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RELIGION SCREWS UP MORALITY

Ever since early Catholic education, I’ve rejected the concept of original sin. Now, in my ‘60s, I’m irate about it. Please Father, gimme a break; I had nothing to do with Adam and Eve. I can’t even figure out why God had to appease himself by sacrificing his only begotten son. What the heck is God pissed off at me for?

The concept of sin and guilt has ruined a lot of lives. To religious people, sacrifice is good and pleasure is bad—particularly sexual pleasure. Why else would all forms of non-reproductive sex be considered evil and criminal? There’s even a Biblical story to illustrate God’s this point: Genesis 19:24 tells the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. God informs Abraham that he plans to destroy the city of Sodom because of its wickedness. “Non-vaginal sex,” sayeth the Lord, “that’s not what it’s all about. I told you people to be fruitful and multiply and that’s not the way to do it. So you better get that nephew of yours out of there, because it’s going to hale some pretty nasty brimstone any day now.”

Until this day the derivative “Sodomy” refers to non-reproductive sex. No babies plop out of this union and this is unpleasing to God. If pleasure weren’t anathema to God, instead of destroying Sodom, He would have gone to Jerusalem and sayeth with Jewish accent, “Try it, you’ll like it.” But noooooo. He sayeth, “Woe be to you who fuck around. It’s my way or the highway …to hell.”

God wants fat asses sitting in pews— that makes homosexuals an abomination because they don’t reproduce. The word of God gets transmitted much faster and accurately in tight-knit, large extended families. Think of all the suffering throughout the generations this fact has caused. The state of Georgia, until a few years ago, actually outlawed oral sex between consenting adults—even if they were heterosexual and married.

To bring the point home—that religion loves sacrifice and not pleasure—I offer this excerpt from Mirror Reversal.

Looking at herself in the mirror with a serene smile of success, Cynthia reminisced about the great times she had the last few weekends at the rave clubs. She loved to dress up sexy and beautiful, get there early, and pick up the first good-looking hunk that turned her on. Then she’d spend the rest of the night disco dancing, having intriguing conversation, perhaps smoking a little grass – body stuff that makes the skin very sensitive to touch, nothing heavy – finally going up to the dark balcony and having doggie-style safe sex with her arms resting on the railing. While screwing she could overlook the festive dancers below, enjoy the Beats & Breaks music, and watch pixie light rays of color reflecting off the whirling glitter ball and the glitzy costumes. That was her idea of a good time, good clean All-American fun, and she tried to understand why this should be considered immoral by anyone who was into humanity and the human condition—especially in a world with so many people doing serious damage to one another and catastrophic damage to the environment.

And so I ask, with people killing one another every day, people blowing themselves up, and people ravaging and desecrating the great Amazon rainforest daily, I inquire, “Why is Cynthia’s idea of a good time considered immoral? “ The very pillars of society—the judgment of right and wrong—are corrupted by people who want everybody to observe the one true religion.

I’d love to hear any comments on whether Cynthia is a good girl who just wants to have fun, or an incorrigible sinner who should be stoned.

If you’d like me to continue this eccentric ministry, please pick up a copy of Mirror Reversal on Amazon or B&N. I just received word that God is coming to take me unless I sell a hundred books by the end of the month. Nah… forget that. I think somebody’s tried it already. Sorry Rev. Roberts.

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Comment by Richard Goscicki on March 20, 2009 at 12:24pm: To answer Carver’s question about Cynthia’s phone number, sure she looks like this

But in creating such an intellectual I had to give her an skinny, ectomorphic body. So when she has to work as an exotic dancer to pay her rent, the following happens.

The trouble was, Mano Negra had spent a lot of time and money on Revolucion Blvd. in the zona norte of Old Tiajuana. He’d seen it all from Spanish Fly to the fabled donkey shows of yore. This snooty chica in front of him was nada. By the time he finished his third beer, he felt like he was getting cheated, paying five bucks a beer, ten bucks to get in, and having to watch an uppity chick with no personality. He’d paid money to see full-figured, voluptuous women. He started making obscene gestures, making kissing noises, and yelling, “Ven Teticas, ven con Poppi.” (Literally, “C’mere, Tiny Tits, come to Daddy.”)

Cynthia was modeled after Jean Seberg, the beautiful American actress who hounded to suicide by the FBI during the '60s. Mirror Reversal tells the story.

Comment by Richard Goscicki on March 20, 2009 at 10:00am: Fun post. So many questions. Pedophilia is definitely bad and to me a sign that there's something wrong with the system.

