Sexuality and Atheism

Frank85
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Sexuality and Atheism

how do we explain sexuality in a religion driven society, and where does right and wrong to being to one side or the other come from, explain please... 


Thomathy
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Could you expand on the

Could you expand on the question?  I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly you're asking after.

Do you want to know how people determine what is right and wrong with some sexuality in particular in a 'religion driven' society?  What society are you talking about that is religion driven?

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."


Desdenova
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I don't quite follow you,

I don't quite follow you, and agree with Thomathy that your question needs expanding upon.

Other than that, I believe that sex is the domain of two ( or more if that floats your boat ) consenting adults, that the aspects of their sexuality are entirely between them, and that those aspects should be of no concern to any secular or religious group.

It takes a village to raise an idiot.

Save a tree, eat a vegetarian.

Sometimes " The Majority " only means that all the fools are on the same side.


JillSwift
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Here's a broad set of

Here's a broad set of answers, I hope they end up relating to your question:

So far as any sexuality goes and religion: If religion is what guides one person's morality, that's keen. But religion does not drive all of society, even in theocracies.

As for right and wrong in sexuality: Keep it safe and keep it consensual and it's morally acceptable.

"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray


Hambydammit
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 Turns out I've written

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
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Rich Woods
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Without going into too much

Without going into too much detail...Atheism is extremely liberating regarding sexuality. Once you are able to conjugate in the nature, manner and frequency that is natural to you without bearing religion induced guilt...well, what can I say?...Life doesn't suck.


Conor Wilson
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Frank...

I agree with both Jill and Rich (...and I'm going to have to check out Hamby's links...) and I add to them:

 

1. Religion has a rather disturbing habit of demanding such virtue in the area of sexuality that it is a wonder that anyone who is not asexual achieves even part of what religion demands.

 

2. #1 is so very true that many ministers "fall from grace" via sexuality, thus revealing religious sexual demands for the impossible tasks that they are.

 

3. Indeed, if the strictest standards of, say, Roman Catholicism were applied to the behavior of some asexuals, even they would often be guilty of mortal--sexual--sin.

 

4. Relgion can get rather ruthless when these things are brought out into the open.  For evidence, I refer you to modern-day Islam's habit of taking a woman who has been raped, and instead of doing the proper thing and looking for her attacker and punishing him, Islam instead punishes the woman--the victim, mind you--as an "adulteress."  This does not mean that the hands of non-Islamic religions are clean.  After all, even in this country, Christians can threaten to get out their guns over political disagreements, which in our day often have sexual implications.  (Thank Reason, only a small minority of Christians do so.)

 

5. The most damning point of all: the only reason that this has changed to any extent in the West is because of the Enlightenment, and the separation of church from state.  Once the State stopped being the enforcer for the Church(es), (...well...to the extent that it has, anyway...) the Churches were then forced to actually live in peace with their neighbors, instead of merely claiming to do so.

 

Conor


Hambydammit
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 Conor, when you read my

 Conor, when you read my stuff on sexuality, you'll find that most of it is very dry and scientific, or dry and historical.  There's a reason for that.  I tackled the easy parts first.

Despite how obvious it is to some people that humans are "naturally" this way or that way in today's society, it's not as objectively easy to demonstrate.

Human brains were not built (by blind evolution) for post-industrial information age dating.  We have more options, more privacy, and more travel radius than we ever have before.  Many of our sexual emotions were built when we had maybe a half a dozen mate choices, and anything we did was pretty well known by everyone on earth that mattered -- our whole tribe.  While our ancestors may not have recognized the importance of sex with regard to paternity, our genes did, and they programmed us with sexual possessiveness and jealousy, but they also programmed us with good things, too.  Especially when women have an orgasm, they get a rush of natural drugs that cause a physical addiction to their partner.  Even without an orgasm, most women, and many men, are very likely to develop a completely natural attachment to their partner and jealousy towards anyone who tries to steal them.

In this age however, I think it's important for us to take a lesson from other less controversial areas of human nature.  To quote myself:

Quote:
As a result of this adaptation, we in the post-industrial world crave sweets, and enjoy them when we get them. There's a big difference, though. Post-industrial man has something that pre-agricultural man did not – processed sugar. We have learned to farm beets and sugar cane, and aided by advanced tools, to extract the pure sugar. We can use it to flavor everything from barbecue sauce to tiramisu to cough syrup to coffee. We can get sugar year round.

