Many Judeo-Christian faith groups of the more fundamental nature such as the more far right branches of Evangelical Protestantism, Pentacostals, Roman Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Mormons have voiced their disaproval of non-intercourse sex such as oral sex and masturbation..whether solo or mutural. Regardless of their personal opinion, attraction to the same sex is not mentioned in the Bible. Neither is oral sex nor masturbation is mentioned in the Bible as a unnatural or a forbidden thing. The Following is taken from the XJW site, "Escape From The Watchtower."
The Watchtower's Views On Sex
The Watchtower publication supplied to the elders entitled" Pay Attention To Yourselves And To The Flock," page 93, Discribes their view on what "Porneia" is. There they lump anal sex right beside oral and or mutual masturbation between persons not married to each other . . . . " On page 142 it states, "While perverted practices are wrong, if within a marriage one is involved or has been involved in such, it does not mean that he or she would necessarily lose service privileges. If such conduct becomes known to the elders, they would need to consider: Is the practice recent or ongoing, or is it something occurred in the past and is definitely conquered? Is the individual promoting such conduct as a proper life-style? Is his attitude one of remorse? If he is sincerely repentant and the situation is not generally known, it may not be necessary to remove privileges of service."
I find this amazing. Here the Watchtower calls oral sex "perverted" and yet no "service privileges" are lost, unless the "situation is generally known." Either this is a wrong practice or it is not. Is it right that the elders can ask the above questions to married couples? There appears to be so much open space in the above counsel, that one elder, who is firm, harsh and legalistic would take away "service privileges" of the individual, while a more balanced, mature elder would not do such. It now comes into the personal decisions of men to determine the outcome of the situation and not solely the scriptures. This is clearly a legalistic way to deal with matters, a legal code, similar to the Pharisees of Jesus day, a code that is not to be practiced under the "law of Christ." For such practices "make the word of God invalid."
Notice that it is stated more than once, that this type of sex is "clearly a perverted sex practice." How "clearly" is it? Not clear at all. And the fact is, that if it becomes known to the congregation, that a Married couple is having oral sex, the result could be a deletion of the brother's privileges in the congregation, or possible disfellowshipment. Now this person would be completely shunned and labeled an outcast, all for having certain types of sexual relations with his wife. Is this in harmony with the scriptures? There are certain cases where women are frigid and penetration is almost impossible. What then? There are also cases where men cannot obtain an erection, thus unable to please their wives. What then? According to the Watch Tower Society, they would have no other choice but to remain celibate.
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society also, puts their own meaning into the words "loose conduct" and "uncleanness" (Galatians 5:19, Colossians 3:5). They claim that "loose conduct" pertains to any type of sex, other than sexual intercourse, including practices between married couples. Using the term "uncleanness," the Watchtower publication supplied to the elders entitled "Pay Attention To Yourselves And To The Flock," it states on page 92,
"Uncleanness includes an intentional momentary touching of sexual parts or caressing of breasts." And on page 94, "Self-abuse, or masturbation, is not porneia (fornication), nor would one who was raped be guilty of porneia . . . . copulation (as in penetration) is not necessary to constitute porneia, and neither is sexual climax." The Watchtower Society.(1)
To go even a step further on the interpretation of sexual practices, Jehovah's Witnesses elders have to ask individuals some very intimate personal questions to determine whether they should conduct a judicial hearing or to determine the outcome of the judicial hearing they are already conducting. Can you imagine Jesus Christ instructing his disciples to ask such questions and lay out such details on sexual matters? Did Jesus Christ teach a Christian Law code of judicial hearings and organizational procedures for married couples sexual practices and for men who have nocturnal emissions in private or woman who use a vibrator in private? Certainly this goes far beyond the "law of Christ," following legalistic practices that Jesus himself condemned in his day.
Yahoo! News An Ejaculation a Day May Keep Prostate Cancer at Bay
Wed Jul 16
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Frequent masturbation may be really good for you.
Research by Australia's Cancer Council Victoria found that the more often men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to suffer the disease that kills more than half a million men each year.
The survey of 1,079 prostate cancer (news - web sites) patients and 1,259 healthy men found that those who masturbated or had sex at least once a day in their 20s were a third less likely to develop the malady.
"For men in their 50s of course that's often not achievable," Graham Giles, who led the research team, told Reuters Thursday.
