Page 53 - Advanced Romance

50 Advanced Romance*
and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.27
This story is not a good beginning for Western sexual relations. This Western view of sex as a sin was of course amplified throughout history by church leaders. Wrote Paul in 1 Corinthians 7: 1-2:
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.’ But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.
But it took supreme sexual hypocrites like St. Augustine to codify the view that sex should be eliminated, castrated!, if at all possible. After a sexually libertine thirty some odd years he said: “Lord, make me chaste [sexually pure] – but not yet!”28 Soon after he proceeded, with a straight face we assume, to help establish the rule that priests should be celibate.29
The profound hypocrisy of this view was backed up until the Protestant revolution when preachers were allowed to marry. Yet the Puritan streak in Protestantism assured that sex wouldn’t be looked at with freethinking objectivity. And, very recently (circa 2012) some priests began resisting celibacy and scores of other priests were found to be serial child molesters.