 

There's another adaptation we must consider. Our ancestors had to catch pretty much any protein they were going to consume. Protein came primarily from animals, and most of the animals we lived with were faster than us. To put it simply, it cost us a lot of calories to catch and kill our dinner. In addition, we were very seldom certain that we would find a meal tomorrow, or the day after. Food for us, like every other creature, was a hit and miss proposition. To that end, we developed a propensity for gorging. If there was a dead antelope by the fire, we consumed not just enough to sate our hunger, but as much as we possibly could, for that stored fat energy might well be the difference between a successful hunt in a week. It could literally be the difference between life and death.

By now, you've probably anticipated where I'm going with this. Very few humans expend energy in catching their food anymore. Not only that, but we get to eat our fill every day, and we add pure sugar to a large percentage of our food items. Our natural desire to gorge ourselves only compounds the problem.

According to the 2008 stat sheet from the American Heart Association, more than 9 million children under 19 years old are overweight. Nearly 14 percent of preschool children are overweight. Overweight adolescents have a 70 percent chance of remaining overweight as adults. Obesity increases as we reach adulthood. Among women between 30 and 40 years old, 34 percent are overweight. The link between obesity and myriad health problems is so well documented as to be incontrovertible.

The problem isn't just sugar. We also crave fat, for obvious reasons. Fat is one of the best ways to store energy in the body. Stored energy was crucial to our ancestors, but it is literally death to us today. Salt was an extremely precious commodity well into the modern human era. Today, it is available for a nickel a box at the supermarket, and is added to virtually everything we cook. Our ancient instincts have turned on us, and we are eating ourselves to death. Potato chips, candy, Big Macs, cheesecake, and All-You-Can-Eat Buffets are slowly and consistently killing us.

Our natural drives for sugar, salt, and fat, have been the catalyst for a fast food industry that is literally killing humans by the hundred thousands.  Clearly, just because our emotional desire for certain foods is natural, it's not necessarily good.

With sexuality, though, it's tougher.  For one thing, our emotional reaction to being denied a big mac is (hopefully) much less severe than being abandoned by our lover of ten years.  Some people will argue that human sexual emotions are so strong that our desire for monogamy is equivalent to "morally right."

This is special pleading, of course.  The strength of our emotional convictions is not a barometer for the strength of any moral imperative, nor does it provide any foundation for the formation of any worthwhile moral system.  Just think for half a second and you'll see why emotion is completely useless in any kind of moral system.  The whole point of morality in most cases is to do the right thing IN SPITE OF our emotional desire to do something else!

Here, we must pause.  Consider what I just said, and let the truth of it sink in.  Even good Christians will tell you that moral "systems" are designed to tell us what we should do even when our emotions disagree.  Think of a child who has no money in his pocket and really, really wants a candy bar from the grocery.  His mother teaches him, through a series of moral lessons, to refrain from stealing the candy bar AND to supress his anger at not getting what he wanted.

So, to suggest that the emotions involved in sex are so strong as to be considered immune from the very premise of moral discussion is absurd.  If we can look at our desire for sugar and realize that it needs to be tempered by reason, we can also look at our desire for monogamy and realize that just perhaps -- it's a remnant from another time in our evolutionary history, and that there is no hard fast rule that everybody needs one wife or husband.

Similarly, the desire to reproduce is extremely emotional, but we can say that reason allows us to conclude that some people ought not reproduce even though they have a very strong desire to do so.  This is reason over emotion.  It is the heart of morality.

Still, we are talking about morality -- not what is "natural."  This is where the second big hurdle comes in.  Is there any difference between what is natural and what is moral?  I suggest that there is not.  Bear with me, though, because that last sentence doesn't mean what you might think it means.  I view "natural" as a trick word.  Any behavior that a human is capable of is a "natural" behavior, simply because there's no alternative.  We were built by genes.  They are natural.  Without a supernatural soul, we can only regard everything as natural.

This is where that essay on murder and sugar comes in.  Once we remove "natural" from our vocabulary, we are forced into another paradigm.  Unfortunately, this is where a lot of Utopians have gone horribly, horribly wrong.  The French Revolution failed because politicians got a hold of the notion that sometimes the masses need to be forced into "Enlightenment Values."  Of course, very bad times follow when a government comes to this conclusion.

