The progressives at Salon ask, “Why is religion so obsessed with sex?,” yet they themselves cannot seem to write enough articles on the idea that it is.
Last week they blamed the “old men running the Vatican” for everyone’s “sexual hangups.” Now they’re going after Christianity in general - with an excerpt from a book titled “The Illusion of God’s Presence.”
In it, John C. Wathey accused Christianity of condemning sex out of fear. Wathey began with a long Freudian analysis of the “emotions” of religiosity and sex. “Religious emotion remains primarily infantile, with God normally in the role of a greatly exalted parent,” he remarked.
This love of God as a parent activates the “incest-avoidance system,” he said, which degenerates into an “obsession with controlling or prohibiting sexual behavior, coupled with an almost irresistible drive to violate those prohibitions.”
This is an odd claim since those who consecrate their virginity to God and remain celibate are often called the “brides of Christ.” However, the love of God is essentially different than either parental or sexual love.
In his effort to relegate the love of God to some mundane sphere, Wathey cited two anomalous examples of love for God that seem to him to be sexual: St. Teresa of Avila’s ecstasy and the writings of Baptist preacher Lee Roy Shelton Sr.
The author also betrayed an ignorance of basic Catholicism when he says that the “sinfulness of sex” is the reason priests and nuns remain celibate and why Catholics believe in the Immaculate Conception.
Wathey pointed out that sexual indiscretions are a common problem in the Christian clergy, a result of developing an obsession with something they cannot have.
“Lust is healthy and normal, but a religious obsession with it is not,” he argued.
He described sexual fantasy, viewing pornography, and masturbating in private as “acts of negligible consequence or moral weight in the broader society,” even though these actions often destroy marriages and families.
Liberals like Wathey have contempt for what he called the “religiously warped view” of sex. Nevertheless, why do the atheists at Salon fixate on rules they don’t observe and dogma they reject? If religion is obsessed with sex (it is not more than with anything else), liberal writers are at least as much so.
