by Phil Taylor

Created on: January 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 18, 2007

First I would like to announce that God is cool with Sex! Not only is He in favor of it He invented it. It is the most wonderful gift that he ever gave us second only to His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the first of a series of writings that I will release on the subject of sex, marriage and God. I would like to talk about sex in general and God's original reason for inventing it. Since God made sex and endorses it then why do some people in the Christian church have such a problem with it? Well I won't get into the theology of it but I will say that it is based in a misappropriation of scripture by a protestant sect known as the Puritans.

This disdain for certain elements of the natural world was a modern resurrection of the ascetic notions of one wing of an ancient heresy known as Gnosticism. Now if you have studied this ancient heresy you should know that there were two reactions in the Gnostic movement to the concept of the "flesh". Both sides believed that our bodies were unholy but they reacted to that belief differently. One side claimed that since our bodies were evil nothing we did with it could affect our spirits. So any and all debauchery was allowed and in some cases encouraged. The other side believed that since our bodies were unholy they needed to be punished. This side practiced extreme asceticism. This included starvation fasting, self flagellation, extreme celibacy, sleeping on beds of stone and the wearing of scratchy and uncomfortable clothing. No physical pleasure of any kind was allowed. This side of Gnosticism found its way into the Church. We see it at various levels through the early monastic movement with its origins in the "desert Fathers."

The Catholic Church eventually purged itself for the most part of the concept of self punishment. Some old school monastic sects may still practice some of these things and retain some of these ideas but they are not widely accepted or endorsed. You can see a chilling example of this belief at work by the albino monk in the movie "The Da'Vinci Code"

So you may be asking if the Catholic Church doesn't have a problem with pleasure then, "Why do they make their priests abstain from sex?" Well I think many people especially non Catholics misunderstand this. Priestly celibacy is not about denying pleasure but is rather about freeing the clergy from the distraction of family. There intention is to produce clergy that can truly dedicate all of their lives to the ministry of the Gospel and not be divided

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