I suggest that only when we remove Utopianism from our vocabulary as well will we have any chance of achieving a very good society.  Perfect society is impossible for a variety of reasons which are not reasonably covered in a single blog post.

Having said that, we can look back at sexuality through the same lens.  Will most people opt for monogamous relationships?  Yes, I believe they will.  Most people will have babies "because it's the meaning of life" or some other such ad hoc explanation to try to rationalize the rush of emotions they feel after they become pregnant.  They will look at their mother and want to be like her out of the emotion of idolization and admiration.  They will see fathers as strong men of duty and responsibility.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this -- but there's also nothing inherently wrong with a nonmonogamous relationship either.  The lying and cheating that often go with monogamy are a result of the demand for monogamy, not an inherent part of nonmonogamy.  That is, people who know they can have sex with other people don't often lie about it.

This is all easy enough to put into a blog post on an atheist friendly site, but to sell this kind of thinking to the religious public requires a lot more justification, a lot more analogies, and above all, a lot more patience.

That's why all my stuff is focused primarily on science.

 

 

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
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Susac
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Like everyone else, I have

Like everyone else, I have no idea what the OP is asking.

 

So I'm just gonna talk about what I want to on this subject.  Sticking out tongue

 

There are a lot of things about sex that religion likes to get it's fingers into, and there are a lot of things about sex that evoke moralistic feelings and that people like to rationalize with religion.

 

First off, think of sex partners as a resource.  This is not how we are taught to view them in this culture, but this assumption is underlying a lot of our sexual mores, and it is explicit in many cultures as well.  Given this, women are a more valuable resource than men, since women represent the literal bottleneck through which reproduction occurs.

 

This reason, combined with a male tendency to be bigger, stronger, more aggressive and more authoritarian is all the reason you need to explain patriarchal cultures.  Religion then provides the window dressing on this phenomena, by rationalizing the oppression of women as "gods will."  Simple enough.

 

Human beings are also prone to having several moral brain systems activated in response to sexual stimulus.  The most common moral response system that people have relating to sex is the response system of "purity"

The purity response system helps us to survive by helping us to stay away from disease and putrescence.  It also helps us to choose fit mates.  For this reason, my 17 year old daughter complains about the "creepers" at the bus stop - older and less fit males (drug addicts, homeless people, people with poor hygene etc.) who might end up checking her out when she rides the bus.  This is my daughter's purity system gaging the fitness of these potential mates and finding them deeply unacceptable.

 

There seems to be some variance between people on what activates the purity system relating to sex.  In addition, people can be desensitized to their emotional response to "impurity." 

For example, I am straight, but I do not find the thought of homosexual male sex objectionable.  Some people do.  Once upon a time I saw two men kissing and I got "icky" feelings about it.  Now it doest bother me.  My work requires me to have occasional interviews with pedophiles.  That still bothers me, but not as much as it used to.  I find doe-eyed, healthy young women attractive, conversely I find burned out crack whores unattractive.

 

All of these are examples of my "purity" emotional systems being activated.  Violating my purity systems results in an identifiable feeling:  Revulsion.

 

Enter religion -  Religion provides a social rationalle for these emotional responses.  This is bullshit of course, because the emotional response comes first, THEN the rationalle is added later, but then religion has always been big on taking credit for human morality, so this is no surprise.  The other thing religions do is they provide both "moral strictures" to canonize naturally occurring moral response systems, and they provide mythology and iconography to guide people's attempts to structure their thoughts about such things.

 

Examples:

The idea that for a man to lay with another man is an abomination is a canonized moral stricture about the purity response.

The Madonna and child icon is an example of the mythology of purity response as an icon.

The myth about Jesus healing the lepers is about the power of god to remove impurity.

 

So what is going on here is that the religion builds a mythology that uses the purity response of the believer to justify itself.  The believer experiences this as a service that the religion is providing because it provedes them a socially sanctioned way to structure and make sense of their experience.  This is important to the believer because the believer needs to find a way to structure his experience in order to build his identity.  This is why religious identity is so deeply rooted in the personality -  people literally build their sense of self out of these narratives.  When you tell them that the narrative is wrong, they tend to get upset.