#Biblical Sexuality

[caripr94]

Hey caripr94! I was thinking about Aang and Katara and I would like your wise insight :)

I read a comment or watched a video saying that Aang should not have married Katara if he wanted to rebuild the air nation. The argument was basically that he should have married a non-bender like Tenzin. Since Pema is a non-bender the probability of airbender kids is higher compared to a bender like Katara bearing his kids.

Another opinion was that Aang should not have married at all. He should have impregnated as many willing women as possible.

Let's say Aang was Christian, what would be a good course of action? There should be more airbenders to regain the loss of culture and to provide future teachers for the next avatars, but being monogamous is an obstacle to that goal. There are only so many kids one woman can have. What if Katara was infertile? Korra would be doomed since there would be no airbenders to teach her if Aang remained faithful.

Well, really, it's not just about rebuilding a nation from one's children; it's also building a nation of psychologically healthy individuals. Look at what happened when Jacob built his nation from his offspring from several women. The women had to compete with each other for his affection and so did their children. Joseph was sold into slavery because of his brothers' jealousy of him, and although it ultimately turned out for the best, it still put him through years of trauma, especially starting at the young age of 17.

Even in the Avatar canon, as shown in Legend of Korra, Aang's children still had to compete with one another for his attention and affection, even when they all had one mother to smooth things over between them. If they all came from different mothers, I'm sure that it would have been harder for them, especially considering how distant Toph's daughters were from each other for 30 years when they had different fathers.

So I don't think that having more children with more fertile women to rebuild the Air Nomads would have been worth forgoing the stability and commitment that comes with monogamous marriage and reproduction. Besides, I don't think that it would actually be necessary to rebuild the whole Air Nation anyway. Like many others have said, there's no way that the Fire Nation could have wiped out a whole nation in one day, even with Sozin's Comet. Some of the Air Nomads could have escaped and hid amongst and intermixed with the populations of other nations, so they could have descendants in those other nations with their genes and maybe even airbending abilities. Considering that, Aang could have gone to one of those women and have his kids from her for better chances of airbending offspring, and those kids could have intermixed with those other descendants.

[liberty1776]

Has God Changed his Mind on Same Sex Relationships?

God does not change his mind. Does the Bible have authority. Marriage is linked to the Gospel. 

[kgdrendel]

Opinions, Heresy & Unity in Christ: Judging and Despising Believers

Let us pursue what makes for peace and for building up one another

I am not sure how to write about the things that I believe God has laid on my heart today. I will start, though, by explaining the combination of things that give rise to my thoughts, and I will try my best, relying on the leading of the Holy Spirit and whatever wisdom I have, in humility and full reliance upon the grace of God, to address these things that weigh on my heart today My thoughts…

[graceandpeacejoanne]

"The Bible and Sexuality," by Karen R. Keen

In my opinion, this little primer could be developed into a sturdy textbook for Christians on all sides of this hot topic today. #TheBibleandSexuality #KarenRKeen #NashvilleStatement #BiblicalSexuality

The Bible and Sexuality, by Karen R. Keen, Durham, NC: Contemplatio Publishing, 202.116 pages. What Does the Bible Say About Sex? A slim volume, easily read in an afternoon, or evening, Keen writes with a spare yet approachable style exploring what the Bible has to say about sex, including same-sex encounters. Originally intended as a primer for her college students, Keen explains that her…

[martyschoenleber]

Clearing Up a Media Firestorm on Biblical Sexuality

Ran across this late last night and was impressed with Dr. Heath Lambert’s presentation of his church’s recent statement on biblical sexuality. Well done. Don’t trust the media headlines. Listen to his words and explanation. And Christian, don’t flinch when the world doesn’t like it. Truth is determined by a majority vote of the culture. It is determined by the sovereign God of the universe who…

[phalar-aluve]

He is simply serving

VAMPIRE CUNT.

