Does God Have a Penis? And Other Irreverent Questions

From years ago, as a randy fourteen-year-old Catholic boy, I can clearly remember the growing angst I felt while waiting my turn at the confessional. I wasn´t worried about confessing my cheating on a math test, nor the times I´d disobeyed my parents, nor the dirty trick I´d played on my brother. No, those things were not high on my worry list. What was at the top, and caused shivers of dread to race up and down my spine, was knowing I would have to tell the Father about my falling (again) into the awful terrible sin of "self-abuse". I knew he would ask how many times and I knew I should tell the truth. I should speak up and say: Bless me Father for I have sinned – and (if you must know) almost daily – or (for shame, for shame) - sometimes more. If I dared to tell the actual numbers, I feared I´d be kneeling in a pew doing penance prayers for the next month! But I was also fairly convinced that God might strike me dead for lying in the confessional. So what else could I do? At other less intense moments, I would wonder why it was God gave me a penis and then expected me not to touch it except to pee. I pondered why God made touching myself "in pleasure" a no-no and just how it was that my one handed adventures could really harm anyone? I didn´t buy the business about going blind or growing hair in my palms. But worse yet, in my wicked undisciplined young mind, I even wondered occasionally if God had a penis - and what (for God´s sakes) did he do with it?

Despite all the well intentioned attempts at instilling a particular brand of "morality", the Fathers at the Church and the Sisters of St. Josephs, who taught at my school in those years, were unable to completely indoctrinate me. It just didn´t stick. A part of me remained uncontaminated, quietly independent and more inquisitive than was healthy for me in the eyes of the Church. I did not completely buy the party line. I could not really understand nor accept a god, capable of creating a universe and everything in it, who would be so obsessed with my one-handed pleasures. From my viewpoint, I was harming absolutely no-one and was, at the same time, getting needed relief. I feared that without masturbation (a word I did not even know till I was 16), I would go though adolescence with a perpetual erection. A woody that would be highly, unavoidably visible (adolescent grandiose and wishful thinking, I suppose) and terminally embarrassing as I walked school hallways. Though I did not know it then, in reality, my concerns and fears were little different from other boys.

Now, decades later, I am mostly bemused by the silly things still taught by some religions about sex and pleasure. If it weren´t for the direct and collateral damage to the human spirit caused by certain religious beliefs, much of the specific teachings about sex would be humorous. I´m still astounded, for example, at the negative emotional energy generated by most debates or discussions about homosexuality. I´m floored by continued condemnation, in some quarters, of birth control. I´m even more perplexed by people´s willingness to accept dictates from anybody about their private sexual behavior, and, in some cases, from sexually inexperienced old men who claim to be celibate. It´s sort of like taking scuba lessons from someone who´s never been near water, don't you think? Many religions act as if controlling consenting adult sex is at the top of God´s "fix-up-the-universe" to-do list. As if wars, starvation, plagues of diseases, and the wipe-out forces of Mother Nature´s hurricanes were but incidental matters. Like God is far more interested in and offended by what people do with each other for sexual pleasure than with murderers, thieves, hurtful people and hypocritical politicians or preachers who say one thing and do the opposite.

As a species, our technology has far outstripped the evolution of our social and spiritual thinking. With over six billion souls on the planet, we have the know-how to travel into space or fit the written knowledge of mankind almost literally on the head of a pin. But still, our behaviors toward one another continue to be dominated and controlled by irrational, archaic religions utterances. We remain willing to kill our own kind over differences in beliefs about our gods. Sadly, we seem little different now than we were four or even ten thousand years ago. Please think. Find an area of current strife or open conflict on this planet that does not have directly or indirectly religious based causal factors. Is there one?

Religions preoccupation with "controlling" human pleasure has a very long history. Some date the origin of the impulse to the story of Adam and Eve, their "sin" against God and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden (the original pleasure dome). Others point to the anti-pleasure stance taken by St. Paul and his great influence on later Christian theology. Still for me, it boggles the mind to confront the present reality that our culture continues to look to a wondering desert tribe from centuries ago for guidelines on how we should live in the Twenty-First century. Heck, even Microsoft Windows gets updated. Why not some of our religious thought?

