Faith and/or Science

God, Sex, and Your Lover

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 13 Comments

……now that I have your attention, let’s talk about sex.

Well, yes and no on that.  Let’s talk about God, sex, and your lover.

A college classmate of mine sent me a link to a recent essay in the Huffington Post, Roger Friedland: God, Sex and Love on American Campuses.  I love that she knew I would be fascinated by this, and I am.  I find the intersection of sexuality and spirituality to be one of the most compelling destinations in human experience.

Friedland is a Professor of Religion and Cultural Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He conducted surveys of students on his campus to find answers to questions about who is doing what with whom and why from a sexual perspective.  He was curious about the perceived change of habits since his own youth, when as he reflects, love was taken almost for granted but sex was something to investigate.

My generation took love for granted; sex was the great uncertainty, the adventure. This new generation has reversed the equation. For them, sex has become ordinary; what is uncertain, frightening, and for an increasing number of them unbelievable, is love.

When you read the HuffPo piece, be aware it is relatively explicit but moves on quickly to questions about the relevance and role of religion to young people’s choices about sex.  Friedland is quick to establish that there is simply no objective and reliable research that supports the idea that belief in God has much of an effect on what people actually do in their sex lives.  For example, students taking “virginity pledges” were almost identical in their sexual experiences with those who did not take the pledge, with the exception of more, ahem, oral experience.

So what difference does belief in God make in all this?  According to Friedman, it makes a monumental difference in a very key area, that being the connection between sex and love.

When compared to those who don’t believe in anything beyond the physical world, young people who definitely believe in God are twice as likely to make love, as opposed to just having sex…….If you want a lover, one of the best places to look is among those who believe in God.

It would be too easy to turn this research into an advertisement for why if one is looking for love they should join a faith-based dating service.  The real show-stopper in Friedman’s musings comes when he proposes that we all think very critically and seriously about what it means for our world that we are chasing sexual social demons at the peril of losing our grip on real love —  not so much love in the Valentine shape of the thing, but love in the God-shape.

We are going down the rabbit hole after something that is not much influenced by our pursuits, and neglecting to secure our commitment to and involvement with love in our spiritual and social selves.

A relation with the divine is one in which you acknowledge your lack of sovereignty and self-control; admit that you are not your own basis, your own source; and depend on an other for your being whom you will never really understand or control. Religiosity and real romance are parallel orders of experience.

Religion is a source of constant disagreement and debate; increasingly for this generation of young people, so is love.  It seems to me that when we lose specific religious convictions, if we still have love as a guiding star our world is generally secure.  The opposite does not hold true.  If we begin to debate the existence and importance of love, all that holds us together is in peril.

Love is an unlikely, even impossible, life course, but nonetheless an essential driver of much that is great in our world. Love is the prerequisite of our kind of history. When we no longer believe in it, we cripple our capacity to make it.

Sex will always be interesting, there’s no denying that.  But I have to agree with Friedman, for sex to be the driving focus of organized religion as it has become in so many cases seems anemic and sad.  There is no end to the list of things that people think “should” be true but that just are not.  Religious organizations need to get serious about what is really at-risk here.

Let’s take our eyes off of people’s underpants and put them back on their hearts, where they belong.

Image credit: Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)

And I Thought Heresy Was So Last Century…

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 16 Comments

I’m not very trendy or au courant, so I’m often informed of the latest craze well after it has taken root.  I thought I was safe, however, in my general assumption that seriously being accused of being a heretic was in mothballs.  Imagine my surprise in the past 4 weeks to encounter 4 people — that’s one per week folks — being either actually accused of heresy or expressing concern that they would be.  Two of the people I know personally, two are authors of books questioning traditional interpretations of Biblical scriptures.

From Wikipedia:

Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one’s religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion.

I originally planned to steer clear of the recent book getting a lot of press about questions of “what is hell” and “is hell real.”  If you missed it, there is a good AP story about the book, the author, and some of the fall out connected to his public questioning here:  What is hell? Book stirs debate about afterlife – Yahoo! News.

I told a friend of mine who implied it might be good for Esse Diem that I considered it but rejected it as meaningful conversation, as it seems to go nowhere fast.  The people I’ve encountered who believe in hell are not moving, and I can honestly see why:  It’s a great no-lose position.  I actually saw a woman spell it out online:  “If I am right, you will burn in hell and I will be in heaven with God.  If I am wrong, I’m still not going to hell.  Goodnight.”  Except I am editing her closing remark.  It wasn’t that polite and was closer to a parting comment more common on the street.

You have to hand it to her.  That’s pretty solid on the face of it.  True, I win.  False, I win.

Except sometimes, even the most hardcore not-gonna-change-my-minders open up, and I say better late than never:

The Roman Catholic Church has admitted to erring these past 359 years in formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining scientific truths it long denounced as against-the-Scriptures heresy.

Pope John Paul II turned up Saturday for a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to help set the record straight on behalf of the 17th century Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist who was the first man to use a telescope and who is remembered as one of history’s greatest scientists.

Excerpt from Chicago Sun-Times, November 1, 1992, William D. Montalbano

So here we go, friends.  Let’s be absolutely clear about what the position of the woman who holds onto hell with white knuckles really is:  It’s a fear-based insurance policy that claims to be faith-based, but in fact represents an inner terror and insecurity that, to me, is about as far from what God wants for us as you can get.

This does not mean anything goes and nothing matters — far from it.  But I think we so often confuse the concepts of being punished by sin and being punished for sin.  (A side note for anyone turned off by the word “sin” — I know it has a lot of baggage, but it is the best word for describing what is meant by violating a moral code of conduct decreed by a divine entity.  That is all intended here.)

My own understanding of sin in my faith tradition grew exponentially when I started to think as an adult about why a society thousands of years ago recorded some things as sinful and warned heavily against their consequences.  I began running informal experiments on my own life, and lo and behold, there developed a reliable pattern of misery connected to violating the principles of the 10 Commandments.  Note:  Have not tried them all.  Not planning to try them all.  Rest assured, my “study” is complete and everyone is still alive.

I don’t think God punished me.  I think I punished myself by not taking some good advice about how to live a healthy life connected to some core concepts that hold society together.  And I think that is what divine influence in this world wants us to understand — we are important to one another.  We need to take care of ourselves and our neighbors.  We need to focus on systems of justice and love and caring and honor in order to live our healthiest and happiest lives.  When we fall away from these systems, we hurt ourselves.

I’ll close with why I finally decided this is a good topic for this blog.  I believe that what we teach children shapes our world in ways we cannot even fathom.  Ask yourself this question:  If you had never heard of hell, and one day at age 30 someone told you that you should embrace the idea, would you?

Engraved portrait of Italian physicist and astronomer Galilei Galileo (1564 – 1642) sitting at desk and reading book. Engraved by Samuel Sartain from a painting by H.W.Wyatt. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)