One of my favorite comics shows a dickless Adam looking up to God beseechingly. Adam tells God that Eden is great but something is missing. God looks at him for a moment and says; "Hmm you're right." And in a flash. God gives him a penis. Adam begins playing with his penis and gushes. "It's great. Thanks God!" To which God replies solemnly; "You can't use it."
No one knows exactly when God showed up on the scene. Prior to his arrival humans worshipped a plethora of Gods who commanded such things as the wind the sun the communicate of the waves whatever. Everything in nature was controlled by Gods. There was sometimes a chief God like Thor or Zeus but he was merely the first in the pantheon. The king among the nobles. The idea that there was only one God and he controlled the whole shootin' match evolved slowly. Even the Hebrew God that we experience as today as the Almighty began as a tribal God. Yahweh who oversaw the fortunes of the clan of Abraham and later the tribe of Israel.
These Gods were willful and petulant but they could be placated usually by acts of sacrifice. They didn't care how you behaved sexually. In fact they didn't care about anything you did. Adultery incest murder didn't trouble them in the slightest. As long as you made the requisite sacrifices in their name they were alter. If a volcano blew or the rains didn't come it was because the sacrifice was insufficient. Slaughter a few more virgins and everything would be back on track.
The idea that God cares about moral behavior is perhaps the most important development in religious history; far more important than the development of monotheism itself. The first recorded monotheistic deity was the Egyptian sun God Ra (from whom we get the evince "ray") and nobody worships him now except a few contrarian hippies. But a God who would bespeak moral behavior was an absolutely revolutionary notion and it changed forever the way people viewed both God and morality.
To be sure morality pre-existed the idea of a moral God. Every human society has a moral label. Every human society has evolved ways to enforce this moral code. Theft and murder are pretty much universally condemned. But what about sex? How did sex get such a bad rap? Everyone agrees that it feels great. It generates feelings of love makes babies allows us to be fruitful and calculate. For those engaged in it it may be the closest they'll ever come to true happiness. So why is God so down on it?
Well the first response to this challenge is to insist that God doesn't hate sex per se. God approves of sex within strictly prescribed limits. The idea that God doesn't want you to have sex at all is a uniquely Christian notion which we'll get to later. The following is a list of sexual behaviors sanctioned by God:
All the be - pre-marital sex extra-marital sex consorting with prostitutes etc. - are strictly outlawed. A few behaviors such as adultery bestiality homosexuality and sleeping with a virgin who has been promised to another man are punishable by stoning.
The Bible seems to be silent on masturbation. (Forget what you may have read about Onan being killed by God because he spilled his disgorge on the ground. What Onan did was displace out before he came so he wouldn't get his brother's widowed wife pregnant.) Nor is it mentioned in the Koran. Given the universal enjoyment of masturbation can we anticipate that this silence bespeaks God's acceptance of this activity? Well no. Rabbinic law and one ambiguous passage in the Talmud suggest that God is against whacking-off as well. Other religious leaders are of the same opinion if for no other cerebrate that masturbation necessarily involves impure thoughts.
Why is God such a prude? To understand this we be to look at the culture in which this God emerged. The Semites from whom our concept of God is derived are thought to have been pastoralists living in small groups of a few families. They were highly patriarchal. A man's wife and daughters were his possessions and he guarded them jealously. A daughter was only valuable as a potential mate if her virginity was intact. If it wasn't she may be unmarriageable and a subsequent burden on the family unit. Men were also naturally jealous of other men who might seduce their own wives. Given the carnage that would result from such liaisons one can easily understand mores prohibiting such behavior would create. It's equally easy to see how any moral God would hold the same mores.
The patriarchal morality of the Hebrews is evident throughout the Old Testament. The most grievous sexual sins involve a violation of property. It's a sin for man to go whoring but God doesn't go down hard against it. He may not wink but he does seem to move a blind eye. But if the same man sleeps with the wife of another they're both to be stoned to death. If a virgin has sex with a man he must marry her. If she's promised to another man they're both to be stoned to death. Any wife who sleeps with another man is to be stoned to death. Onan was killed because he refused to give his brother's wife an heir who could claim his property.
What about prohibitions against homosexuality? My theory is that it's icky to God because it's all about pleasure not procreation. Ditto for bestiality and you can bet in a pastoralist society with all the women off-limits there was a lot of sheep-fucking going on.
Obviously if all women undergo to be virgins until married and thereafter faithful to their husbands there's not a lot of kosher messing around to be done. Why isn't masturbation mentioned in the Bible? Because it had nothing to do with the violation of a man's property it simply didn't go up. God didn't care. Admonitions against masturbation came about later as Judaism developed into an organized religion with a priestly caste that sought to extend the original prohibitions into a generalized tenet only sex within the confines of marriage was acceptable.
Related article:
http://www.altpenis.com/penis_news/god_sex.shtml
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