From: cctr114@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Rea)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Sexuality (was: Re: REFRESH)
Date: 20 Nov 92 06:20:26 GMT
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Paul Conditt (conditt@tsd.arlut.utexas.edu) wrote:
> In article <Nov.15.22.15.38.1992.23926@geneva.rutgers.edu> belgarath@vax1.mankato.msus.edu writes:
>In my experience as a single 
>Christian and also as one who tries to minister to people with sexuality
>issues (homosexuals, sex-addicts), I have found that this attitude has
>done a lot of damage to Christians.  The effects of it are far-reaching
>into the Christian community.  The problems related to sexual sin that
>exist in the church are numerous.  We have adultery, pre-marital sex,
>extra-marital sex, homosexuality, pornography addicts, child-molesters,
>frigid wives, impotent husbands, teenagers who are very sexually active,
>singles who carry a tremendous amount of guilt for having sexual thoughts
>and possibly acting them out.  The list goes on and on and on.
 
In my experience as a young person the message I recieved from the Church
was as follows

DON'T DO IT UNTIL YOU'RE MARRIED
AND GET YOUR HAND OFF IT
AND STOP THINKING ABOUT IT
AND DON'T HAVE ANY DREAMS ABOUT IT EITHER
HAVE I MADE MYSELF CLEAR SONNY?

To which I should have said, ``But if I do that I'll EXPLODE!!!!''
 
As I see it we are faced with a dilemna to which there is no clear
solution. In the age in which the sexual ethics of the Bible were
developed marriage was virtually coincident with puberty. I was reading
very recently about the life of Egyptian peasants in the time of
the Pharaohs, the average woman would marry about age 12 have between
three and five children and be dead at age twenty. While we could expect
that life spans in the Israelite hill country would be a little longer
it would be nothing like today. Now there is typically a 10-15 year gap
between puberty and marriage, when everything becomes ok.  So our culture
has changed but our sexual ethics are still the same. The problem is that
both our culture and our sexual ethics seem right. I shudder to think of
what would happen if 12 year old children started getting married, but the
power of the male sex drive in the adolescent years is an awesome force, to
which the Christian church has given no guilt-free outlet.

There have been occasional posts about the deliberations of the Presbyterian
Church on human sexuality. The length of time thay have spent shows the
complexity of the subject, but also my impression is that they have not 
really been able to improve on the sexual ethics presented in the Bible.
Yet as is so obvious, our problems remain. There are only a couple of
deviations from standard Christian sexual ethics I have supported. A
few times I have made some postings setting out my reasons for supporting
polygamous marriages in certain limited and well defined circumstances.
I will not run over these again. The other is, given the extreme prevalence
of masturbation, and it seems to have no clear detrimental effects, why not
bring it out into the open and tell single people to do it and enjoy it
and remove the guilt that so often plagues people as a result of it.
(Well I guess this guilt could be a clear detrimental effect, but I think its
a result of our ethics and not inherant in the act of masterbation.)

I once heard a lecture by Dr. James Dobson in which he essentially said the
same thing, so at least I know that I am not alone on the issue of
masterbation.
 
> 
> Paul Conditt

--
                                                                     ___
Bill Rea                                                            (o o)
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