The Church and Sex 

The very idea of sex being something dirty or ugly
 is a direct mirror of man's ego and fear of God.
All life exists through sex; all life grows out of it.
Sex is beautiful as God is beautiful and
to think otherwise diminishes God.

        We know that many men have not felt this way and have projected their consciousness powerfully out into the race consciousness. We do not have to look far in the histories to see that many of the early great men of the Church were seething with hatred instead of love, and clearly dysfunctional and full of sexual hang-ups. It is sad but true that it was the concepts of such men which formed the basis of much of the religious doctrine that was to set the standards for morality right up to our present times. These men, specifically Tatian and Basilides of the second century, and their contemporary Maricon, propagated suppositions that have wrung down the halls of time, echoing sadness and suffering that is replicated generation after generation. The very idea of sex being something beautiful was completely alien to them. It was ugly so it needed to be stripped from their ‘God’ Jesus’ life. So they propagated the supposition that Jesus had never been married, creating in the process the dogma of his Perpetual Virginity.

     Such ideas projected onto the life of a Jewish rabbi took Jesus completely out of the world of Judaism for love, sex and marriage, to a large extent, is what Judaism was all about. It was absolutely unthinkable for a Jewish man to not get married and not have a family. And it was forbidden for teachers of the religion, which Jesus was, to not marry. But these ideas went further then stripping the man of his religion and cultural heritage. They denied that he had ever existed as a human being. The church created a divine idol for people to worship and emulate. The path to God, through Jesus, demanded sexless ness, and even marriage less ness under Maricon. The primordial image of sex as an unholy, ungodly, dirty animalistic activity was planted early and deeply in Christianities history.  

      The Greek Gospel writers, perhaps unwittingly, gave basis to this implantation by unknowingly basing some of their writings on top of a translator’s mistake. About 270 years B.C. Ptolemy Philadephus of Egypt had the old Hebrew Testament translated for the Jewish community living in the ‘Greek’ city of Alexandria. The new translated bible was famously called the Septuagint because it took seventy scholars seventy days to do the work. When they got to Isaiah 7:14 they ran into quite a problem. The verse reads, ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ What is not commonly known is that in Hebrew there are two words of different meaning for virgin. There is ‘almah’ which meant a ‘young unmarried woman’ or more broadly, a woman of any age, married or not, whose womb had not yet produced fruit. Such a woman could already be making love with a man, married, engaged or not, and not yet conceived. The other Hebrew word is ‘bethulah’ and this word specifically means a physical virgin who had ‘no’ sexual experience and whose hymen was still intact. Perhaps the reason for the two words in Hebrew was the fact that the ancient Jews considered the retention of virginity, once a girl reached the age of marriage, usually about fourteen years of age, as a disgrace and an insult to God. Marriage, sex and procreation were that important.

     In the original Hebrew text the word almah was used. When the translators came to that passage they had to deal with the fact that Greek has only one word for virgin, ‘parthenos.’ So they would either have had to leave that passage blank or fill in the sentence with the only word available to them, which is what they did. Centuries later the author of Mathew, probably seeking through the old testament for prophecies to support his writing and the rumors (or religious political need to create a god) of the mysterious conditions of Jesus’ birth, came across his Greek translated copy of the bible and alas it said his mother was a virgin. Thus the seed thought for the Immaculate Conception. After Mathew came Luke, another non-Jew who spoke only Greek and he came to the same conclusion as Mathew. It is very interesting to note that Mark and John did not repeat this mistake. The two Jewish authors had access to Hebrew bibles and when looking up this passage saw nothing unusual in a ´young woman´ giving birth to Jesus.  

    Outside the fact that God participates in each and every conception using as instruments the physical penis of men, the sperm that flows from it, and the egg of a woman, which is waiting in the womb, it is an immature even hysterical thought to imagine God doing this in another way. When we see God as nature, there is no separation between God and sex and the use of sex for the creation of life, even if that life be a divine one like Jesus or his mother Mary.  

     We have to address the possibility that religious teachings are contributing to the distortion of human warmth and sexuality and thus to much violence and sexual abuse. It is not seen but lies that strip the beauty and holiness from sex are in part responsible for the continued violence we see in the world of sexuality. Whenever a person or institution sees life through the lens of a perverted fantasy, they lose empathy for the real being and needs of others. The child molester looses empathy for what a child would feel in an abusive situation. The Nazi lost it for the Jews and many other non-Arian people. And what is the lie that is eating out the marrow of compassion and empathy in those who have followed Church doctrine through the centuries, what has made it impossible for them to live in the heart that cannot exist in the face of falsehood and outright lies? 

