wish for a prayer like that to come true?

And as exciting as that prayer is, it still misses the point. Sexiness, like happiness, is all in the mind. If we want great sex we shouldn't be spending so much time worrying about the body. Instead we should be worrying about the heart.

For me, some of the biggest impediments I've had to enjoying sex is worry, fear and guilt. Worry because I'm terrified of disappointing my sexual partner, mostly because no one told me some really important information... like how to have sex - yes, some of you may laugh and say it just comes naturally, but when you've never seen a vagina before, much less felt the inside of one then it's a pretty nerve wracking experience. The kind of nerve wracking experience that gives a man temporary impotence from worry. Just briefly on that point, generally the best cure for impotence is to slow down, relax but not to give up. Instead we tend to ridicule and laugh at men brave enough to admit to having this problem making it much worse... to me that sounds like a psychological strategy to make other men infertile. Interesting, yes? Men can be bitchy too, although they're probably far less aware of what their psychological blows are meant to achieve.

So yes, the how to have sex was never adequately described and in my catholic sexual education, mostly given by female teachers (who obviously felt awkward talking about it to classrooms full of teenage boys), and I graduated with an absurd idea that the vagina was two squiggles of ink on a caricature of a woman. I wonder what the girls imagined a penis to be like? Although a penis is probably more self-explanatory than a vagina which is still a mystery to me to this day and I'm sure it is a mystery to many many women too.

But the secret to great sex is not where you put and touch the various genitals. The secret is being receptive to the experience of having sex. And being receptive is about being comfortable, feeling sexy and excited all at once - all things that happen in the imagination (and with the devil, apparently). The words one says to ones lover leading up to sex are as important, if not more so, than the places and ways you touch them.

I've come to the conclusion that if you can play make believe comfortably with someone as though you were still very young children, then your potential for awesome sex with that person is very high. Strangely, we discourage day dreamers and imaginative children... do we want to make our sex lives boring? Do we want to stomp out the divine spark of creativity in our bodies?

One final illustration.

When experiencing orgasm inside a woman I used to feel guilty and dirty for it, because I felt like a parasite trying to infect an innocent woman with my seed. I've heard couples fighting and women say things to hurt their partners to encourage this perception: that men are parasites just trying to spread their genetic disease to women then run away. Let me tell you as a man nothing is more deeply troubling to my soul to think of myself like that. Instead, when I orgasm now I think about how I'm potentially physically merging with this woman whom I love and admire. Part of me, merging with part of her to create a new life made from the two of us accepting each other.

I think the catholics have it all wrong. I think they actively encourage sexual perversion and the cheapening of sexual experience. I think they're very good at telling themselves that they hate sex because they love it so much. In any field of study, anyone who is proud of being ignorant is generally considered a shameful fool, so why are catholics so proud to be ignorant about sex?

I don't know about how most other religions regard sex, because they don't talk about it either... or maybe they just don't talk about it to prudish catholics, I just don't know. But being conscious and knowledgeable of ones sexuality is a spiritual and divine element to a human being in my opinion.

Discogia and Becoming an Atheist

When asked why I became an atheist I usually answer with a stock standard answer like, "There just isn't any imperical evidence for the existence of god and there are far more likely explanations that fit the facts and evidence that is available and these explanations do not require the existence of god to work,"

This statement might well be true but it doesn't actually convey any of my personal or emotional experience with coming to terms with living in a universe without a god in it. In truth my loss of faith was driven not my intellectual needs at all, but by emotional forces at work within me.

To understand why it felt so unbearable being a Catholic one first needs to understand the concept of cognitive dissonance. Notice that the feeling doesn't have a specific name, instead they just refer to it as involving a mixture of secondary emotions like: anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment and stress. However, none of these secondary emotions adequately describes the primary feeling. I have adapted the term 'discogia' to describe this feeling.

As a young Catholic I spent a great deal of time worrying about whether or not I would go to hell if I died. See, although many people say that I was a quiet well behaved child I nonetheless knew better. I had frequently lied to, stolen from, harmed and decieved many people (including my own family), albeit these were petty crimes typical of a child in retrospect. However, it was very clear to me that I had committed serious crimes and injustices to other people. God was very clear on this and he watched everything that I did and he knew my thoughts so I couldn't lie to him. I had no explanation for my actions except that I was evil. Therefore I was going to hell. When I confessed my sins to the priest he assured me that my sins were not that important and I would be forgiven.

This is where I started to feel discogia creeping into my life in a big way.