[caripr94]

No, I'm not anon and I don't think I'm misunderstanding your reblog. You're comparing not having sex to stopping eating completely and saying that people who can do either and still be okay are in the minority, as if sex was as necessary as food. You really think that people are such animals that they can't control their sex drives? Those people are actually a minority in certain populations. We've also had a thing since the dawn of man called marriage and that is the only reason why it seems that the average person can't live their whole lives without sex. When the average person finds that they can't live without having sex for very long, they get married, and certain people doing so only while being married and only to their spouses is the only reason why people having sex has turned out as well as it has been since the dawn of man. It's taking sex out of the bounds of marriage that has caused our society to go out of control.

Ngl mothers who are pro abortion are so sketchy to me. Idk how you can go through the entire process of having a baby and still think it’s alright to kill an unborn child for whatever reason.

Yeah it's hard to believe a person can feel a baby growing inside them, kicking, moving, hiccuping, etc. and still be like "no this isn't a person and is ok to kill" but the power of suggestion is real and when you have "experts" assuring you it's ok and the culture you live in constantly pushing that idea it becomes easier to believe, even when logic might say otherwise.

I'm more skeptical of those who perform abortions thinking it's ok to kill the unborn. I mean they're the ones actually killing the child and pulling all of its body parts out of the womb. They have got to know what they're doing.

[evergreensandthunderstorms]

So I uh went down a rabbit hole when the Talamasca set photos dropped and

Paging @oldbutchdaniel to yell abt this with me maybe?

[here-there-were-dragons]

my mother is absolutely convinced of some nonsense conspiracy theory that (in her words) "originally humanity lived in peaceful all-woman societies of goddess worshippers who took care of eachother and lived in harmony, while males were roving loners that had no society and never cooperated. that changed when the men banded together and overthrew the peaceful woman-dominated societies, and enslaved us all." and, according to her, this is proof that a woman-dominated world would be innately more peaceful, and that men are innately violent and evil and should be either barred from holding any legal power or leadership roles or at least should be (again in her words) "gelded like bulls" to remove their testosterone before even being considered for such a thing.

she also evidently believes that the problem with all religions today is primarily that they aren't "goddess worshippers", because she seems to think goddess religions are inherently peaceful and pure too and seems to be especially obsessed with "Isis" in particular. the very very few times she's openly considered it unambiguously bad for some population or another to have been exterminated (she's got a bad case of devil's advocating genocide brain), she's gone out of her way to make up some crap about how said people were a peaceful society of goddess-worshippers, almost always of isis. delusions of isis-worship seem to be the only thing that ever causes her to consider any arab or middle-eastern culture, society, or ethnicity to be relatively uncomplicatedly undeserving of extermination, in fact, because every fucking time she doesn't immediately start devils-advocating it and making remarks about how "the rest of the world should box them in and let them blow eachother up" it's when she's whinging on about how whatever specific micro-ethnicity she's thinking about are or were traditional persecuted isis-worshippers.

the sole major exception to her weird fixation on isis worship justifying worthiness of life is the whole israel thing going on, in which she has consistently made very obvious that literally the only reason she's against the genocide of palestine is because it gives her an excuse to even more openly hate jewish people than she already did. and honestly i'm not sure even that's true because i think she's made some offhand remarks about palestinians having probably been peaceful isis worshipers before the jews infected them with christianity or something anyway.

so for the last, however fucking long it's been i've been constantly having to listen to her go off about how this behavior is in the jew's blood or whatever and that they literally invented all genocide because somehow the concept didn't exist before them and wouldn't have ever been invented by the rest of humanity without those jewish aliens dropping it in i fucking guess apparently and she furthermore goes on about how every single genocide and mass-oppression movement in history is directly inspired by them, ESPECIALLY the nazis, and THEN i have to listen to her rant about how, basically, wwii was something they entirely brought on themselves by "dominating the economy and treating everyone not them like shit" and the nazis were just "using their own tactics back at them". and then she goes on a rant about how the people the original jews exterminated back in the day (aka the first ever genocide, which they invented, because jews invented genocide and hate according to her) in the middle east region were peaceful matriarchal isis-worshipers.