     It has always been the inability to feel victim’s pain that allows individuals and institutions to tell themselves lies that encourage their crimes. Rapists, for example, tell themselves, “Women really want to be raped,” or “If she resists, she’s just playing hard to get.” Child molesters commonly lie to themselves with thoughts like, “I am not hurting the child, just showing love,” or “This is just another form of affection.” There just are certain mind trains that blot out empathy. We are the master race said Hitler and thought the German people. Christ (and sexless ness) is the “only” way to heaven thinks many Christians. These types of thoughts utterly obliterate empathy. Obliterating empathy we obliterate the human heart and this leads to a human sickness with little hope of cure. While there is some small hope for instilling a sense of empathy in offenders such as child molesters there is little hope in instilling this in rigid institutions such as the Church. Collectively they are more like psychopaths who are notorious for being completely without remorse for even the most cruel and heartless acts that we know the church has been guilty of time and time again. Psychopathy, the incapacity to feel empathy or compassion of any sort is the end result of societies and religions that breed such emotional patterning.

     The long history of ruin can be laid solidly at the feet of books that have made it a shame to be creatures of the flesh and that our pure spirits and beings cannot be integrated in the most beautiful and loving ways with our bodies. Sexual intercourse was too dirty, shameful and indecent for a pure being like Christ and there was no way that his mother Mary could have made love with a man to bring him to earth. The church defamed the act of lovemaking with wild fantasies of virgin births. And they defame sex, love and the beauty of intimacy and touch when they stripped Jesus of his humanity, of his sex. By holding him and his mother up as pure holy and sexless they set deeply in the collective unconsciousness a pattern of insanity which has ripped through the ages and still haunts society through a compulsive need to abuse our children. Sexual intercourse between beings can be and is beautiful enough to bring a being like Jesus into the world and Mary his mother could let herself be penetrated by a penis without diminishing her being or beauty in any way. Christians do not doubt that Mary was a virgin not realizing what it really means to make her into one. Teachings that defame the sexual act at its very heart and core, at the level of holiness and spirituality, are leading to shame and the subversion of sexuality into something hurtful, dark and ugly.  

The Heart of Beauty is The Heart of Sex

      Hitler understood completely how lies function. If you lie often enough and big enough the human mind will believe. It does not matter the truth to the mind, it accepts and molds itself to whatever conditions it. That is why in HeartHealth we see the heart as the instrument of truth for the minute we leave the truth we leave the heart and the heart both knows and feels this. The problem with the human mind and humanity at large is that we have walked so far away from the truth and the territories of our hearts that we no longer know or feel the consequences of it.   

     In the hysteria that was to build into a train for Virgin worship, the early church fathers degraded sex in the most disgusting terms. And through extension of the thought that sex was too ugly for Mary the mother to engage in to create such a beautiful being, male celibacy and male virginity became not only desirable states of being, but eventually they were considered necessary and even demanded states for a person to live in Christ. The view of Jesus as sexless and as completely divine set a subterranean quantum pattern rolling across the eons of time that set seed thoughts into the race consciousness as sex as un-divine. Do teachings that consciously or unconsciously lead people to believe that sex is dirty, meaning not holy, are they dangerous, hurtful and abusive to humanity? If this lie is at the heart of and creates food for sexual perversion, is it important to confront it? If there are people or teachings that lead us into feeling shame about something that is really inherently beautiful, and if such shame about our bodies leads us to subvert or pervert our sexuality, do we have a crime in the making?

