Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (36 page)

In the last few years new language has developed around relationships in the polyamory and BDSM communities. Since multiple relationships are so common in these communities, they have learned to deal positively with jealousy. The result is language and ideas that turn jealousy on its head. For example, compersion (also called frubble) is defined as “A state of empathetic happiness and joy experienced when an individual’s current or former romantic partner experiences happiness and joy through an outside source, including, but not limited to, another romantic interest.”
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We have a choice in how we treat situations. We can fall back on jealousy or we can experience the joy of our partner.

The point is that jealousy is culturally learned and, therefore, can be unlearned. The poly community has been able to reframe it. Are there jealous people in the poly community? Of course. The difference is that they have tools for dealing with it more rationally than other groups. In the poly community, jealousy is generally exposed and discussed so the person can look inside and understand how jealousy hurts himself and his relationships.
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As the great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein (an early pioneer in polyamory) said, “Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy – in fact, they’re almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil. . . .”
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There is little to be learned from religious approaches to sex and relationships. Religious values do not foster emotional maturity and rational approaches to relationships. Indeed, religion places a third party in the equation – a god. Religion does foster jealousy, control of women and the ever-present voyeuristic god in the bedroom. The Old Testament god says, “I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God”(Exodus 20:4-5). From his obsession with people’s sex lives, we might conclude he is jealous of all the sex everyone else is getting.

Now let’s look at three big ideas that anyone can use to create fulfilling and satisfying relationships, relationships that meet your needs even as you meet those of others.

176
Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization
was first published in 1929.

177
Malinowski's
The Sexual Life of Savages
was originally published 1929.

178
Steven Pinker in
How the Mind Works
(1997), as well as Tooby, J. and Cosmides, L. “Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of the Mind and Brain,” in M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.),
The New Cognitive Neuro-sciences
(2000, second ed., pp. 1167–1178).

179
See, for example, “Jealousy and Violence: A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary Psychology,” by David J. Buller. Available online at
http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/sex-jealousy-and-violence/
.

180
The international organization
StopHonorKillings.com
tracks honor killings throughout the world. Though there is more than jealousy involved in this crime, it is rarely prosecuted in many countries regardless of the motivation – jealousy or not. Men and families are thought to have the right to kill a wayward girl or woman.

181
Blackstone, E. (1783).
Blackstone’s Commentaries
.

182
Mullen, P. (1995). “Jealousy and Violence,”
Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry
5, 18-24.

183
Diekstra, R. F. W. (2008). “Effectiveness of school based social and emotional education programmes worldwide.” Available online at
http://educacion.fundacionmbotin.org/index.php?a=educacion_responsable_evaluacion
.

184
Payton, J, Weissberg, R. P., et al. (2008). “Positive Impact of Social and Emotional Learning for Kindergarten to Eighth Grade Students: findings from three scientific reviews.” CASEL. Available online at
http://casel.org/publications/positive-impact-of-social-and-emotional-learning-for-kindergarten-to-eighth-grade-students-findings-from-three-scientific-reviews-executive-summary/
.

185
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compersion
.

186
The long-running podcast “Polyamory Weekly” has discussed jealousy from many angles over the years. It is most interesting to hear that sexually monogamous people listen to it and find the advice and discussions even help them in their relationships. Online at
http://polyweekly.com/
.

187
Heinlein, R. (1991).
Stranger in a strange land
. The book was originally published in 1961 but with 27% cut by the publisher, who claimed it was objectionable. In 1991 Heinlein’s widow retrieved all the excised material and republished the book uncut. The result was a much more complete and interesting work that included characters who were polyamorous, though the word had not yet been invented at the time.

Sooner or later monogamous marriage hits the end of the biological leash. If you eliminate religious marriage ideas, how do you develop relationships?

“You have to let go of who you should be in order to be who you are.”

-Brene Brown in a TED lecture

Religion tells you who you should be, not who you are. If you were raised in a religion or a religious culture, you were given a host of sexual “shoulds” designed to induce guilt and keep you coming back to the religion for forgiveness. Many sexual shoulds sneak into our self-identity early in life. Shoulds say more about a religion’s infection strategy than they say about you.

Many religious people are the sum of all the shoulds they absorbed in their early training. Because their shoulds define them, they never learn who they are. They are too busy being who their minister, parents, spouse, church or Sunday School teacher says they should be. People who rely on shoulds to make life decisions often make poor choices. For example, reasoning, “I should marry a nice Christian boy/girl,” instead of, “It would be best to marry someone who is compatible with me in many ways and has no guilt around sex.”

The great psychotherapist Dr. Albert Ellis called this the “tyranny of the shoulds.” He often said in his workshops, “Shouldhood leads to shithood. Don’t should on yourself, and don’t should on others – it stinks.”
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Eliminating shoulds will enhance your life in many ways, not only in sex. Change ideas from, “I shouldn’t be angry with my parents for making me feel so guilty about sex” to, “My parents did the best they could with the tools they had. It is irrational to be angry with them for trying to raise me in the way they thought best.”

Many people spend years getting over sexual hang-ups they learned in their religious training. I won’t deny this can be difficult to overcome, but much of the difficulty can be changed by learning new ways of thinking – changing your sexual map. If you continue to be angry with parents or religion, it is a sign that you are still using old thought patterns. Change the thought pattern and the emotion often changes as well.

