Neddy Bate
Valued Senior Member
In that case, god would be bisexual. (He made some of us male...)
Why is God so obsessed with sex?
- Thread starter synthesizer-patel
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In that case, god would be bisexual. (He made some of us male...)
Before easily avalable porn, tv adverts, billboards, nightclubs, scanty clads, etc.
jan.
Maybe on some subconcious level, sex being the start to all human life means it's seen as being a sacred act. I mean, it's hard to argue that sex isn't special when you look at it from that perspective, it's literally the reason we exist.
So any social norm that forms against a certain sexual practice has extra momentum behind it since, on some level, sex is a sacred life-giving act. This might explain why cultures that have a low value for human life also have more rape. Life isn't sacred there, and neither is sex.
This could also explain why there's so much sexual assault and suicide in the military. Lower value for life due to proximity to combat. So if I had to throw out my best theory on why people care about sex, it's because it's tied directly our ability to create life, and the lower price we have on life, the higher the chance there is of sexual assault.
yes, I think that is the best way to couch the difference. Obviously I think they are wrong and certainly about me.
Yearnings, desire, love also - I realize these could have meant to have been included but I felt they needed stressing. For so long I have believed that their distaste for desire, for example, was based on some understanding they had, rather than a difference in temperment and different desires.
Yes, that is their story. Only having gone the other way, I know what feels like integration.
What is it you think is dirt?
It certainly seems like every God has preferences - hence the teachers/teachings they send. If God has preferences and things are not like God prefers, that's an objective problem. Most mystical Hinuism is ultimately a monism, where everything is God.
That is also true. Though it is not really a problem any more. It used to be when I felt torn between ideas about God. I disagree with some notions of God.
Again, if I examine the speech and writing of every religious person, they seem to be saying there are problems. Not simply that people have problems. If it is really true that only people have problems - and this is what they believe - I need to see this in action. And I have not. In no Ashram, temple or church. When the specific conversational moment comes up, some gurus, masters and not so far priests, will say ti is all really OK - in much more elegant terms. But only in that moment.
There is no one who is not affected by the problem of evil. They may never have heard that term or work with a similar concept, but they struggle with the existence of evil in their rationalizations, defenses and blame if nothing more concrete that the less priviledged deal with.
A unified God is not unified - see the discussion with LG. This was God's doing. The separated out pieces are confused and part of the rules center on sex. Rules to help one no longer identify with the ego, etc., and rejoin - in a useful way (again see LG) the unity of God. I actually listened when this stuff was said to me. I paid attention.
This does not fit my experience with music or many other things. Not that I set out to 'enjoy music for its own sake' or sex, but the control and institutionalized distaste and fear present in religious doctrine has certainly not been present either. Children do not serve - I assume this is one of the non-for it's own sake attitudes - and yet can enjoy even the simplest things.
By feel. Just as by feel one can tell what is oneself or not. Otherwise one is just listening to authority. And generally authorities with great fear of emotions, especially expressed emotion, sexuality or anything that seems to them to be out of control.
So are they a part of him or not? Me and my hands? Me and my voice?
So portions of God relegate themselves on account of what you personally consider dysfunctionalism?
But we are a part of God. It is God's consciousness in us that has forgetten its nature? or?
No, its an ontological issue. It is an issue of who has free will. In Christianity, where we are not God, then it can be a free will issue. But in mystical Hinduism there is no out like this.
So it would not be a good thing if all beings returned to the unity and stayed there since this would no longer be a reciprocation situation, but a mere unity and thus a diminished God.
Soulds like a clear dualism. The individuality is used by something else. And something better.
Service and use. I cannot see why God would want its portions to have somethign more than freely choosing not to be free.
Oh, they have responsibility for their portion of the whole as parts of God - in my perspective. So for me this is a false dilemma.
It is not simply that individuals have free will, they have free will and a nature that seems to run counter to the class based metaphors of goodness and distaste for desire in your system. It is nto simply random natures we are born with, we are born as bodies with desires this God judges. And the whole material realm seems also to be distasteful to this God except when this is explicitly framed, then it is denied.
Look at what actually goes on in ashrams under these rules. Look at how member treat eachother. Look at the disdain - not simply by random members, but by the devotees who come close to the guru him or herself. The disdain for emotion, desire, lack of control. Disdain for those who do not simply go along with the precepts. For those who have trouble. For those with strong passions. Whose faces show other emotions than bliss or a kind of pleased poker face.
Why do these rules that come from a monism always lead to such splits and why do those who rise in such organizations always have an undercurrent distaste for portions of that monims.
If this service is good, I can only assume that this is the goal.
Not to mention all the other issues dealt with in organizations elsewhere, say in academia. But that would be hard to avoid. It is the new splits, specific to those who follow these rules that in part makes me skeptical about them. But if I look closely and listen closely, it is there in the whole schema. A very harsh dualism.
Yes, why the sexual and emotional hang up? Why the judging from on high? Why the upper chakra dreams of control and distaste for the lower chakras? Why the ongoing implicit acceptance of the lower being bad and the upper being Good? And then that this is always denied when it is so obvious and throughout?
Yes, your choice of analogy was problematic. Ironically however this is precisely what your system is doing? This small portion of the light in the mind decides that all the other parts must be controlled rather than granted their free will, because of a deep fear that without this control things will go terribly. I have sympathy for this fear, but not when it is expressed as a judgment with all the attendent blame.