     In the early years of the church there was remarkable revulsion against sex that swept through the minds of its leaders. Perhaps there were reasons because in Greece and in Rome things were completely out of control sexually. The Romans were less inclined to nudity then the Greeks but had their festivals at which all pretence to modesty and shyness were abandoned. In fact their Bacchanalian festivals became so bad, so obscene and violent, that finally they were banned. But deeper reasons for the deformation of sex can be traced to ‘certain’ Gnostic philosophies that equated the dark force with matter, with physicality while the light force became equated with spirit, spirituality, asceticism and Jesus Christ. In Gnosticism matter was seen as ugly, recalcitrant, irredeemable and evil. The creation of human beings, in this point of view, was an imprisoning of pure and Holy Spirit in vile matter. Through asceticism, by eliminating any attachment to the world of physical reality and by getting rid of emotional involvement and physical pleasure one was thought to be returned to pure spirit and thus made holy again. This view, taken to extreme, saw that bringing one more soul or spirit into the world of matter as the ultimate evil and thus the worse possible human act. Carrying this idea to its logical conclusion, one extreme Gnostic sect, the Manichaeans, taught that intercourse with preadolescent girls was not ultimately evil because pregnancy was not possible. Even the Roman Emperors were shocked by this idea and outlawed the sect. For a time St. Augustine was a fringe member of the Manichaeans and St Augustine had a great influence on the future course of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. For him the quicker even married people abstained from all sexual relations the better for their souls. For Augustine all sexual acts or pleasure outside of marriage were mortal sins; acts sufficient to separate people forever from God and so consign them to hell. Through this, all kinds of physical intimacy and touch were frowned on and held under suspicious eye.       

      Thus in modern times we see that the Doctrine of Jesus’ perpetual virginity as a reaction to the dirtiness of sex, its lusty and adulterous side, which reflected onto the lowest and weakest side of humanity. This speaks of our vulnerability to being enslaved by the senses and of the utter lack of love that can exist in orgies and other sexual behaviors that were immensely popular at the time. The view of Jesus as sexless and as completely divine set a subterranean quantum pattern rolling across the eons of time that set seed thoughts into the race consciousness as sex as un-divine. There is no dispute here that sex can be unholy meaning unloving, but is that its basic nature or is just what some people make of it?

      Jesus being a Jew would have been into sex but against the unlawful and improper use of it. This is what it meant to be a Jew. Two thousand years ago Judaism permeated and controlled the Jew’s every action, thought and even word. The Law either sanctioned a thing or it did not. And what Jesus said was that he came to uphold the laws not break them. In Luke 8:1-3 for instance it says that Jesus wandered around the country side with an entourage which included ‘many women who ministered unto him of their substance.’ It would have been a complete scandal and crime to walk about unmarried so with women. There are many indications that Jesus himself was actually a man who was married and thus followed tradition and law and the joys of sex. This substance the bible talked about probably meant that the women financially supported him but some could translate instead of having something to do with the gift of womanhood.  

A wife who will make love to you with her heart

is worth all the devotion, all the love and respect,
deserves all the tenderness, attention,
caresses, sweet kisses on her neck. 

    The history of the Church is littered with violence. Though the past century or two have seen a drastic reduction in overt violence, meaning there have not been any burnings at the stake or inquisitional tortures for quite a while, we have to address the possibility that religious teachings are contributing to the distortion of sexuality and thus to much violence and sexual abuse. These lies that strip the beauty and holiness from sex are in part responsible for the continued violence we see in the world of sexuality. This book calls for the healing of our sexualities, and though we can do that on an individual basis, The Heart of Sex is calling for it on a racial level as well. This is what religion is about, teachings to the collective. In plain language The Heart of Sex is calling for a complete dismantling of religious teachings that indicate that sex is not holy and beautiful because they are abusive to the human spirit. Sexual intercourse between beings can be and is beautiful enough to bring a being like Jesus into the world and Mary his mother could let herself make love with a man without diminishing her being or beauty in any way.

      Individuals who abuse our children or rape our daughters have to be removed from society, but what about the teachings of the churches that are responsible for the deformation of sex, the most vulnerable part of our beings? Should we let them rove freely? Should they go unchallenged to continue their pollution of the collective imagination, injected through hundreds of millions of followers’ minds?  If they are abusing the racial consciousness with lies it is as important to remove them, as it is to remove a rapist from society. To not do so is to condone and take responsibility for his next rape. The church is again in crisis about the subject of its priests abusing children and about how they have handled the situation for the past few decades.  

     Though many, probably rightfully, believe that the church would be destroyed permanently if it stripped itself of the images of the Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, and the perpetual virginity of Jesus, The Heart of Sex calls for their removal not only from our individual consciousness, as a freely chosen movement of our consciousness, but it calls for the removal of these teachings from society as it equally would call for a removal of a child abuser or rapist. To allow these teachings to continue for eternity is to allow the continual abuse of our children and of our women.  