New Age religions have brought into the popular love language the idea of “soul mate.” It seems a benign idea at first glance but warrants closer examination. If soul mate just means someone you get along with, have lots of common interests and strong emotional connection with, it’s not
particularly harmful. What can be harmful are people who take this notion seriously and make important decisions based upon their determination of how their “soul” matches up against that of their lover or partner.

Whether you are into New Age or not, many religionists espouse similar ideas. If you and your religion believe you possess a soul, that is the beginning of a delusion that will inevitably disappoint you and lead to disappointment with your partner. I have heard many married Christians claim that their god brought them together. Many a (now divorced) Baptist minister has claimed from the pulpit that god gave him his wife.

Many people feel they are more than their physical being. That a soul exists outside their body – outside of time and space – something that lives on, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The most immediate consequence of soul belief is that it creates an invisible and, by definition, nebulous intermediary between you and your partner. How does one know what a soul likes and doesn’t like? How does one mingle one’s soul with another’s to see if they match? How does one distinguish between soul communication and physical communication? What is the difference between effective communication and observation skills and communicating with the soul?

The feelings one gets when communicating well with another person can be incredibly rewarding and gratifying, but it says nothing about a soul. Everything needed to establish a strong and loving relationship with another human being can be done with skills that are learned or taught. Good communication skills make for highly satisfying relationships, no soul required. Here is a short list of skills:

1. Active listening skills: the ability to not only hear what the other person is saying but to understand and explore some of the underlying concerns and emotions so that you feel you are able to articulate your partner’s issues and concerns in a way that makes him or her feel heard and cared for.
   
2. Anticipation skills: the ability to understand someone well enough so you can anticipate some of their needs and concerns and take appropriate action. For example, you know a friend likes flowers or a certain kind of food, so you arrange to provide those on occasions when it would make her feel loved and cared for.
   
3. Ability to subsume your needs and desires when needed: When
   a partner is sick, emotionally distraught, under pressure at work, upset with a child, etc., you put your needs on the back burner and support her emotionally.
   
4. Ability to identify and avoid unhealthy levels of need or dependency: A good partner knows when to call you on your “baggage.” It may be as simple as saying, “I will not participate in your pity party. Let’s get to work and see what you can do to get back on track.” This is a difficult skill to learn and perform because it means putting the other person’s well-being ahead of the relationship. It is delicate because it has the potential to disrupt a friendship, as it does any relationship. If you are misreading the situation, it can come across as cruel and unfeeling. If you are correct, but the other person is not willing to take responsibility for his behavior, it can make him withdraw. Ultimately, it is the most caring thing you can do as a friend, lover or partner, but it requires deep trust and skill.
   

We could list many more. The question is, “Where in this list of skills is a soul required?” Any of these skills and behaviors can evoke feelings of deep care, compassion, love and support. They are skills a mother or father may show to a child, a lover to a partner. Continual practice of them leads to levels of trust that make us feel deeply connected to another person.

On a less romantic level, this kind of interaction probably prompts our brain to release a dose of oxytocin – the bonding and trust hormone. Oxytocin has been shown to be important in mother-child bonding as well as sexual bonding for both men and women and trust between people working together on a common project. At a chemical level, you feel close to someone because they can evoke a release of oxytocin and other chemicals in your brain. If you were to take an oxytocin-blocking drug, chances are you would feel less close to them.
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It is not very romantic, but reality is a better basis for building a relationship than fantasizing about a soul mate or counting on a god to find you a partner.

Religion puts a set of moral rules around sex and sexual relationships. These rules are so far from our nature as to be cruel and fundamentally unrealistic. As we have seen, the proof is in the fact that religious people behave in almost the same way as non-religious people do. The main difference is that they feel quite guilty, whereas the non-religious feel much less guilty. The biggest problem with religious sex is that there appears to be no way out. You either follow the church’s moral strictures or you are unsaved and unclean.

The result of this conceptual prison is that people step outside anyway but try to hide it. So-called “cheating” is the reason for 17-25% of divorces, according to some researchers, and that number may be a low estimate. Other research indicates that nearly 70% of all married men and 60% of married women have had affairs. That’s two out of every three marriages.
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With divorce highest among the most religious states and zip codes, we can probably assume that religious people are having their share of affairs.

Cheating is ethically wrong, whether you are religious or not. It is a violation of a promise. That may sound harsh, but there is far more to this notion of cheating than current pop culture knows. From my experience, people who cheat have two conflicting goals, First, they often want to stay married to their partner – or they would leave; and second, they desperately want something that is not present in their marriage. The genetic map pushes them toward variety and they have reached a sexual satiation point with their spouse.

Pop culture notions of monogamy are strongly based on religion. Whether country music or rock, opera or Harlequin novels, stories and songs mix ideas of temptation, evil, god, angels, fallen women, sin and much more. Religious monogamy has no way to understand satiation or need for variety. Religion puts a leash on our sexuality and expects to keep us on the straight and narrow.

What happens when you decide to slip the leash and leave religion? You must develop your own ethical guidelines. God won’t punish you if you have an affair, but your life may become miserable if your spouse finds out. People who cheat always have a dozen excuses: she never wanted sex; he
never listened to me; she hated my friends; he treats my family terribly. The underlying reason is simple – humans get tired of each other and want variety. Once we recognize these simple facts, we can explore new options.