So I contend - if there is one outstanding area that deserves updating, it really has to be the one dealing with human sexual behavior....of all orientations and types. I am only talking here about consensual behaviors between adults and not the host of damaging sexual activities such as rape, incest, pedophilia or the use of sex for dominance. You only have to briefly consider the fact that human sexual response is geared for far more than simple reproduction before realizing that something is wrong with the model offered for sex by most religions. If reproduction was the only goal of sex, then human females, like other mammals, would come into heat and be sexually receptive on a limited basis. Males would then butt heads to win the opportunity to mate. Well, some do that anyway - but you know what I mean. The reality is adult consensual sex can and does impact on many different levels, sometimes several at the same time. It can be fun – whether solo, in couples or in groups. So what? It can be a bonding experience or one that heals emotional scars. It can open doors to other positive emotional experiences. It can be recreational. It can be something done on a cold winter´s night when the power is off and snuggling under a quilt just seems a good idea. To limit sex to only "married" people, in this day of effective birth control, later marriages and a growing population of divorced and unmarried persons is simply irrational. To say that it is better for two men to kill each other in combat than to love one another sexually is idiotic. To tell a teenager they must wait till they marry before experiencing sex is equivalent to lighting a match in a windstorm and expecting it to ignite a candle. It´s no surprise that contemporary faith-based abstinence programs -by any real measurement - have failed across the board.

Why is a boxing match, where two people (usually males) pound each other into bloody pulps, not considered an abomination while two persons of the same gender sharing sexual intimacy is an abomination? I´d just bet that if more men make love to each other or were simply more loving to one another, there would be a whole lot less warring going on - except possibly some minor squabbles over who gets to be with whom. Such a turn of events, you´ll have to admit, would be unlikely to ignite a nuclear holocaust.

I propose that we adopt a new gay-straight (and everywhere in between) pleasure principal. A principal that encourages people to love and to enjoy one another. To seek out friendship and to learn to value differences. I propose we stop this silliness of telling consenting adults that what they may or may not do with their sexual parts. Or trying to convince them that somehow the very God who supposedly created them, finds their consenting pleasures distasteful to the max. Or should we believe that God is a trickster who, like a virus software guru, instills capacities in us that are overwhelming but still sure to lead to damnation if we use them. Give us eyes but don´t let us see? Give us ears but have us plug them up so as not to hear? Create a marvelously complex sexual response capacity but then tell us its use is mostly bad and sinful? Nonsense. The way sex is often interpreted by religious thinkers dosn't even support the notion of intelligent design.

Gay, straight and in-between, we need to push for the early release of Human Sexuality - Version 2.0. In this updated release, what people do sexually (that harms neither party physically or emotionally) on a consensual basis is programmed to be of "no interest". This applies to all sexual orientations. Sexual pleasure is treated equally among humans - males, females and those who might be in-between. Loving one another is paramount and is positioned as truly the first commandment. In Version 2.0, marriage is a commitment between two adult souls who consciously decide to spend their lives together in support, in caring, in loving, in the good times and the bad, with children or without. There are no questions about gender or orientation identity. Just - "Do you love one another?" In version 2.0 you are not required to marry in order to experience the joy and ecstasy of sex. Ecstasy - without drugs - can bring you closer to your creator, whoever or whatever you conceive him or her to be. In version 2.0, guilt and condemnation are reserved for situations were you fail to love to the best of your capacity.

For the sake of human survival, we need to find more ways to put aside the anger and bitterness generated by those who insist on telling us how to lead our lives. We need to recognize that these people are not only willing to lie and use propaganda to achieve their goals, but that they do so on a regular basis. We must learn to accept creation as our gods might have intended - and to study hard to discover how those intentions are revealed and expressed in the real world. If we do not do these things, and I´ll admit the prospects are not encouraging, then we increasingly risk wars that have the destructive power to set us back to a second stone age, or worse yet, bring about the annihilation of our species.

We need to ask ourselves: Do we really want to believe in a god who is more concerned with body parts and where they are at any given moment than in the condition of our loving hearts? Do we really want to believe in a god who judges two men killing each other in war is more acceptable than those same two men sharing a physical loving relationship? Do we really believe consensual adult sexual activity is number one on God´s agenda?

Well, as for me, I doubt that sex even ranks in God´s top ten list of concerns. I suspect he(she) has more important things to worry about in some nearby spiral galaxy. I think at some level, I suspected these things even when I was fourteen and anxiously waiting my turn at confession.