"(But) masturbation isn't bad for you. I don't believe in the blindness and hairy palms theory. Prohibitions against ejaculations are not based on science," he said.
The study, conducted between 1994 and 1998 but still being analyzed, did not focus specifically on masturbation.
Nevertheless, it was the largest so far to ask participants not just about their sexual relations but also about masturbation, and to analyze the ans
wers. Giles said the findings correlate with previous research that showed Roman Catholic priests were 30 percent more likely to get prostate cancer, but they contradict other studies that suggested having a variety of partners or frequent sex could lift the risk.
One theory that could explain the new results is that semen may have a carcinogenic effect on the cells lining the prostatic ducts if not flushed regularly out of the pipes by ejaculations.
The research is due to be published in this weekend's British Journal of Urology International.
Augustine The Inventor Of Sexual Shame In Religion
To minimize carnal pleasure, Augustine and his colleagues endowed the act of intercourse with the burden Augustine & Sex Masturbation was forbidden because it wasted valuable and necessary seed for an endangered species, the holy community, and because it gave pleasure without a compensatory pain. Hence, prices of masturbation had to be invented: hair on the palms, blindness, insanity and impotence by reducing the finite supply of sperm. Thus, one whole strand of Christian ethics contributed to the dangerous reductio ad absurdum that sin is simply sex and thus sex is evil.
Augustine has much to teach us, but even he cannot possibly teach us all that we now need to know.
Lust was the sinful desire that could only be mitigated by purposeful, procreative, an unpleasurable sex. the very organs of sex, the genitals, were called by Augustine pudenda, from Latin pudere, "to be ashamed." Thus the genitals were instruments of shame because what they facilitated was itself a shameful, disgusting, but necessary act.
Augustine reconstructs, "resitualizes," as modern biblical critics would call it, the Eden story and transforms it from a story of creation and disobedience to a tale of discover of sexual shame, making sex, and not disobedience, the original sin by which all of the subsequent race was tainted at birth. It is in this way the he reads Psalm 51:5, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." As Ray Tannahill points out in her eminently readable Sex In History, for Augustine and the moral theology he was developing, "The body was no more than a flawed vessel for the mind and spirit, and it was now up to the Church to propagate Christian morality in these terms."
He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, if the austere Augustine may be credited with wild dreams. Celibacy became the bade of moral authority. Marriage was a concession to human weakness and the need for companionship, children and sex. And sex within marriage was tolerated not for pleasure but for the morally worthy purpose of producing more Christians-but even children were described as a "bitter pleasure," of which the pangs of childbirth were both sing and punishment.
Somewhere in the twelfth or thirteenth century, marriage was made a sacrament, which mean that like all sacraments it could not be dissolved. Jesus' judgment on divorce, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery" (Mark 10:11-22), confirms Paul's textually older prohibition on divorce in 1 Corinthians 7:10-15. According to Tannabill, "One marriage . . . should supply enough companionship for any man; second marriages were adultery, third fornication, and fourth nothing short of 'swinish.'" (7)
Given these meanings of shame and sin attached to the meaning of sex, its no wonder that all sex outside of marriage was looked at in disgust. Pleasurable sex, masturbation, and any other non procreative sexual activity was considered deviant and compounded the sin of lust and therefore heresy, labeling those practicing such as heretics.Until fairly recent times, homosexuality was regard first as sin, then as crime, and then as illness. These cultural identifies all stem from what homosexuals do or cannot do sexually, and the source again is not the Bible but the moral assumptions of the Church Fathers with which they then read the Bible and interpreted it as part of the teaching tradition of the church.
"It is just in the explicit sexual sense that Augustine writes about in The City of God. The lust that excites the indecent parts of the body is dangerous because it "assumes power not only over the whole body, and not only from the outside, but also internally, it disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotions combines and mingles with the physical craving," resulting in so intense a sensation of pleasure, "that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed."
Since such a lust is not subject ot rational or physical control but is itself master of all, it is both to be feared and controlled. "It is right, therefore, he writes in the very next chapter, "to be ashamed of this lust." and the organs that serve this lust should be called pudentda, or "parts of shame." The trouble with arousal for Augustine is that is does not operate at the behest of the mind, but literally has a mind of its own. The corrective to lust is shame, and shame itself is not a virtue, like modesty, but a punishment for lust. Thus lust, of which sex is the manifestation, is to be punished by shame not because it is pleasurable but because it is irrational.
