"I will not permit a woman to teach, nor to have authority over men." (1 Tim. 2:12)
How is it possible for Pope Innocent III in 1216 to say that "the sexual act is itself so shameful as to be intrinsically bad."
There is a causal chain that leads from contempt for sexuality to contempt for women.
The Council of Trent proclaimed:
"If anyone claim that it is not a better and happier thing to dwell in virginity and celibacy than to be married, then that person shall be anathematized."
In a similar vein, Margaret Starbird, a Magdalene scholar, believes that it was the removal of the feminine from discourse about God that created the strange vacuum of sexuality in Western religions, in which God is solely masculine. Even the redeeming presence of Jesus had to be seen as the "virgin son" of an also "virgin mother." Within this equation there was no need for sexuality, and even less so for the discussion of sexuality as a spiritual act.
The idea of God that monotheistic religions have imposed upon people seems to exclude any reference to sexuality as a way of approaching or expressing the divine. The concept of God as an all-powerful Father with no feminine partner has formed the consensual basis of ordinary discourse. (It should be noted that in the East this is not the case, for instance, the relationship of Shakti and Shiva.)
This has deeply influenced Western philosophy and the metaphysics that arose from it. These mental frameworks have had a multitude of consequences for Christian and Islamic history, as well as for Judaism.
In fact, these ideas have penetrated so deeply into people's minds that they do not realize they are the fruit of a particular religious ideology to which we are conditioned, and that this notion is far from axiomatic.
These religious and philosophical systems have assumed and insisted on a concept of an asexual or unisexual God as the only reasonable one and have relegated all others to the category of mythology.
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There is nothing particularly sacred about any sexual embrace that is not filled with consciousness and trust. There is only desire-fulfillment, discharge, and biological well-being.
What we sometimes forget - and what the Gospel of Philip reminds us - is that love means "union" - a union between two freedoms, two subjects who bow to one another.
Rabbi Nahmanides said that the sexual relationship is in reality a thing of great elevation when it is appropriate and harmonious.
This requires an evolution of full humanity in which our entire being is filled with indwelling light, innocence and agape. No doubt Jesus lived his full sexuality on one level or another; otherwise, he could not have been fully human. There is current of thought in Christianity that has made him into a kind of eunuch, a defective, impotent male (not to mention depictions of him as if he were not Semitic, but instead hailing from Connecticut).
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