Saturday, April 14, 2012

Sex Sells in Advertising. But what’s it doing in Religion?


Madison Avenue has been sexualizing products as a sales gimmick for as long as advertising has been around because sex sells. But, what is with the Abrahamic religions’ fixation on sex and sexuality? What are they selling?

The Old Testament is chock full prohibitions, instructions, and penalties for sexual behavior. It is also full of inexplicably bizarre and violent sexual references.

  • Lot commits incest with his daughters.
  • God’s demand of total genocide of a pagan tribe, except for the virgin girls who are to be sexual fodder for the Hebrews
  • God kills Onan for whacking off onto the ground.
  • Judah doing his daughter-in-law.
  • I don’t even want to explain Song of Solomon’s "My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him". (!?)
  • Attempted angel rape in the Sodom and Gomorrah story... Lot trys to placate the mob with his virgin daughters.
  • Rapists of virgins have to marry them and pay the girl’s father 50 shekels.
  • Incest by Adam and Eve’s children
  • Noah puts a curse on his son Ham’s son because Ham saw Noah naked.
  • Abraham does a servant so his sterile wife can have a baby.
  • A woman who grabs the privates of her husband’s attacker while trying to help her husband has to have her hand cut off.
  • Bestiality requires the man AND the innocent beast to be put to death
  • Homosexual sex punishable by death.
  • Women who commit adultery must be put to death.
  • God doesn’t like turtle necks on penis’ and requires genital mutilation of the Hebrews.
  • Having sex with your father’s wife is punishable by death.
  • Threesome with your wife and mother-in-law...death.
  • Lose your testicles? Banned from temple.
  • Endless laws and rituals about coming into contact with ejaculate and women who are menstruating.

This isn’t even scratching the surface. There are over two-hundred (200) references to sex, sex acts, sexual parts, rape, incest, masturbation, and lewd and lascivious behavior, as they say, in the Old Testament. The Jews were obviously obsessed with sexual matters. Christians today who say Jesus did away with the laws of the Torah, the Old Testament, nevertheless seem happy to pick and choose among those Old Testament sexual prohibitions depending on the situation (“JOHNNY!! What are you doing?? Jesus is watching!!”) , or their agenda (“God hates fags!”).

The New Testament has a few references to sex, but not nearly as much fun as the OT unless you think being a eunuch for the Lord a good thing, which Jesus endorsed whole heartedly. And there’s that mysterious homoerotic verse about a young man flashing Jesus (Mark 14:51-52). But more than once we are told there is no sex in heaven ... some heaven that is.

The Quran has lots of sex stuff too, much of it drawn from the Old Testament, But here are a few uniquely Muslim sex thing:

  • Women are to be considered fields to be “tilled” with ones “plow.”
  • Virgins await the faithful in paradise (note: paradise beats heaven).
  • No sex for new widows until four months and ten days has passed.
  • Women charged with lewdness by four witnesses are to be put under house arrest until they die.
  • Slave wives should be punished only half as much for lewdness as your free born wives.
  • Wives who are lewd have their inheritance taken away.
  • And this peculiarly ambiguous admonishment:
    “it is forbidden that ye should have two sisters together, except what hath already happened of that nature in the past. Allah is forever forgiving and merciful!” and obviously Allah is into threesomes with twins, but only once!!


So what’s this all about? What’s with all this sex stuff? Why does it seem their god is one big horn dog and hall monitor of penises and vaginas, who gets to use them, and with whom?

Because God is made in Man’s image ... and men are pigs. Men wrote the scriptures to satisfy their misogynistic bent to subjugate women, and to elevate the sanctity of the penis; to justify as God’s will otherwise abominable acts; to establish a sexual pecking order. What better way to exercise control than to be the keeper of the strongest natural instinct among animals; to be divinely appointed to enforce God’s determinates of where, when, and how their willing mind slaves will have sex?

And on it goes with modern day keepers of their God’s genitalia obsession: Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, the religious right. If any of them were to ever get elected I imagine they’d push for a new national motto –

“In God We Trust, and in Your Genitalia We Don’t”

6 comments:

LaurieB said...

Why in the world do these religious women put up with this bullshit? They are traitors to their own gender. Every time I see Santorum on TV with his idiot wife and brainwashed daughters behind him I could just barf.

NatalieK said...

A nice list but it could do with the references. I am due to talk to my husband's Rotary club about Humanism, and I will probably stick to my original plan of reading them the letter asking Dr Laura's advice about other abominations. http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/drlaura.asp
My ambition is to get 2 laughs out of the Rotarians. Years ago they had a talk about humanism and apparently found it difficult and incomprehensible and "too profound"

NatalieK said...

I asked some proselytising Muslims what reward awaited female suicide bombers (72 virgin males are not my idea of paradise!) They told me that they became the virgins who are the reward for the male suicide bombers. My follow up question was "What happens if the ladies are not virgins at the time of their suicide?" After some discussion in a language I did not understand I was told that "Nothing is impossible for Allah". A member of the public disagreed, saying that female suicide bombers become the queens over the other virgins, and asked me if I didn't agree that that was a wonderful fate.

Dromedary Hump said...

Nataliek, here's the reference link:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/sex/long.html

You'll find the Quran there as well.

Ian said...

Hump, I think this is the most important verse in the NT, and nails the lie that the NT cancels out all 'the nasties' from the OT.
Matt. 5:17-18 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.To be a true follower of Jeebus you have to accept, and follow, all 613 commandments, becoz if you change biblical morality it aint no longer biblical morality.

Ian

Anonymous said...

Laurie, religious women support it and attack other women because it is a survival mechanism. They feel like all they have for status is the goodwill of men in their lives. They have little power on their own except for sucking up to patriarchal power. If they rebel, they are sacrificed. They are also kept from talking to other women about certain subjects by fear. Traitors to their gender, yes, but also just trying to protect themselves the only way they know.