Most Baptists and Methodists [JW's] have not spent much time in consideration of the moral philosophy of Saint Augustine, but their anxieties about the sins of the flesh could not be better expressed then his. They threw off much of Roman Catholicism's moral theology, but they retained the notion that somehow, the sins of the flesh got between the sinner and God.
Such sins, however, were not sinful because they offended reason but rather because they gave pleasure, which in the refracted Calvinism to which they all heirs, was itself an unacceptable end. Thus sex was only for the begetting of children, shameful for the man, painful for the woman, both part of a divine plan; and sex for any other purpose simply confounded pain and shame, especially if any pleasure without penalty was involved. Women were thus vessels of shame who, like Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah, led their men to disastrous ends.
Masturbation was forbidden because it wasted valuable and necessary seed for an endangered species, the holy community, and because it gave pleasure without a compensatory pain. Hence prices of masturbation had to be invented: hair on the palms, blindness, insanity and impotence by reducing the finite supply of sperm.
From these anxieties come many of the other social inhibitions of the flesh. Drinking, for instance, like sex, contributes to the "almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, as overwhelmed," Dancing was also forbidden for its similitude to the sexual act. The old Southern Baptist joke has the young man say to the young woman with whom he is about to have illicit sex, "We'd better do it on the sofa so they won't think we're dancing." Although wider spectrum of virtues, including those of the Commandments, and those to be aspired to in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, when most Christians think of morality they think first of the sins of the flesh, and then most explicitly of sex. Thus, one whole strand of Christian ethics contributed to the dangerous reductio ad absurdum that sin is simply sex and thus sex is evil. Augustine has much to teach us, but even he cannot possibly teach us all that we now need to know. (8)
Augustine and those who take their moral philosophy from him, think that the creation account in Genesis, all has to do with sex and their awareness of their genitals, what he calls the "parts of shame." He assumed that the nakedness was ipso facto a cause of shame because it provided the occasion of lust, and we know his views on lust. It is hard, however, to take seriously the implication that the story of that first disobedience is simply a tale of prudery and a genealogy of shame.
The story is not about sex or lust or "parts of shame," no matter how titillated Augustine was by the conviction that it was. It is about limitations, indeed about the ambiguity of knowledge. The fact that they knew that they were naked means that they saw themselves for the first time a they were and that knowledge, contrary to the modern notions that "knowledge is power," made them realize with their first infusion of knowledge, just how weak and vulnerable they now were and had been. It was not knowledge that had protected them from the blandishments of the serpent, but ignorance that had preserved their innocence.
Now they knew all, but their knowledge was not a blessing, it was a curse; and hence, as John Halagood says, "All knowledge is ambiguous." (9)
Footnotes:
1 Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Pay Attention To Yourselves And To The Flock, p. 92
2 Dallas Willard, The Spirit of Disciplines, p. 171
3 Ibid, p. 172
4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 163
5 Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder, pp. 146-147
6 Tom Hovestol, Seeing Ourselves in the Pharisees Extreme Righteousness, p. 83
6a Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island, page 170
7 Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book, pp. 168-170
8 Ibid, pp. 251-253
9 Ibid, pp. 259-260
The Following is based on the information provided by the G0y web site...Only I have taken out the harsh street terms.
The PROVEN Health Dangers Of Anal Sex..Whether Gay or Straight!
"Gender is irrelevant. Whether you are attracted to the same sex or the opposite is irrelevant. Infact, 135,628 cases of AIDS were attributed to "HETEROsexual" contact. What you are not told is the FORM the "Heterosexual contact" took. People may assume, because of the label "HETEROsexual", that it was penile/vaginal sexual contact. This is unlikely for (2) reasons. 1) More men are likely to use a condom in penile/vaginal sex to prevent pregnancy; And, 2) contrary to misconception , the vagina is fairly hostile to HIV taking hold, where as the anus will welcome it readily! Most women infected by HIV became so by participating in anal intercourse, or repeated unprotected vaginal sex with an infected partner (who almost always contracted HIV via anal intercourse or *IV drug use). The playground acronym for AIDS: "Anally Injected Death Sentence" is not inaccurate in this respect! AIDS is seldom spread in other ways sexually....But is spread equally high through blood transfusions. Being gay (attracted to the same sex) does not spread AIDS. Anal "sex" does."
For more on this or to read more about gay and lesbian issue see the topic index for "Gay & Lesbian."
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