     There is one particular person who is repeating this great blasphemy of old. His name is Sai Babba and he claims a virgin birth and teaches by his own personal example that perfect and holy (who he is, God incarnated) energy is absolutely sexless. Is he a black magician sucking the energies of millions of followers? Or is he a saint representing the real truth for humanity? If this man is right than he is the one and only pure one and we, the rest of humanity are dirty unenlightened folks who are not god (or godly) because we still have our sexualities. If he is wrong and deluding himself then this wrongness is at heart of what is wrong with sex and what leads some people to act out ugliness. Who is at the bottom of sexuality making it into what it is for many people, a perverse, dirty, ungodly thing that us humans do like animals in heat. Some people take it that far. The point for our race consciousness is this. What kind of situation do we have in the collective unconscious when the most beautiful person (the most enlightened or God centered man) says or shows himself as being so because of his sexless ness? If he is crazy then most of the Christian churches are insane also for he is only repeating the Christ fantasy. And in mental hospitals around the world we have many doing the same.  

      Most people judge this Sai Babba out of hand but he has millions of devoted followers around the world who think very much the opposite. People find it easy to judge him but he is doing nothing less then the founding fathers of Christianity. His point comes directly from the bible and is the corner stone of Christian belief. Sai Babba is a personification of the bible story and of course makes authoritative reference to it and its story. Is this man a sex criminal? Meaning is he hurting other innocent people by leading them into diminishing their consciousness about sexuality.  

     Sex is as big and beautiful as God is and when the human mind tries to reduce it into something small or ugly through the perceptual power of the conceptual mind, something hurtful happens. Beyond the above gross lies about sexuality we have other subtle extensions of the above. For instance, narrow definitions of sexuality as something God created ‘only’ for procreation. It is obvious that this is true, that this is ‘a’ purpose of sexuality. But is it the only purpose? Can the human mind in humility say that it is?  

Sex as Sacred.

Consecrate your energy, conserve it and raise it to love.

Ever restoring our partners and ourselves
 is the most pleasurable of pleasurable duties.

A privilege and offering of our highest devotion.

It is one of the greatest joys of life.

In true communion essences touch.

In the oneness our very beings are captured, happy and free to be.

Bliss is the radiating heart, warm and tender.

Like the sun, our happiness shines to everyone.

      The defining framework of The Heart of Sex is beauty. Sex can be incredibly beautiful or it can be disgustingly ugly, though for many it falls somewhere in-between. Most understand the universal nature of its pleasurable ness though it is painful for many. The prose in many chapters of this book concentrate on images of the beauty of sexuality for this is the direction we must go if we want to make life better on earth. This implies though that we need, as a race to move out from under darkness and away from an ugliness that we have let deeply into our souls. Part of that ugliness is that we have accepted sex as ugly and that has made it ugly and shameful in our unconscious. This is why we have used Christ as an image in this book and brought him back in the arms of his lover Mary who was not a prostitute after all but his lawful wife. Though there are some people who believe that he did not exist at all as a historical figure, there is no doubting the fact that he exists in the collective consciousness of a great part of humanity today. The Koran accepts him as a main prophet of God so one way or another the reach of his image creeps into billions of souls.

      It is not enough to leave things alone because violence is being done to the most vulnerable part of our beings. Sexual violence and abuse is not permissible so when we permit it in one of the world’s greatest religions we permit it on our streets and even in the sanctuary of our homes. There is a general tendency about sexuality even in our courtrooms. We all too easily try to dismiss child sexual abuse in the family and too often return abusive fathers into the nests that they control. In rape trials we see the victim put on trial and this creates a fear of even going to the police and thus to court. I have heard of parents forcibly putting their children on priests´ laps and letting what is known as ‘light’ abuses go on with the expectation that future heavy ones will not occur.  

     The Catholic Church has perhaps been the worst offender in this regard by keeping silent for decades about the immoral criminal betrayal of its children. Whenever a new case of a priest being accused of child abuse erupted the Church said it was an aberration, an isolated example, one bad apple, or using scapegoat psychology, blamed it on media bashing by anti-Catholic press. The official policy of the Vatican was secrecy. They thought that it was better by far not to let the public know what was happening. So their strategy was to admit nothing, buy silence; settle out of court and seal deals with confidentiality contracts.   

