Des DownUnder On Sundays

By Desmond Rutherford | ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA -- SEX: Goodness Or Madness?

What is it that makes prudes so mad about sex, especially about people enjoying sex? Why do so many think they have the right to define the limits of other people's consensual sexual activities?

To even begin to find an answer to the question of why many get so involved in the sex lives of others, we have to admit, for the sake of this discussion, that sex is a primary instinct of all living things that require the female to be fertilised by a donation from the male. See how easy sex education is?

The problem is, that the moment religious and conservative people hear the word 'donation', they think they must give some money to someone. They have been conditioned to respond in this way from the moment they could walk and talk, but it's really a result of their ancestors passing along their confusion about donations for sex with the fertilising donation itself, from generation to generation. Even a prostitute is not expecting or wanting to be fertilised. Indeed, they generally take measures to keep the deposit from activating, unless of course they are being paid to carry luggage, like a rent boy sometimes is.

To get back to the subject in hand, which is usually enjoyable, no matter whose hand it is, it is important to realise that the demarcation between sex for reproduction, and sex for pleasure is arbitrarily being decided by differing cultures. Some societies are very restrictive in trying to keep sex as an indulgence reserved only for people of opposite gender, after they have taken vows of servitude to each other in front of their community, during a ceremonial service conducted by that community's collector of religious financial donations. Those donations have no relationship to the fertility donations that occur between the blessed couple, or in one of them, when they manage to get that far, sometime after the service.

All the preceding donations are very different to the ones made to a prostitute, who is usually happy with a lesser amount, but then their overheads are smaller, unless the donor has been saving up for awhile. In addition, it must be said that the results of the prostitute's services are much more tangible, down to earth, and the organ playing is often superb. It is, however, in these types of cultures, something of a paradox that those who attend the services of a prostitute then feel the necessity to go back to the house of the religious money collectors to confess that they enjoyed the service supplied by the prostitute. It's a continuous conundrum to consider that the only way a celibate celebrant cleric could conceivably commiserate with such confession is to consult the collection of constricting conceptions in a current copy of an ancient book completely out of context with the rights of human freedom to make donations.

The collectives of accusatory Christian Cults, with curious Biblical quotes, constantly engender the homosexual gender issue as being an agenda which curses the course and cause of not only Christian culture, but the future of Western civilisation. Where do they get this idea? Is it because their sects deny sex as the expression of our secular love for each other that they are frightened of gender freedom and marriage equality? Or is it that they never realise, are never willing to admit, that we humans are always becoming who we can be?

The sects seem unable to heed our need to love beyond that one kind of love in which we donate only a small physical part of ourselves so that life may be conceived. They obsess only over the physical act of sex, missing the fact that when we humans are motivated by love we can create much more than just the physical.

Love is a creative force that can be viewed from a Socratic path by which we bring our potential into being, and help others with their own efforts. From the love of the good that we find, we learn to love the same in others, and we learn to love others even when they are different. We find we can love the many, same or different; the love of goodness in all life, and then beholding with one whom, so it seems in our minds, we create love, and share it, forever.

Love is not a god wanting us to praise it, fear it or be ashamed of it, as the apocalyptic cults would have us believe. For those cults, the nativity of love is a negativity of life. Babies are born to live, but their burgeoning awareness of how to create love can be repressed. They can be taught to hate life; to try stop others from creating love. Teaching a child, from birth, to fear and hate love is truly evil.

Despite life in all its beauty surrounding them, those cults crucify love, in some bizarre belief that denying beauty in this life brings happiness after death. This is their madness, their insanity, their inanity which drives their fear and hatred of life; their fixation with death. In their confused madness they deny that love is a goodness to be found in life. Love is beyond their feeble notion of sex being nothing more than animal lust. Confusing sex and love, they absurdly condemn sex as a necessary sinful release, to be tolerated only for procreation in wedlock. They have no conception that love creates more than children; love can create goodness, because its beauty is what we can be aware of, in this reality we call life.

Love is the only sane and satisfying reason for life, but the repressive religious cults would have us believe we cannot become, or be, the goodness which is the beauty of life itself. Goodness is available to us all, not because of whom we love, but because love is something we can make. It is our birthright to be free to make that love with each other regardless of gender. Our awareness, and appreciation of the beauty, the goodness in life, is the motivation to create families and express ourselves in art, and solve the problems of our lives, and to just laugh and play with the cosmos. It is our living human right to be able to do them joyously, amidst all of life's pain and sorrows and tribulations, or subject to the mad beliefs of those cultists.

And despite the cultists' inane rantings, we celebrate the discovery of life's beauty and goodness, by donating, by dedicating ourselves to finding happiness; by consenting to create love with each other.

If, like some, you think this is too lofty a thought, too romantic an attitude, to believe in the beauty of the human experience of life, then ask yourself if the alternative is preferable; misery under the slavery and threats of the repressive religious cults and their primitive beliefs.

Sex, sanity, life, love, beauty, truth and goodness, or the madness of those repressive cults. It really isn't a difficult decision, is it?