and then she starts making comments about arabs being backwards and palestinians either being mysogynist muslims that should be boxed in to blow eachother up with everyone else or secret peaceful isis worshippers corrupted by men's cruel hand, sometimes in the same sentence, entirely dependent on which group she's more in the mood to hate at the time.

it's exhausting. beyond exhausting. her sole purpose in existence seems to be to have the singularly most exhausting set of politics physically possible to fit into one person.

just, sometimes i think, if there really is anything at all to the incredibly stupid and inexplicably popular idea that anyone or anything has a Purpose tm to exist for, i feel like my mother's purpose is to be walking proof to me of a Type Of Guy That Is Real, cause i sure as fuck would have trouble inventing this mess if it wasn't standing right in front of me spewing confusingly bipartisan hate. all of her thoughts and opinions are these long winding nonsense chains that feel like if that man carrying thing sketch about the friend with confusing politics was a person. on meth.

[haggishlyhagging]

Not talking about sex does not make it go away, and the lack of discourse about sexuality is not a stable situation. Sex has a way of reminding people about itself. Biblical law's concern with regulating sexual behavior indicates that Israel was as aware as we are of the power of human attraction. In the Song of Songs, this awareness finds expression in the phrase "for love is stronger than death." This awareness also underlies all the uses of the erotic metaphor, for they rely on our experience of the sexual bond as a bond of connectedness. The Bible is aware of the strength of sexual attraction and the sensations of communion, but it offers no vision to help understand and integrate this experience of human sexuality. Biblical monotheism's lack of a clear and compelling vision on sex and gender was tantamount to an unfinished revolution. But no culture can exist without some ideas about an experience as compelling as sexuality. When powerful emotions cannot be integrated into our vision of humanity, society, and divinity, then they are feared. This fear of eros can lead to a desire to avoid the occasions of temptation, thus rigidly reinforcing gender lines and making society ever more conscious of gender divisions. This weakness in the fabric of biblical monotheism begins to emerge in the stresses of the destruction of Jerusalem, the Babylonian exile, and the difficult restoration period. Then, when Israel becomes exposed to Greek ideas in the Hellenistic period, Greek concepts of sex and gender fill the vacuum in decidedly antiwoman, anticarnal ways that have long influenced the Western religious tradition.

-Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

[lesbiradshaw]

every time i see that picture of phoenix’s arms flexing and covered in sweat i feel like i got hit over the head with an anvil cartoon style. except in this case the anvil is labeled LESBIANISM.

[theatrum-tenebrarum]

Hi,

I was reading your post about Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer Morningstar and you said that angels are genderless beings. I’m just wondering if you could maybe talk about how relationships and sexuality work (or rather don’t work) in that context.

Thanks!😊

Hello! That's an interesting question! Some opinions are such that all spirits, be they of angelic, demonic, fae or whichever origin do not possess a gender. There is no definitive answer as to why that is so, but some things in favor of this theory are: 1. they are from different realms/dimensions/modes of existence and we cannot know that gender (or sex) actually exist there, and if they do exist we don't know how they manifest there 2. it is speculated that all of these beings from other dimensions don't possess a body at all, but are actually forms of energy (therefore most humans cannot physically see them, but they can eventually feel them!). However, being forms of energy, it is thought that they can manifest or inhabit a body they prefer. That would mean spirits could choose a sex or gender for themselves, if they wish to become visible to human beings or interact with them.

When it comes to possibly forming a relationship with one of these beings such as angels, there are plenty of standpoints we could talk about this from! The first would be the standpoint of mysticism. More specifically, Christian mysticism, which is very interesting and probably not what you think! Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish nun and mystic who lived in the 16th century recounts her experience of physically confronting an angel, a Seraph or Cherub, with an ecstatic, sexual twist. After explaining how uncommon it is too se an angel in its physical form and describing its appearance, she recounts: "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it." There's actually a stunning piece of artwork depicting this exact scene, by the great Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini! So delicately ethereal and otherworldly, but at the same time rather corporeal and tactile.