      Some people suggest that we should leave people alone to their religions, to their ideas and thoughts. What right have we to say what is right and what is wrong or what is truth or not some say. In HeartHealth we said that whatever separates is not love, and though certain ideas and concepts do bring separation; they believe we should permit it. But what do we do when ideas bring violence and abuse? At the heart of a sexual abuser is a person cut off from the world of intimacy, touch and heart. Lacking warmth they seek it in negative ways, sometimes in violent ways. But can we legislate away the thoughts and philosophies that lead to such cold states of mind and being? Nazis still exist and are still free to think and believe what they may but publicly they are seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity.  

     The Heart of Sex is calling for a holy crusade, on the level of imagination and public opinion, against institutions and types of thought that lead human beings to the alter of suffering. Putting the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, in the same category as rapists, child molesters and many other perpetrators of family violence is just karmic payback for all the violence they have instigated these past two millennium. Clearly the church was incapable of empathy then and still prefers to identify with its own political selfish interests now then care for the well being of its own children who they still let be abused by their priesthood. If the Church is abusing the racial consciousness with lies it is as important to remove them, as it is to remove a rapist from society. To not do so is to condone and take responsibility for the next case of child abuse. To allow these teachings to continue for eternity is to allow with equal ease the continual abuse of our children and women. So this article calls for a religious reformation that cuts out a cancer at its source. It is time to examine closely what it was that led to such violence if we want to end the abuse of our children’s greatest vulnerabilities.

      The Vatican deceives humanity in its use of the terms "moral" and "morality." It is a mistake to let the Vatican define these terms for they are perhaps the least “moral” organization in the history of mankind. Vatican influence must be neutralized. Large scale justified public criticism of the Vatican, the likes of which have not been seen before would be a first step in decreasing the incidence of child sexual abuse. There is no escape now from confronting the massive insanity, which sets itself up against all common sense and intelligence. “There really are people, and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so,” said Scott Peck and he certainly seemed to be talking about the crowd who seem to take it as their natural right to abuse the innocent nature of childhood. The sexual abuse of children is the greatest shame of humanity and if the largest religious organization in the world is perpetuating this horror through its philosophies and followers what can we expect from others.

      In this the truth of all the above is coming to light in the current crisis centered on the almost daily report about priests accused of child molestation. In the United States there is a flood of reports and even some arrests for priests accused of child sexual abuse. In Italy at least seven priests have been sent to prison for pedophilia. The Catholic Church has been accused recently of keeping silent for decades about the immoral criminal betrayal of its children. Whenever a new case of a priest being accused of child abuse erupted the Church said it was an aberration, an isolated example, one bad apple, or using scapegoat psychology, blamed it on media bashing by anti-Catholic press. The official policy of the Vatican was secrecy. They thought that it was better by far not to let the public know what was happening. But now the Catholic Church is headed for an apocalypse of faith because its priests are, in too many numbers, abusing children left trustingly into their care.

     Now Father Maciel, one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church is being accused to have molested some of the young men under his control, some 50 years ago, at the headquarters of the Legion of Christ, a few miles from the Vatican. Juan Vaca, who was first abused when he was 11 years old, told reporters. "He pushed my hand onto his penis. And I didn't know anything about masturbation. And he (Father Maciel) said, 'you don't know how to do it. Let me show you.' And he gets my penis himself and starts to masturbate me. I was in shock." Now 65 years old and a psychology professor at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Vaca, the former superior of the Legion of Christ in Orange, Conn., says he was one of some 30 boys abused by Macial during his studies at the Legion in Rome. Vaca also told reporters how he was instructed to bring other boys to Maciel's room.

      Though the Vatican has chosen to ignore Vaca and his allegations he is not alone. He is one of eight former students, now all in their 60s, who have signed sworn affidavits submitted to the Vatican that they were abused by Maciel. But this man, who is a master of Vatican politics and who has worked with several popes is untouchable. In fact, the pope has continued to praise 82-year-old Maciel, a Mexico native, as an effective leader of Catholic youth, despite detailed allegations sent to the Vatican four years ago saying the man was also a long-time pedophile.

   Through much of history the Church has acted collectively like psychopaths who are notorious for being completely without remorse for even the most cruel and heartless acts. Psychopathy, the incapacity to feel empathy or compassion of any sort is the end result of societies and religions that breed such emotional patterning. The Church lived through many centuries of such behavior and only now, hundreds of years after that behavior has basically ended, has a Pope apologized for it and the massive suffering they caused. This chapter has tried to explain why they were able to go on pathological rampages. They were champions of untruth so unable to remain in the halls of their own hearts. Since the heart is the truth we cannot live in it when we live with lies.