Thread: reconciling sexual fetishes and religious belief.

One way to answer is to differentiate religion from church, and to remember the Goat on the Sabbath. Everything I'm about to say is my own admittedly generalized opinion, one that may well offend, but that is not my intent, and I avidly welcome any criticism thereof or any correction of facts I have misrepresented or misinterpreted, when I say that I do not believe it was ever god or Christ's will to smother our lives with the rules the church invents. Christianity vs. Christ As an agnostic believing in a higher power without defining it in terms of a specific church's view, my favorite quote remains I have nothing against god, my only issue is with his fan-club. Christ is in my mind a fascinating figure, one who dedicated his life to saying that doing good, being caring and human to each other, was more important than a blind adherence to static rules. The Goat on the Sabbath parable. It amazes me then that many but not all of the dominant sects of Christianity didn't seem to get the memo, calling it the word of god and of their church's namesake Christ, that we should all live our lives by a strict set of rules, and go further to make sure everyone else does to, whether they want to or not. Because god created us with free will so we could kill each other in his name for daring to be free - really? I'm getting off topic here - returning to the point of the static rules of the church vs. religion, in few places is the distinction clearer than in sex, even down to the most basic level of orientation. Warning Pandoric Can of Worms about to be Opened The churches view on homosexuality is one of my favorite examples. I'm not trying to derail the whole convo here, I am just using this as a useful example to explain. Leviticus The book of the Bible where god's apparent hatred of homosexuality comes from is in Leviticus, 1822 Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman that is detestable. and 2013 which repeats this and adds a death penalty. Other than the fact there are so many ways to interpret this line such as that one should not treat homosexual and hetrosexual encounters as completely identical in every single way, Leviticus is in the Old Testament - that tome of static rules Christ was explicitly arguing against a blind adherence too. But even ignoring Christ in Christianity, Leviticus also contains commands to burn anything as ritually unclean that a woman touches while on her period, to never cut your hair and to not eat 'unclean' food like shellfish, pigs, or anything else that, at the time of writing, may have been a health hazard for people to prepare and eat. Strange how these rules have not endured in most mainstream Christianity, yet a blind adherence to homophobia has. The Point The point of this longwinded rant is to present my own belief - that the restrictions modern churches place on our lives, especially in terms of sexuality, are authored by churches, not by religion and not by god. As an imperfect being trying to understand the mind of a perfect being, I am not arrogant enough to assume a perfect understanding - but I do believe that god and Christ's message was to be good to each other, respectful and kind to each other regardless of who we are. As such, being respectful of other people on this site, especially of our differences, and not being intently degrading, destructive or harmful against a person or character that unequivocally does not want it, would be well within the morals of my view of religion. But then in fantasy, doing something completely against what a person or character wants is a difficult feat to achieve. As an enthusiast of taboos like tentacles, I will admit there are taboos that seem to stray outside that area. But then as I said in another longwinded reply here , I beleive even tentacles are not based on true sadistic destructive rape, but on consensual non-consent, which I believe remains on the grey fringes but still well within the realm of being good to one another, enjoying causing pleasure and an inner freedom, at most in a subdom overpowering, not in actually enjoying sadistic bloody destruction. And Even the Darkest Fantasies are More Moral Here, than in the Real World My own personal understanding of Christ's message can even be stretched to allow for an acceptance of the darkest non-consensual fantasies and socially deviant taboos. I believe in the lesser of two evils, and that exploring those less than light areas of your personality and sexuality, here, in a fictional setting with fictional characters without the risk of harming anyone in the real world, is infinitely less evil than the alternative - than in giving every dark part of yourself an ever growing strength through repression, at best permanently denying an understand of all that makes you you, and at worst eventually being unable to resist experimenting in the real world, where people get hurt. Returning to Christ and the sabbath-goat, I believe the lesser of two evils is always better than an adherence to static restrictions so blind and impractical that it inevitable lead to the greater evil anyway. We live in the real world - Christ got that, Christianity didn't. Who would you rather believe?