Sexuality And God
I’ve had a lot of years to think about the whole “God and sex” thing and I have come to the conclusion that God made sexual immorality taboo because He knows it has too high a price for us. Sexual immorality costs women their self-esteem and it costs men their ability to love. God knew this when He warned us against sexual immorality and here’s the story of how I came to see it too.
I was right into the women’s liberation and sexual revolution movements when I was young. I was firmly convinced that women should have sex when they want, with whom they want, because they want. I saw no harm in “using” men the same way they used me. I had sex as, when, and with whomever I pleased and nobody told me what to do with my body for the first 19 years of my life. Let’s be clear about one thing though. I was having sex because I got off on having the power to make men lust after me not because I wanted the sex itself. The sex was actually pretty boring and unsatisfying so there was really no incentive for me to go after men for that.
I never thought twice about what I was doing until, at 19, I got pregnant with my first child. That’s when I realised other people might end up paying a price for my choices. People like my son who was deprived of his biological father and forced to endure abuse from a damaged mother.
After my son was born, in sheer desperation because I was abusing my son and couldn’t stop, I turned to God for help and it resulted in me becoming a born-again Christian at 20 years old. That was the start of my transformation from total sceptic to firm believer.
It wasn’t an instant transformation because I questioned everything and resisted change fiercely. How come it was not OK for me to sleep around when the church had no problems with men doing it? How was it better to bring a child into the world to suffer than to abort it? Why does the bible say women are inferior to men in the eyes of God?
I thought some things were not relevant to the modern world and I was convinced they found their way into the bible because ancient biblical authors translated the bible through the lens of their archaic views on women and not because God put them there. I had long conversations with God in which I made my views about the sexism in the bible very clear.
“If I am not as good as a man go get a man to worship you because I don’t want to spend eternity with a God who thinks I’m second best.”
God responded to that by leading me to a poem that struck me as truth;
Someone named Matthew Henry wrote something called “An Exposition of the Old and New Testament” in which he said;
“Be careful if you make a women cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s ribs. Not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal, under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.”
I felt God was telling me He loves me, and every woman, exactly the same amount as He loves men and, to this day, I still think I’m right that a lot of the religious rules come from men and not God. Men who have preached the word of God according to historically male interpretations of what the Bible says.
The Bible doesn’t specifically prohibit unmarried sex, for example, it does, however, denounce “sexual immorality” in about 25 passages of the New Testament.
Two words usually used in these passages are “moichos” and “porneia”. Moichos refers to a married person having sex with someone other than his or her spouse and is generally translated as “adultery”. Porneia refers to “illicit sexual intercourse” and is usually interpreted to mean unmarried sex. The word is usually translated as “fornication” or “sexual immorality”.
The bible advises us to “Flee from sexual immorality” because “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”
So, according to the bible, sexual immorality is a sin against ourselves. I was never sure why that was or how it worked but, as the years passed and I saw what happened to me and to many of the people I counselled, I started to form a theory about why God might be warning us not to play fast and loose with our bodies.
The theory formed slowly over many years but, eventually, it seemed clear to me that “sexual immorality” was not referring to people having unmarried sex after all. “Fornication”, as we all know, is another word for the act of sex itself and it can be used to refer to all kinds of sex regardless of the marital status of the participants. Fornication is about two people going at it hot and heavy as opposed to the slower, more mutual, act of making love to one another.
My theory is that sexual immorality happens when the sex is selfish. Selfish sex is when people are there to get something for themselves. What they are there to get may be an orgasm but it can be many other things too. People can have sex to prove they love you or to make you fall in love with them. Sex can be used to hurt or be hurt, to dominate or be dominated, to get power, position, money, possessions, a place in a group, bragging rights and many other things.
In other words, if you are there to get something rather than give something, it’s selfish sex. You can tell yourself it’s not but if we peel away the layers of your rationalisations and find your motive is to get something then it’s selfish sex and that makes it immoral regardless of whether you are married or not.
The church has convinced society that the presence of a wedding ring automatically makes the sex acceptable in God’s sight but I don’t believe that is true.
God is not blind. If the sex is selfish it is fornication with or without a wedding ring and He simply accepts that immoral sex with one person is better than immoral sex with many because at least the people in a marriage are likely to reproduce.
Having children is selfish too, of course, but it tends to result in an increase of unselfishness and it was God, after all, who ordered man to “go forth and multiply”.
God did not invent marriage. The church did so they could say these people have God’s blessing to have sex and whatever kind of sex they choose to have is nobody’s business because it is carried out within the sanctity of the marriage bed. A lot of evil happened beneath those church sanctified blankets and behind those marital front doors that was never approved of, and is still not approved of, by God. God’s idea of marriage is much more basic – if you have sex with them you are married in His eyes! He does not issue marriage certificates and the union is not registered anywhere but in Heaven.