Starving babies go to a rather nebulous place called limbo. Limbus infantum is for babies that weren’t yet baptized, but if they were, the little darlings go right to heaven with the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free pass. To follow the logic to its logical conclusion, death in infancy is the best thing that can happen to your soul. Pizarro actually liked to throw Incan babies off the cliff so they can take advantage of this loophole. No bull.

Comment by unholyroller on March 19, 2009 at 11:39pm: "The man believes sexs outside the narrow dictates of marriage is dirty and vile"......does this attitude exclude child molesting, nun raping priests?? Off subject, maybe but...just asking. Are the starving babies saved?? Do they go to heaven after a brief, painful life? Are their parents guarenteed a place in heaven for just making more and more babies to starve? How can the disgusting, evil old fuck live with himself? Oh....yeah....he's the pope. Infallable..direct line to god.....scuse me!

Comment by Richard Goscicki on March 19, 2009 at 3:06pm: Quite so. I've always marched to the beat of a different drummer. When I was ten, my mother told me, "you think you're normal and the rest of the world is crazy." "You got that right," I told her.

Richard Dawkins certainly challenged conventional thinking with The Selfish Gene. I found it life changing. Genes are the programmers of life and don't care a fig about the individual. All they care about is their own propagation.

I had always taught that the cell was the basic unit. My whole worldview changed. There's no divine providence, that's for sure. It all happened at random.

Comment by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on March 19, 2009 at 2:08am: Challenging conventional and ingrained ideas is always useful, although it can be rather uncomfortable.

Comment by Richard Goscicki on March 18, 2009 at 8:40pm: Rosemary, you make a fine devil's advocate. I love this stuff.

First of all, Cynthia is a professor of evolutionary biology and would have no problem avoiding pregnancy. A recent poll came out stating 40% of recent US births are outside marriage, so this definitely is a problem for society. I would argue that a change in attitude toward sex would be part of the remedy. Not outlawing condoms, as the pope would have us do. The man believes sex outside the narrow dictates of marriage is dirty and vile, (lewd and unseemly, vulgar and coarse). He directed condoms be disregarded in favor of Catholic family values including abstinence.

Education is the only answer regarding African over-population. The president of the World Bank just stated that 200,000 to 400,000 babies and children starve every year. (What a horror! A starving baby doesn’t even get to be counted as having lived.)

This is intolerable for a reasoned world union. Africans should be doing infertility operations after one or two babies. The animals, including the mountain gorillas of Uganda and the rhinos, black and white, are perilously near total extinction. If it were explained to them that their very continent is at stake, I think they’d live responsible lives. But white man’s religion has infiltrated some awful lies into their common belief system.

But let’s get back to Cynthia. If anyone on this thread buys a copy, I’ll answer any questions that arise in this multi-topical story. It’ll be fun because it deals with almost every subject you can think of.

Comment by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on March 18, 2009 at 6:28pm: That should read :

the main WAY of satisfying normal human desires.

Gawd, I wish we could edit these things.

Comment by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on March 18, 2009 at 6:26pm: While I am not about to stone the woman, or her male partners, for this kind of behavior I suspect that the consequences of this behavior would not all be good if it were the only or main say of satisfying normal human desires. Clarence Dember has already suggested some of the less fortunate possibilities. My first reaction was to wonder how other people would fit into this scenario and how much emphasis is placed on their needs and desires. My second reaction was to wonder how the risk of pregnancy, or the event of a pregnancy, would be dealt with. My third reaction was to wonder how children and other caretaking responsibilities would fit this scenario.

The important point, which I did not make clearly in my first posting, is that I do not consider the behavior to be intrinsicly immoral or even necessarily unwise. This does not mean that I would recommend it as a common experience.

Comment by Richard Goscicki on March 18, 2009 at 4:31pm: Thanks for your interest in Cynthia. I take it you’re referring to the post-reversal exotic dancer and not the professor. You see, Mirror Reversal is based on Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. In the early chapters of the book, Cynthia is richly endowed with what Dawkins calls “coy” genes. She’s modest, shy and strictly family oriented.

But out of jealousy her ex-boyfriend Wayne slips her a bit of psilocybin and her genes flip—the reversal—and now she becomes as “fast” as she was modest in the introduction. She follows the advice of Janus Joplin, “What better way for a girl to show how much she digs a guy than to take him home and screw ‘im.”

A major theme of the book is: we’ve been robbed of paradise.