Ungodly Sex

Christians talk a lot about Sin.

They say we are all Sinners.

Sin was the moon god, worshipped 2000 years BC .

In the the ancient city Ur of the Chaldees (located on the Euphrates near its point of entry into the Persian Gulf, in present day Iraq), there is—if it has survived the present war—the remains of a zuggurat (a pyramid-shaped tower of brick) built around 2100 BC to worship SIN.

If you worship the moon-god Sin, you are a Sinner.

And Christians talk about you a lot.

I’d like to see this zuggurat myself. Like to bow down at its crumbling bricks beneath the full moon rising in the darkness and worship Sin.

Maybe do a little Sinning myself there on the moon-spilt ground. Be a Sinner.

Sinning with other Sinners under the beacon of the cloudless moon.

I was born naked, without belief in gods or God. I believed only in what I could touch and hear and see: the breasts I suckled on, my mother’s cooing voice, the funny faces my father made, the lullabies my grandmother sang. I believed in what was palpable and real.

Almost from my birth adults attacked both my nakedness and my atheism. They wrapped me in clothing. They filled me with talk of imaginary beings—Easter bunnies, tooth fairies, Santa and his tiny reindeer (who never seemed tiny in my imagination—or Santa either). King of all these imaginary being was the one even my parents believed in: the God who, they cooed, created and loved us all. With God came angels who were (so they told me) thoughts from God, But try as I might, I could never imagine angels as “thoughts.” I had to imagine them with wings and bodies and faces. God too, had to have a body and a bearded face—or he couldn’t be imagined either.

It seems that to be imagined—much less be visualized doing things—even imaginary beings must have bodies of some sort or another. Though we are told that God is pure spirit, bodiless and eternal, the truth is we can’t imagine spirit without imagining body. Thus even adult Christians must imagine their God transformed into bodily Jesus in order for their deity to seem real. It is a truth every baby is born knowing: real things have substance. Soul requires body for its expression: otherwise it is static and absent. Official definitions notwithstanding, bodies are necessary for existence.

The established definition of God says he is bodiless—yet no one can imagine him without imagining something. Him, did I say? God cannot be him. Embodied in human form, imagined as Jesus walking the earth or hanging on the cross, God can have a penis even if he never uses it. But take away the body and you take away God’s penis, his maleness, his masculinity, all. Nor can God be feminine, since the disembodied cannot have a vulva either. God must be sexless and genderless, forever “it”.

Note that if a theist insists on masculinizing God, turning it into he, they are not taking their theism seriously. Any pronoun other than “it” is just the infant’s intuition that real beings must have a body reappearing in the grownup. The infant is right. No matter how much intellectual brainwashing the adult theist has undergone, they can never quite escape the infant’s truth.

Let me repeat that: whenever anyone refers to God as “he”, they are failing to take the concept of God seriously. If your God is bodiless nonetheless very real, then you will readily concede that the God you believe in must be an it. On the other hand if your God is merely an imaginary fancy of yours—like Santa and his tiny reindeer or like the tooth fairy—then impossibilities don’t bother you, and you will have no hesitation in insisting on God’s bodiless masculinity.

If God is merely a fantasy, incoherent details don’t matter. Pretend doesn’t have to make sense. But if your God is not pretend, then it can be neither masculine nor feminine.

As for me, I was born a naked atheist and I will die atheist and—God willing! (that was a joke)—I will die naked. If nothing else, when I die it will be me, my body not my clothing, which does the dying. Only naked me can die. I was born naked and I will die naked and my profound wish while alive is to be allowed to be naked me. It is the most profound wish any of us can have: to be fortunate enough while we breathe and live to be our naked selves. Me and you, meeting as we are despite the cultural smokescreens of clothing and religion. Naked me and naked you in naked life—from beginning to end and everything between.

Isn’t sex just about the most unlikely thing to be God’s handiwork? Imagine the Almighty sitting alone in the vastness of heaven with only His alter-ego Son and Holy Ghost to entertain Himself. Imagine Him after trillions of years trying to figure out some way to break the boredom. Is that how we got sex?

No, because if there’s one thing we can be sure of about sex, it’s that God’s not having any. Sure, I suppose He could entertain Himself as Supreme Voyeur watching us go at it for a while, but ultimately what’s the appeal in that for Him? It’s not like He has any sexual desires of His own—he doesn’t even have genitals, much less hormones like testosterone coursing though His disembodied spiritual Holy Self.

The problem with sex from a spiritual perspective, is that it just doesn’t fit the picture. Would a God who only wants us to reach the zenith of spiritual existence have invented penises and vaginas? Sorry, don’t think so. Doesn’t fit.

Even the Bible stumbles over sex. Right at the beginning of Genesis, when God created Adam and began searching for a “helpmeet” to mate with him. What follows—this is right there in the Bible—is God parading all the animals of the world before Adam to see which one he would choose for a mate. After Adam found none suitable, God finally hit on the idea of creating Eve, a creature just like Adam but with vulva and curvy breasts. That worked well for Adam, but God seems to have never gotten comfortable with the idea. Sexual intercourse wasn’t supposed to be part of His plan.

Which perhaps explains why Christians—not to mention Jews and Muslims—have stumbled over sex from the beginning. Genitals have never meshed with the divine plan. And they never will.

Face the fact: sex is not Godly. It’s ungodly. And that’s a good thing—it wouldn’t be any fun otherwise. Ungodly sex kicks with life, it pulses with a physical spirit that can only come from bodies being together, doing their thing.

Ungodly good.