It is strange on the face of it, but maybe not so strange when you consider that sex, generally, is viewed much differently in the west than in Asia.
In the west we have this idea that sex shouldn’t happen without love to go with it – and preferably marriage to sanctify the whole dirty business.
I chose the terms “sanctify” and “dirty business” quite intentionally, because although Buddhism may have something to say about sex, it doesn’t begin to proscribe it, except under certain prescribed circumstances, like Christianity does. And of course, that’s where the real difference comes in, in the difference between Christianity and Buddhism.
Everything that is addressed by Christianity is, or should be, a serious business in the west, if you buy into the theology. Because Christianity is a one shot deal – you either get it right the first time or you burn in the lake of fire for eternity, at least in the classical version. Now there are all kinds of kinder, gentler variants that deny that there is such an entity as Satan (another Christian creation that bears on this discussion), or even Jesus in a historical sense, asserting that all this is just metaphorical, but nonetheless true.
I think that no matter how they slice and dice it to try to appeal to modern consuming western man though, the old beliefs are still there beneath the surface, deep in the psyche of not just those who practice the new Christianity “lite”, but also in those westerners who claim to be atheists. It’s our mythology, you see.
We believe that life is a one shot deal. Whether you go to heaven or hell or rot in the ground may be up for discussion but essentially that’s it. You’re dead. No passing go again, no get out of jail free, no collecting $200. Whatever happens is what happens and it’s over.
So it’s pretty important to get it all right that first time around the Monopoly board.
The doctrine of forgiveness of sins mucks this up a little bit, since virtually all the variants of Christianity allow that, since this is a one shot deal, if you just say the magic words under the right conditions you can have all your sins forgiven before you die, no matter how abominable they might be, and go collect your heavenly reward. Following this logic if Adolf Hitler were Protestant and confessed his sins to Jesus Christ before he shot himself in his bunker then his fellow Christians can expect to meet up with him when they get to heaven. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, may not have had time to make his confession before he got shot in the head, so he is most probably burning somewhere down in the pits of hell.
The rationality of Christianity aside, every Christian needs to avoid sin because you never know, you might get hit by a car or shot like MLK and have to suffer the consequences of hell.
So when god rails against fornicators and perverts in the Bible, or turns people into a brick of salt for even turning around to look back at the city of fornicators that he’s getting ready to destroy, after being told specifically not to, you better believe he means not to do any fornicating. You want to have sex, you need to get married.
That’s part of it. The other part is the strong tradition of monogamy in the west. There’s just no tradition of any sort that includes acceptable extra-marital relations in the west, if you leave out deviants like the Mormons.
Undoubtedly this second condition flows from the first to a large extent. So we’ve got a bunch of people running around over here who, whether they overtly acknowledge it or not, believe that sex is a dangerous affair that their god doesn’t like very much except under certain special conditions, i.e. marriage, which pretty much implies that it’s not for fun. It’s not even for relief. It’s for procreation, and if you’re smart you’ll avoid having too much fun even when you’re married and doing it just to have children, to be on the safe side.
You don’t have to look just to Asia to see the contrast. Look at the heathens in Africa. It drives the good Christians here in America bonkers that they are all running around having sex without a care, so much so that they’d rather see them die of the diseases that result (AIDS) rather than even recommend the use of condoms to prevent it. The condoms might save their lives, but they’d still lose their immortal souls, see. Besides, if we don’t get to have fun here, those savages we’re sending ‘aid’ to shouldn’t get any either.
So it’s all much more serious over here. The Swedes can claim to be all liberal and enlightened and not to care about this sort of thing since it’s religiously inspired morality that has no place in the modern world, but that’s what they say. They’ve still got the collective unconscious of the west animating what they believe, and a couple hundred years of enlightened liberality is not going to snuff that out.
In addition to that I am guessing (and here you’ll have to set me straight if I’m wrong) that since you have to go through thousands (?) of lifetimes before you get released from the cycle of rebirths, as long as you don’t do anything that’s real bad, like maybe turn into an Adolf Hitler, it’s really not going to make a whole lot of difference if you slip up a little bit on something like having sex.
It may mean a couple more lives, but hey, what’s a few lives when you’ve got a few thousand to go through?
Besides, you can always give some money to the monks and get some merit, or do some good deeds for others and get the same deal.
What do you think?
This was comment but i change it to a post since it was so long.
nietzches_dog