I think Teresa's experience doesn't require any input from my side, and it surely points to the fact that it IS possible for angels to manifest in a corporeal form so humans can see them and communicate with them. In this particular case, she speaks of the angel as being male, but she also writes about how most times she is able to perceive angels "intellectually" and in that case she doesn't mention them being of any particular sex/gender. So again, it could be implied that angels assume a sex/gender only when manifesting in the physical dimension. Now the other standpoint would be the one of occultism. Generally, in occult circles it is thought that compelling any type of spirit to appear in physical form before the one conjuring it is extremely difficult, almost impossible to do. Most occultists try to commune with spirits in their non-corporeal forms, but when doing so prefer to use some sort of physical object to represent the spirit, such as a picture of them that is preferred by the one who wishes to get in contact with them in order to contact the spirit more easily. Humans need anthropomorphism, it is a way for us to understand phenomena that would otherwise be hard to grasp. Therefore it is thought that by having a physical representation of a spirit, one can ease into the energy that is behind it. This is also the way religious statues are supposed to function, especially ones from the Medieval Gothic era, where literally thousands of statues used to be made for one cathedral only (!), EACH one representing a certain idea, concept, religious figure or mythical being people could connect to through these physical forms. Ways of communicating with angels and other spirits are numerous. Some are tied to certain magical traditions and some aren't. There is absolutely no way to talk about spirit communication in one post, but it absolutely is possible to develop relationships with angels and other spirits from the standpoint of occultism. Speaking of sexual relationships with angels and spirits, there are a lot of possibilities. The first one would be that such a thing is impossible since they are essentially forms of energy - unless the spirit chooses to inhabit (possess) a body or incarnate in the physical form. Yet, there are accounts and stories of sexual encounters with spirits in their non-corporeal, energy forms. The most common stories of this kind are those of spirits that are able to have sexual relations with humans while they are asleep, which likely happens in the same phase of sleep as the one where sleep paralysis or astral projection can happen. In some mystical and magical traditions, each contact with divinity is considered to be an ecstatic, almost orgasmic experience. This contact with the divine could surely be angelic as well, such as in the case of saint Teresa of Avila I mentioned earlier. She explains how the encounter with the angel left her with a "great love of God".

Now there is no easy way to sum all of this up, as I only went through some of the basic theories on communicating with angels/spirits. A kind of TL;DR would be that it is possible to form relationships with angels and other spirits, as there are accounts of such experiences both very old and new, coming from mystics and other people initiated into various magical orders. How one can develop these relationships depends on how sensitive a person is to subtle energies, on the type of magic they practice or the magical tradition they are initiated into and, as well as on other factors that might be out of one's control - such as the angel's/spirit's willingness to communicate! This communication can include sexual activities as well, which could be possible no matter if the spirit is in corporeal form or not. Sexual energy created in contact with some form of divinity is said to be all-powerful and practitioners of magical arts greatly cherish such experiences.

This is a very broad and interesting topic! I hope I managed to cover all the important bits and answer your question. If there is anything you would like me to write about some more, feel free to drop me an ask! Once again, thank you for the question! :)

[haggishlyhagging]

Sexuality is a very complex phenomenon. At once social and physical, "nature" and "culture," it defies categorization. Pagan religions saw sexuality as part of the natural order, part of the same generative force that ultimately resulted in fertility. Erotic attraction had an integral place in the workings of the cosmos. Sexuality could be sacred, part of the continuation of the cosmos, as in the Sumerian sacred marriage ritual. In this ritual, the expression of sexual emotions could be associated with the experience of divinity, and the songs and poems connected with the sacred marriage provided a religious setting for the expression and celebration of sexual desire. Even ordinary sex could be seen as godlike, for the stories of the sexual adventures and misadventures of the gods provided a divine parallel for sexuality. These stories showed that gods also felt these drives and performed these acts. Sexual behavior did not make people less like the gods; on the contrary, it reinforced their resemblance to the upper orders of being. The male gods could be models of male virility and sexual potency, their behavior paradigms of proper (and sometimes of improper) sexual activity.

