SEXUAL OBSESSION | 2005-11-10
If I could leave one intellectual concept behind, it would be this:
Look at the things that are so obvious that we never even notice them.
One of these is the fact that all the people who criticize white people do it on computers or the printing press -- the real ones white people made revolutions out of, not the one the Chinese used to make playing cards with. Whites are attacked for not giving others enough of the goods and services and health and standards of living no non-white society ever even dreamed of.
No one can talk about this.
I come up with a lot of these, but I keep realizing I have not exhausted the list.
I myself saw one of these too-obvious assumptions just this year, and I am very happy about it.
For a man in his sixty-fifth year whose chief joy in life is thinking out the implications of the over-obvious, this is just plain fun. It is breath of fresh air.
By now trying to get people interested in the implications of the over-obvious has become a bit tiresome.
They just don't get it.
So a new idea to chew on is very welcome.
One of the more disgusting things I have run into has been the attempt to make Jesus a homosexual.
Only this year did I realize that every church takes it for granted that Jesus had another, less disgusting but just as unnatural, attitude toward sex: he was asexual.
This is the subtext in every denomination I know about.
One thing CS Lewis taught me was that an obsession is an obsession. Our usual picture of the Deadly Sin of Gluttony is someone who eats too much. Lewis pointed out that gluttony has nothing to do with how much you eat. Gluttony is an obseesion with one's stomach.
A person whose religion consists largely of dietary laws is a glutton. A person who goes to a family supper and says there's too much food there is a glutton. The example Lewish gave was an old lady who sent an overworked waitress back to the kitchen with everything she had brought and insised on just a piece of toast, not overcooked and no unvercooke, but JUST RIGHT.
The piece of dry toast, which was all she wanted in her modesty, was sent back again and again without any regard for the trouble she was causing for others.
That is gluttony.
It seems to me that Satan couldn't care less whether your obsession with sex is in always thinking about it or having it or whether your obsession was with chastity. It was St. Paul, who had been a Manichaean and therefore against ALL sex, who inserted the obsession with chastity into the dogma of every church.
When Jesus said one should not THINK about adultery, he was not saying he had never thought about sex at all.
But we assume that Jesus never gave any thought to it at all.
Even the Old Testament Jehovist Christians assume this. But there is not a hint of any obsession with chastity in the OT:
"It is better to put your seed into the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground."
When peiople talk about Jesus's temptation in the desert, where he spent forty days, no one ever insists that he was never thirsty. In fact, the whole point of the story is that he WAS thirsty. He WAS hungry, he WAS tempted.
Not so with sex. You have to insist that Jesus had no sexual feelings at all.
I took that so much for granted that it took me over sixty-four years to realize how ODD this idea is.