To all those Christian wives and husbands who are being used and abused by their partners and who are staying because of the wedding vows – those promises have nothing to do with God! The church invented “Till death us do part” and “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder” to maintain control over people and they are still being used the same way.
God does not require public vows – you have sex with someone and God considers you married. Sex with someone else after them is adultery. Sex that is not about giving without desire to get, or done for the purpose of reproducing, is fornication and fornication is immoral. Pretty much all sex is, therefore, fornication in God’s eyes and He does not approve or condone an abusive union no matter how many wedding certificates there are or how many preachers say otherwise!
If your partner is abusing you – get out!
Don’t stay for God because He does not approve of fornication and that is what is happening in an abusive relationship. Don’t stay for the kids because all that does is teach children of the same sex as the abuser that being abusive is OK and children of the same sex as the target of abuse grow up believing that it’s normal, and OK, for their partner to be abusive to them. God does NOT sanction either of those consequences of fornication!
For sex to be sanctified by God it has to be done by two people who were both virgins when they got together. They must both be treating each other with love and respect at all times and they should only be having sex to create children or to give each other pleasure. GIVE being the operational word when orgasms are involved. You can’t be giving an orgasm in order to get one because that fits the description of selfish sex and transforms the sex into fornication which pretty much backs most men, and some women, into a corner they can’t get out of. Women who give orgasms to get love or approval from their partner OR from God are also selfishly motivated making the sex they have into fornication too.
How many relationships can meet all the criteria for sanctified sex every single sexual encounter? Everything else, and that is pretty much 99.9 percent of sexual encounters, is fornication and fornication is not condoned by God.
Churches, being focused on males who found that fact pretty much impossible to swallow, created a loophole that would allow men to have all the sex they needed – marriage. Jesus said if a man could not be celibate he should get married and churches took that to mean marriage was a man’s way out from under Gods disapproval when, in reality, it was meant to limit the damage fornication does to those who indulge in it.
In a lot of churches the opposite is preached – women are told to offer themselves up for their husbands to use as and when they see fit in order to prevent them from going outside the marriage for their sex! This encourages fornication because nobody is telling the men to make any effort to GIVE an orgasm – all the focus is on the man GETTING them – selfish sex!
Government jumped on the marriage bandwagon because there was money in it for them. They could charge for a wedding to be registered and made legal in the eyes of the state thus defining official successors which allowed for inheritances and protected assets from being up for grabs when the owner died. People still get married to ensure government can’t grab everything and leave their partner and children with nothing but we don’t really have to these days.
Selfish sex, regardless of marital status therefore, is immoral sex and immoral sex, I have observed, has very negative side effects that differ for each gender.
The first thing I noticed was the negative side effects casual sex seemed to have on women.
For women, the more selfish sex they have, the poorer their self-esteem seems to be. It doesn’t seem to matter which of the two people in the union is selfish either it still seems to have the same consequences. At first I thought it may have been a case of poor self-esteem leading to multiple sex partners and that did seem to be the case many times but that wasn’t all there was to it. I saw women with years between sessions and, when they came back, if they’d had more sex partners than the last time I saw them or they were still having selfish sex with their partner their self-esteem tended to have gotten worse. I assumed it was due to the lack of love rather than the amount of sex partners, or the type of sex, they’d had.
Then I went through my own break up and divorce followed by a deliberate decision to spare myself any further heart break and I swore off relationships. The more time that passed with no sex the better my self-esteem got. I started to get more and more fussy about who I would be willing to share my body with despite the fact my body was getting less and less desirable as time passed. The more I acted as if my body was too precious to give to anyone who didn’t prove he cared about me first the more I found genuine respect for myself growing in me. The more self-liking and self-respect I felt the less interested in casual sex I became.
The theory that sexual immorality leads to poor self-esteem in women started to seem very possible to me. I knew my original poor self-respect was due to the sexual molestation inflicted on me as a child. It’s hard to respect yourself if you feel like a thing and being molested makes you feel like a thing because molesters treat you like a thing. Now it became clear to me that acting like a thing leads to continuing to be used like a thing and self-esteem can’t recover under those conditions.
Before giving birth to my son I acted like a thing – a walking talking vagina – and men flocked to it. They took the sex and I took away pride in being “irresistible to men”. I wasn’t blind though. I knew I was viewed as easy and that men respected me less because of that. I thought that was their problem but, when I had my son, it became my problem because I didn’t want my son to suffer jibes about having a slut for a mother so I had to act less like a thing regardless of my self-esteem. The less I acted like a thing the less I felt like one and the more my self-esteem seemed to grow.