Ancient pagan religion also portrayed the sexual impulse as a goddess of sexual attraction. Male gods, figures of potency, can express sexual activity; they cannot fully express sexual attraction in a predominantly heterosexual, androcentric society. The figure of Inanna/Ishtar provides a way to conceptualize the erotic impulse, a vocabulary to celebrate its presence, and an image with which to comprehend the human experience of sexual desire. Sexual desire comes from the presence of Ishtar. When she is absent,

The Bull springs not upon the cow, the ass does not inseminate the Jenny. In the street man does not inseminate young woman. The man lies down in his (own) chamber the woman lies down on her side.

Sexuality was part of the divine realm, most specifically of the female divine. Even when other functions of goddesses were absorbed by male gods, sexuality could not be absorbed into male divinity. Ishtar remained the representative and divine patron of sexual attraction and activity.

All of this religious dimension of sexuality disappears in biblical monotheism. There is no sexual dimension of divine experience. Instead of gods and goddesses interrelating with each other, there is only the one God of Israel. YHWH, moreover, is a predominantly male god, referred to by the masculine pronoun (never by the feminine), and often conceived of in such quintessentially masculine images as warrior and king. In the earliest biblical poem, the Song of the Sea, God is "man of war." God is also king, the prime metaphor of mastery. This, too, has a masculine connotation. But these masculine qualities of God are social male-gender characteristics. The monotheist God is not sexually a male. He is not at all phallic, and does not represent male virility. Biblical anthropomorphic language uses corporeal images of the arm of God, the right hand of God, God's back, and God's tears. God is not imagined below the waist. In Moses' vision at Mount Sinai, God covered Moses with his hand until he had passed by, and Moses saw only his back. In Elijah's vision, there was nothing to be seen, only a "small still voice." In Isaiah's vision (chapter 6), two seraphim hide Gods "feet" (normally taken as a euphemism), and in Ezekiel's vision (chapters 1-3), there is only fire below the loins. God is asexual, or transsexual, or metasexual (depending on how we view this phenomenon), but "he" is never sexed.

God does not behave in sexual ways. In the powerful marital metaphor, God is the "husband" of Israel. But this husband-God does not kiss, embrace, fondle, or otherwise express physical affection for Israel, even within the poetic license of the metaphor. Such reticence is not demanded by rhetorical usage, for in the other erotic metaphor, that describing the attachment of men to Lady Wisdom, there is no hesitation to use a physical image, "hug her to you and she will exult you, she will bring you honor if you embrace her." Wisdom is clearly a woman-figure, and can be metaphorically embraced as a woman. But God is not a sexual male, and therefore even the erotic metaphor of passion reveals a lack of physicality. God is not imaged in erotic terms, and sexuality was simply not part of the divine order.

God is not sexed, God does not model sexuality, and God does not bestow sexual power. God, who is the giver of fertility, procreation, abundance, health, does not explicitly give potency. God does not promise the men of Israel that they will be sexually active or competent. Biblical thought does not see sexuality as a gift of God. To the Bible, the sexual and divine realms have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, the Bible is concerned to maintain their separation, to demarcate the sexual and sacred experiences and to interpose space and time between them. God would not reveal godself or God's purpose on Mount Sinai until Israel abstained from sexual activity for three days. This temporal separation between the sexual and the sacred also underlies the story of David's request for food during his days of fleeing from King Saul. David assured the priest Ahimelech that his men were eligible to eat hallowed bread by asserting that they had been away from women for three days. Sexual activity brings people into a realm of experience which is unlike God; conversely, in order to approach God one has to leave the sexual realm.

-Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

[queerholmcs]

(queer/religious venting in tags)