(October 20, 2021 at 6:36 am)Ten Wrote: Boru brought up a good point in the Gay thread and I thought we could dive deeper with the question as the actual focus.
Why does god care about our genitals so much?
It's one of the things that really influenced my incredulity and atheism that a god would be so focused on our genitals and what we're doing with them. I know in Mormonism, the focus on sexual purity and repression is part of the BITE model programming for the cult(sex being such a natural part of being human, you can influence and control people by making them feel guilt and shame around this natural instinct they'll never be free from) and a core part of the doctrine(you can't have trans or gay folks because the model for the planetary rewards in the afterlife is Adam and 5+ Eves; The harem god factory doesn't work with Adam and 5+ Steves or if Eve was assigned male at birth, although it'd probably be more fun to run around an empty planet with a bunch of very gay god sex happening). So, I understand for that religious cult why they focus on genitals so much.
But why does god have this focus in other religions?
I always thought it was pretty obvious. Before contraceptives, having sex meant a good chance of creating a life, and if this happens out of wedlock, then this is not just a serious problem in terms of lifelong commitment, but also many women died in childbirth if there was even a minor complication, so this introduced a huge amount of risk physically from an unwanted pregnancy.
Religion created strict rules around this for reasons of common sense. Just as budding societies had to address problems related to crime (murder, theft etc), rules against which all religions have incorporated into their moral code, there were also big problems with controlling sensible reproduction. In virtually all cultures, sexual promiscuity, in particular before contraception was available, was seen as a very undesirable human activity which needed to be repressed and reserved for within permanent. monogamous relationships.
As soon as you have a religion claiming to have total moral ownership over sexual human activity, naturally the question of how to deal in the moral "code" with the over 10% of humans that don't cleanly fit into a heterosexual denomination comes up. Unfortunately human nature makes it hard for humans to understand how someone else can "feel" or "think" differently to themselves, especially when it is about something that is so central to how we are built as beings. In a primitive society this can really only go one way. What I find incredibly sad is that the revulsion and absolute moral judgement is not only still rife in today's more enlightened society, but is actively being taught and propagated by a lot of organised religion. To me this is one of the most disgraceful aspects of organised religion.