See, god hates sin, god is perfect, god created man, god created hell to punish sinners and god loves us. Why then would got create man in such a way that his natural tendancy is to sin? Then after he has sinned throw him into a lake of fire to burn in torment for all eternity... but still love him?

Also, if god created man why make him capable of sinning so easily? If he was perfect and all powerful surely he could have at least done a better job? As for free will this puzzled me the most because I was in love with science at the time and science could predict the future, albeit in limited ways, but the fact that science works at all implies that free will can't actually be free.

I remember being in grades 5 and 6 worrying frantically about this problem. I tried over and over again to write stories that were original... but everything was copied from something I'd seen, read or heard before... all I was doing was reproducing somebody else's ideas and mixing them with another persons. The creativity needed to produce truly free will didn't exist. In retrospect the knowledge and power needed to achieve free will is on a scale well beyond human capability. The conclusion was stark... I was just a machine. Worse than that, a sinful machine doomed to hell... because apparently a loving god had created me this way just for this purpose.

At the time my solution was clear, become a priest so that I could get on god's good side and it would all be ok. Although... god wasn't exactly someone I felt comfortable trusting either. I had been very disturbed by the angel of death killing all of egypt's first born. In mass I had heard that god asked Abraham to kill his only son as a sign of faith, true, he stopped him but later on God would actually kill his only son and I never could understand why he did that. God was actually scaring me quite a lot. Could my father kill me like god did? Just to make a point about how far he could go? Or what really confused me at the time was why would god deliberately forced his son to get himself killed (it is mentioned in the gospels that Jesus had the option of escape but god pushed him into it) then get angry with humanity for killing his son?

The feelings of discogia just got worse and worse as I grew older. But I didn't want to give up on god. So I started off by deciding that the old testament was garbage and focussed only on the new testament... then I started to get bothered by inconsistencies between the gospels which could only be explained if the writers weren't perfect/inspired by the holy spirit but just ordinary men. In which case they could have got it wrong. I also remember being bothered by Jesus' complete lack of a comprehensive schema or world view. His message was devoid of detail and practical advice. By my teenage years I had come to realise how childishly simplistic the words and messages of the bible were compared to the sophistication of later authors. I had to wonder if these were learned men at all writing it.

So eventually I turned to deism. God existed, but it was not for me a mere mortal to interpret his will. Then gradually the importance and role of god in the world grew less and less as I dealt with each remaining instance of discogia by putting in place scientific and rational ideas that dealt with the facts better than the religious one - although by this stage I was in university studying philosophy. When I started philosophy that's when I started gaining serious ground on the overwhelming sense of discogia that I had been ensared in. But that's still too simple an explanation for an emotional level.

It hurt.

Losing god in my life hurt me a great deal... it must have taken me 1,000 steps to get from Catholic to atheist. I was a wiccan in between and a pagan between that. For each step I removed one unpleasant feeling of discogia and replaced it with a sharper more painful realisation of my limitations, mortality, ordinariness and insignificance.

To become an atheist I had to give up these things:

That I was special and unique because I was part of a brilliant plan.
That my body was a work of art, not a randomly arranged set of genetic instructions.
That I would live after death.
That I would eventually see my friends and loved ones again.
That I could achieve anything because god doesn't make junk.
That there was justice in the universe.
That I would always be rewarded if I did the right thing.
That there was such a concept as a 'right' thing.
That I was loved no matter what I did.
That humanity was being looked after and cared for from above so it would all work out in the end whatever happened.
That good things will just come to me if I wait for god to deliver them.

^ That's an awful lot to lose. It hurt. It hurt so much one month I just couldn't sleep at all from fear of death. It hurt because religion had been my iron shield against insecurity in my life. Once I lost that shield I felt tiny, helpless and small. Becoming an atheist was not a quick, easy or effortless task. In this short passage I cannot describe how painful it was. I wasn't suicidal, rather the opposite... I was scared of stepping outside my door in case a car hit me on the foot path and it was all over.

Life after god was only painful to reach because I had had my hopes raised to outrageously high levels by religious education beforehand. If the feeling of discogia hadn't been so awkward (it wasn't painful, just awkward) I never would have given up on religion because those defences against uncertainty were wonderful.

So, for me, I became an atheist not because I thought more clearly than others... but because I felt more strongly than others. I find it awkward telling people that's there's no god or religious dogma is bad. Not because I don't believe it... but I know that every time I say it I'm pushing someone down another of those 1,000 steps that eventually leads to peace of mind... but every step hurts a great deal too and unlike god, I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone.