If you look at it dispassionately, clinically, you’ve got to admit that parts of Catholicism look a-whole-lot like some sort of Psychological/Sociological experiment to find out how much it’ll take to make a heterosexual Man of God want to fuck little boys.
Now, this may sound a tad harsh, but remember, we’re just examining the cold, hard, facts.
First, we take a young (holy)man fresh out of seminary who’s got strict orders never to have sex – or even masturbate. Ever! Then we make it his solemn duty to sit alone in a dark closet and listen to everyone softly confess their filthiest deeds and fantasies to him… Did I mention the no chokin’-the-gopher thing yet? Next, with no relief in sight, we give this poor devout soul a private rectory, and a slave-boy, who we put in a white dress, and make light candles and bring wine. Then we continue this test every day for the rest of the Priest’s life.
I’m not making excuses or anything, I’m just saying that the only folks who should be shocked when fucked-up shit happens, are those who’ve got no clue of the appetite or mating habits of the one-eyed-trouser-snake. Right now this experiment is being conducted on 414,313 men in robes around the globe. Try not to think about that the next time you’re kneeling in church.
I’m not the only one who thinks this is absurd. Saint Thomas Aquinas, a holy-man of God, who spent much of his life grading and categorizing as many sins as his twisted little mind could conjure, thought long and hard about the issues of Man’s sex drive and believed that sex-workers might be a necessary fail-safe to relieve the build up of (sexual) tension.
“If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust” ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas.
I’m not saying it’s some big conspiracy or anything, but if it were it’d be a fucking brilliant one. By making priests take a vow of celibacy, they become unable have any legitimate heirs, so any money they’ve inherited, were paid, or made by any other means, automatically gets left to the Church when the good father shuffles off this mortal coil. And all the Church had to do was keep him from giving any hot meat injections. Brilliant. And it worked so well they expanded upon the idea and made sex off limits for everyone, essentially taking something our very genes compel us to do and calling it sick. They pathologize our drives and convince us that only they have the remedy. And when we find out they can’t cure us of our nature, they blame it on our sinful ways. They can treat our sickness, but only if we keep coming back again and again and volunteer as much of our time, money, and soul as we can stand.
“The Great Reformer,” Martin Luther agreed with St. Tom that a little flesh session every now and again might be necessary to keep one healthy and sane. He thought celibacy “horrific” and predicted that even for priests, it’d bring “division, sin, shame, and scandal to be increased without end.” For Luther, sex was a good thing, as long as one wasn’t committing adultery.
“And just what counts as adultery in the Good Book?” You’ve probably never thought to ask. “A book whose protagonists visit prostitutes and have sex-slaves, and multiple wives?” I’ll pretend you continued.
Well, if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess that any answer you want from the bible will have to be pulled out of a waist-deep quagmire of confusion and misogyny.
These days we have a very womanish view of what counts as an extra-martial affair. That is to say in the Bible, adultery for a woman, means having sex with anybody who she’s not wedded to. For a man though, it means doing the dicky dunk with someone else’s slaves, wives, or other property, But; gang-rape, sex workers, raping war-captives, incest, public rape, owning sex-slaves, and the incest/rape combo meal are just fine, and again, just for men. But remember ladies, the moral of the story is, “No fucking anyone but your husband – or we’ll fucking kill you.”
I gotta tell ya, the more I read these old scriptures, the less surprised I am that people used to enjoy feeding the zealots who lived by them to the lions.
A few years back I found myself hiking up an active volcano in Southern Italy. It’s been an unassuming little mountain for most of its life. Back before year 79, it was so boring it didn’t even have a name; the natives just called it “Mountain.” After that though, there weren’t any natives left to call it anything.
When Mount Vesuvius rained hellfire and ash down on Pompeii and Herculaneum, it entombed them, preserving everything in place for the next sixteen centuries. Theses two cities waited patiently while above weather, war, and Christianity wore away at, rewrote, or erased whole chapters of history. Books were burned, morals twisted, art destroyed, and modesties cultivated. While those two Ancient Roman time-capsules awaited cracking entire ways of thought and ways of life were being scrubbed clean or scrubbed from existence.
When Pompeii and Herculaneum were finally cracked open it was to the titters and radiant blushing of the 1700’s. The millennia-and-a-half of Catholic censorship (painting clothes or fig leaves over, or just straight-up chiseling off the art world’s intimate bits) had left the world unprepared for what life had been like in our pagan past.
Nowadays, if you wander through this two rediscovered cities you’ll get to hear lots of full-grown tourists snickering like children at all the very public nudity and sexual art. Mildly amused tour-guide explain that Romans saw sex as natural and normal, something that everyone has in common. And so, if it’s something everyone does, what’s the point in hiding it?
Somewhere along the way we got it in our heads that sex was bad; having it was bad, looking at it was bad, talking about it was bad, and thinking about it was bad. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. No matter what the evidence says.
In reaction to the Summer of Love the US Government sat down and tried to figure out just what to do about all the nudity and sexiness that was going on all around. It was sure to unravel the moral fiber of this great country of ours and something needed to be done. The Commission on Pornography and Obscenity was conceived to look into the matter and make its recommendation. Eventually, after exhaustive research, the commission made its report. It found that on average, sex offenders were more often raised in conservative households and used porn less than the average person. Based on their findings the commission suggestions were for sex education and against restricting pornography for adults. The proposals was emphatically rejected.
(Isn’t odd that the {neo}conservatives who’re always shouting about how government should keep its big nose out of the affairs of businesses, are also the ones who think the government should ban things like porn and sex-toys?)
Contrary to what those who so vehemently opposed the Commission’s verdict believe, a culture of strict conservatism doesn’t keep us safe from the all the unpleasantries of life; it may in fact do just the opposite. Some studies show that wherever religious fundamentalism is the most intense so are things like abortions, divorces, murders, rapes, STDs, teen pregnancy, etc. Of course correction is not causation, but it does suggest that no, being godly does not make you squeaky clean, you don’t need religion to be a decent person, and even the threat of Hellfire is not a deterrent.
The world is full of people who spend their lives being confused by, feeling guilty over, and/or hating themselves for not being able to live up to standards that the Church and society set. People who are sure that something must be wrong with them and spent their entire lives fighting with natural and healthy drives. How do we know these things are normal? Well, fornication and adultery still happen, even in places in the world where your body is threatened with murder and your soul with torture for all eternity. One doesn’t need those sort of threats to stop us from doing things that don’t come naturally to us.