The assumption is that there are two gunas. That one's selfishness is not loving. And then people point to examples where this is not the case, as if therefore it must be universal.
I really wish people could actually go into their actual feelings about sex, rather than this intellectual smokescreen. because the judgments here have done so much damage.
But you needed to go to a worse case scenario. Which you have done before with the rappers. You use extreme examples as if they were universals. Do you reinforce your own beliefs here with reassurances from worst case examples?
As if the choices were a kind of sociopathy and being a devotee. All I can tell you is that it seems to me this has been made digital with two possible forms of (sexual) love and I can only imagine it is stablizing in relation to your beliefs, but it is not the limits of reality. If we were not meeting in this context and had trust for each other in a personal way, I would ask you what makes you think these are the choices- iow what in your personal life has given you such a limited impression of what sexual expressing can be like. But that is not the situation. I raise the issue because we are coming to the close of what we can possibly do in this forum on this issue.
sure, of course. I have no need to think of service to have a wonderful experience of reciprocation.
What an odd judgement. Have you never unraveled a block to spontanaeity and found that it was not service to God or goodness or reciprocity that was the nature of that block? And then found that one could allow spontaneous expression in that way and it was fine and loving?
Because the above quote assume that this could never be the case. Which ultimately is very sad as a judgement and I can only say it is not remotely true for my life.
I certainly was not suggesting people take up that form of Yoga. I was acknowledging that certain kinds of bodily grace can be found in these ashrams.
I know you can't. You seem not to trust love. You need a legal system, an interior one.
Oh, my soul has no interest in this either. Perhaps even less so. And I have so many loving, reciprocal experiences without it, in fact more, I do not have those fears any more.
I'll leave it here LG. I do not think it makes sense to go further on this issue.
So no one should drink wine?
.
This doesn't quite make sense. The injunctions around sex are old in the various religions not a response to the current state of affairs.
There are new problems, yes, but some of the old guilt and shame are leaving also.
Are you also of the strange and sad impression that the choice is service or addiction?
You are not responding to the point I was making. I did not say 'God could have made plants'. I did say 'God could have made us plants.'
I am not God in that sense. God's shadow, however, that's God. What isn't God?
I know this is the common belief.
I was responding to someone justifying the rules around sex by pointing out all the diseases.
Jan Ardena,
Men could rape their wives and it was not rape. Children being married off to older men was common everywhere. Notions of consent were not present and all the desire still was.
He's right. It was worse. every problem we have today, they had then. Though it tended to be the rich who could live out the fantasies more often.
Men could rape their wives and it was not rape. Children being married off to older men was common everywhere. Notions of consent were not present and all the desire still was.
I'm not really sure how to take that image. I found it amusingly disturbing or disturbingly amusing.
For what is worth - in Buddhism, it is sometimes said that one first needs to have a solid sense of material self before one can go about deconstructing it.
If one tries to deconstruct one's sense of self while it is still weak (ie. "disintegrated"), neurosis/psychosis are a foreseeable outcome.
Hence the desire for integration makes sense; but such an integrated self is not the end.
I think that in Hindu terms, such an integrated sense of self would be the sense of self in the mode of goodness.
That which makes dirty; impurity.
Things are always like God prefers. Or He wouldn't be God.
I think most people do not go to great lengths to be fully epistemologically etc. accurate; for all practical intents and purposes, such accuracy would require a lot of words and most of us simply do not have that much time.
Before assuming that what a person says about an issue is this person's full and complete take on the issue, some additional questions must be asked, many of them meta-questions.
Secondly, churches, temples, ashrams and similar establishments are really more like hospitals where the sick go in order to be cured. Those establishments are not to be seen as the ultimate examples of perfection.
Just like in a hospital, one expects to see people at various stages in their healing process, some very sick, some less sick, so in a religious establishment one expects to see people at different stages of spiritual advancement.
My point was that there are people in whose view this or that problem simply does not exist or is not relevant.
Perhaps what is at issue here (for you) is that you are not familiar with the different relationships that individual living entities have with God - ie. they can be a servant, a friend, a parent or a lover to God.
"Unity with God" suggests some vague immersion/shining together, some kind of Supernova or Black hole kind of phenomenon - which really doesn't say much about anything ...
Religious priorities are different than worldly ones.
Of course children serve too. Have you never asked your children to do something, and do they not seek to do things for you?
That is not my experience at all.
Again, I think it is a matter of different priorities.
He's not right.
Those things, apart from the fact that they exist today, is not necessarily caused by sexual obsession,.
We are obsessed with sex today, because sex is being advertised, broadcasted, taught, discussed, shown (within the limits of the law), implied
, culturalised, etc, etc, 24/7.
That is BOUND to have a strong impact on society.
jan.
There is also the issue of having "free time".
The further we go back in history, the less "free time" people seemed to have - the more of their potential free time was filled with profitable activities - like sewing, mending, checking stocks of grains and legumes for worms and pests. They also didn't have readily available lighting and the winter nights were cold. And the rest of the year, they were tired from working in the fields and forests.
I think the hang up can be due to several reasons:
1. Sheer ignorance and confusion - anything from "Which religious tradition to choose?" to "If I have a sore throat, what should I do and think about my chanting?"
2. Experiencing the amount of spiritual work perceived as needed to be accomplished as overwhelming, impossible to do. Hence the desire for an easy way out, even at the cost of free will.
3. Desire to be No.1.