It’s been fine for women in the western world to sleep with whomever they choose as often as they feel like it for many years now. Looking down on women because of their sex lives has been politically incorrect for centuries and the men of today grew up beside women who made their own sexual choices. Modern men take for granted that sex is not hard to get and they like it that way so why is there still such a thing as “slut shaming” and why are women still the only ones subjected to it?
How is it possible that a modern man could write lyrics that imply easy sex makes a woman untrustworthy and cheap as rapper Eminem seems to be saying in his song “Superman” (feat. Dina Rea)
“But I guess that’s just what sluts do, how could it ever be just us two I’d never love you enough to trust you, we just met and I just fucked you.”
On the other hand, if the sex isn’t easy this man won’t give a woman the time of day as other lyrics in the SAME song also show;
“Don’t put out, I’ll put you out, won’t get out, I’ll push you out…”
Eminem displays some serious, even scary, hatred for women in “Superman” to be honest as the following lyrics show;
“wouldn’t piss on fire to put you out …. bitch if you died, I wouldn’t buy you life”
And then there is the chorus and the utter contempt he displays in it towards the never ending stream of women who give it up to him;
“But I do know one thing though, bitches, they come they go
Saturday through Sunday, Monday, Monday through Sunday yo
Maybe I’ll love you one day, maybe we’ll someday grow
‘Til then just sit your drunk ass on that fuckin’ runway ho…”
Once upon a time it is unlikely there would have been a woman alive who would have let this man near her and certainly none with poor enough self-esteem to join him in singing this ugly rubbish but not today.
Today the self-esteem of women, even women with money, power, and talent of their own is so poor they are singing;
“Give it to me, I’m worth it..”
Fifth Harmony “Worth It” (Featuring Kid Ink)
and claiming it’s “a song about empowering other women to believe in themselves” when nothing could be further from the truth and it’s really, as one listener wrote, “she’s begging for sex”.
And this song, where she is promising unlimited sex if he will just (please, oh please,) choose her;
“She got a body like an hour glass But I can give it to you all the time”
Jessie J “Bang Bang” (with Ariana Grande & Nicki Minaj)
It gets worse – some women are setting womens liberation back a hundred years by agreeing to actually sing lyrics like those written by David Guetta and sung by Nicki Minaj in “Hey Mama” (David Guetta, Nicki Minaj, Afrojack);
“Yes I’ll do the cooking, yes I’ll do the cleaning
Plus I keep the na-na, real sweet, for your eating
Yes you be the boss, and yes I be respecting
Whatever that you tell me, cause it’s game you be spitting”
The women’s liberation pioneers would be turning in their graves and saying no woman should be so poor she couldn’t afford to say no to that! They would never believe a woman with money and the power to walk away would ever agree to let such words pass her lips in a whisper let alone go public singing them!
I watch these young, wealthy, powerful, attractive women and I can’t understand how they can have such poor self-esteem as to permit, let alone participate, in such woman-hating lyrics!
Is it possible that all that free love and casual sex has wiped self-esteem out of women’s lives so completely they don’t even KNOW they have no self-esteem any more?!
I think so.
You only have to look at all the cosmetic surgery people are indulging in to see self-esteem is in desperately short supply these days. People would rather slice and dice their bodies up, literally, than value the things that make them physically unique from other people. I watch television and it’s frightening how much plastic surgery is turning women into clones of each other. They all have the same noses and lips and hair and breasts and, lately, arses. Nobody has the self-esteem to do a Barbara Streisand and say Hey, it’s my nose (eyes, boobs, jaw etc), if you don’t like it you know where to go!
It isn’t just women, of course, whose self-esteem is lacking. You can have poor self-esteem for many reasons but those are not the reasons I am looking at in this article so I won’t get into them. The reason for poor self-esteem I am looking at here is being used and treated like a thing, like all you are is an orifice, like you are interchangable with the next vagina or mouth or anus that walks past.
Most men go into casual sex with one goal – to get sex – to have an orgasm. Most men want their partner to have an orgasm too and they will put various amounts of effort into achieving that goal but the other persons orgasm tends to be considered a bonus and not the main event. They may be more invested in ensuring their partner enjoys sex if they love them but, with casual sex, their own orgasm tends to be the main goal. The first time two people have sex these days it usually qualifies as casual sex because people have sex long before their hearts have time to get involved. People lend complete strangers their bodies yet they wouldn’t dream of handing over their house or car keys to that same person!
Women are telling the world they go into sex for the same reason as men, the orgasm, and I have no doubt that is often true but it is more common for women to go into sex for the chance to develop a relationship with the man – maybe even find love.
So, if women are giving themselves to get love, how is that working out for them these days? These songs they sing seem to be about wanting men to give them sex but, if all they really wanted was just sex then, like men, it wouldn’t matter who gave it to them so there would be no need to call out to a specific man to;
“Give it to me I’m worth it” or to promise to do the cooking and cleaning to get him into bed.
