Overcoming Religious Sexual Shame
sex therapist, who has been seeing these purity-movement victims for several years now, and has encountered countless individuals and couples, who feel lost and alienated from their sexuality, caught between their desire to be good Christians, and their all-too human physical needs and reactions. She explores the provocative proposal that the purity movement has actually resulted in sexual trauma, by using shame as weapon to make young people hate and fear their own bodies and needs.
Schermer Sellers explores the origins of sexual shame in Christianity, grounding much of it in early religious acceptance of the mind-body split. The mind/body split is the notion that our souls and our bodies are two different things, and that our bodies are mired in the evils of the physical world, while our souls can, and should transcend our base desires. This root rejection of our physical experiences, and the perception of sexuality as the most tempting, corrupting aspect of our physical lives, led to millennia of sexual shame, where sexuality is portrayed as a weakness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...xual-shame
sex therapist, who has been seeing these purity-movement victims for several years now, and has encountered countless individuals and couples, who feel lost and alienated from their sexuality, caught between their desire to be good Christians, and their all-too human physical needs and reactions. She explores the provocative proposal that the purity movement has actually resulted in sexual trauma, by using shame as weapon to make young people hate and fear their own bodies and needs.
Schermer Sellers explores the origins of sexual shame in Christianity, grounding much of it in early religious acceptance of the mind-body split. The mind/body split is the notion that our souls and our bodies are two different things, and that our bodies are mired in the evils of the physical world, while our souls can, and should transcend our base desires. This root rejection of our physical experiences, and the perception of sexuality as the most tempting, corrupting aspect of our physical lives, led to millennia of sexual shame, where sexuality is portrayed as a weakness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...xual-shame
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"