Even women-hating songs acknowledge the fact that women are wanting love as Eminem did in “Superman” when he says to the “ho”;
“Maybe I’ll love you one day,”
The facts are that men use women to get sex and women use sex to get love. It’s been that way since time began but nowadays men are getting the sex and women are getting abused instead of loved and the abuse is getting worse and worse regardless of the fact that people are being educated that violence is “not OK”.
In a news article titled “Domestic violence hotline faces spike in demand” they report that;
“It is not just the numbers of calls that are rising, Ms Mangan says, but the depravity of the crimes being committed.”
She goes on to say;
“You ask anyone – even talking to a member of my board who works in the area of child protection, he said they are finding the same thing,” she says. “The complexity, the seriousness of the abuse. We are all seeing an increase in the severity of it.”
Another news article headlined “Australian police handle one domestic violence matter every two minutes.” says that “There were more than 3,000 domestic violence matters in the Logan district in the most recent 12 months counted.
Queensland Police applied for more than 15,000 domestic violence orders in the same 12-month period – with police handling another 25,000 domestic violence matters state-wide.
“Police can sometimes be very black and white, but everything in domestic violence is just a shade of grey.”
Acting Senior Sergeant Roger O’Malia said.
A shade of grey huh?
One of the most popular books in recent times is about woman not only accepting domestic violence but learning to enjoy it and they wonder why violence against women is on the increase?
Where is the female self-esteem that decreed “Women are not domestic slaves and sex objects for men to use as they see fit” and demanded sexual freedom? It has been suffocated and snuffed out by the very sexual freedom it demanded. There is no genuine self-esteem in having a body hot enough to attract every man which is why those same bodies resort to more and more surgery and still it isn’t enough.
The cost to women of too many sexual partners is high. It’s obvious that nothing can immunise a woman against the loss of self-esteem that promiscuity causes because even the richest, most beautiful, most talented, most powerful women in today’s society still suffer from abysmal self-esteem as evidenced by their behaviour and the behaviour they are prepared to accept from their men.
At first I developed a bit of a resentment towards God for building in a cost to women whilst men seemed to get off scott free with their immorality but, as the years passed, it became clear to me that men lose something too when they have too many partners. They seem to lose the ability to genuinely love a woman.
Men are not stupid.
They know women are not being honest when they claim to be having sex for the orgasm. They know women are after more than just the sex. They want women to be in it for the sex, women may even believe they truly are in it for the sex, but women are not subject to the testosterone that creates that urge in men so they CANNOT have the same drive men have. Women want the man not just his penis and men know, or sense, that and it makes them feel like all women are dishonest when they try to tell them they are just in it for the sex.
Even those who are in it for his penis usually have a hidden agenda such as wanting to be able to brag that they had sex with someone famous or powerful or wanting to brag that they are irresistible or whatever.
The more women a man sleeps with the more he starts to feel all women are the same – deceitful, untrustworthy, cheap and not worth loving. If he can have sex with her five minutes after meeting her he knows other men probably can too and that makes her an unsafe haven for his heart.
Once a man develops this level of mistrust for women even those who don’t sleep with him in the first five minutes are not going to be able to reach him. He will just be even more mistrustful of them because he can’t help feeling a little more for the ones who are not easy and that makes them even more dangerous to him so he will push them away with just as much force, perhaps more, as those who do put out.
Being unable to love a woman leaves a man lonely and being lonely because women are “Ho’s” and “bitches” and can’t be trusted makes men angry. Being angry with all women makes men want to be rough with them and having no self-esteem makes women fail to set limits and boundaries. They feel abused but they don’t put a stop to it and men sense their unhappiness and feel they are being dishonest with them which feeds their anger and the cycle of violence begins. Or continues.
If a man is not too far gone in his inability to love he will respond to a woman who has good self-esteem and love can grow but the more women a man has had the less able to love he will be and Eminem’s lyrics show he is a man whose heart no longer beats for any woman. He will either grow progressively more violent and angry with women or he will walk away from them altogether and choose men whose claim to just want sex is as honest as his is.
I believe homosexuality is on the increase not because people are feeling more able to come out of the closet but because women are turning away from masculine anger and inability to love and men are turning away from female “dishonesty” and lack of self-esteem.
Too long – didn’t read?
A woman who has immoral sex loses her ability to love and respect herself leading to an inability to demand, accept, or give appropriate, psychologically healthy, love.
A man who has immoral sex loses his ability to love and respect women leading to an inability to give, or accept appropriate, psychologically healthy, love.
God knew this was what immoral sex would do to us which was why he called it sin and asked us to stay away from it!
God never asks us to do, or not do, something for any reason apart from that it is best for us! It took me 30 years but I see that now and I hope you can too after reading this.
