I'm Praying in Here, That's All! Go Away!

I’ve been reading Mormon websites, researching Mitt Romney’s religion. It’s a rich vein and deserves more time. But in the meantime I found this little tidbit given out to Mormon youth during the seventies to keep them away from masturbating. If anything this proves that you should never let your spiritual guidance be in the hands of the repressed.

The entire list can be found here.

I’ve culled the more laughable parts:

A Guide to Self-Control:

1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body except during normal toilet processes.

3. If you are associated with other persons having this same problem, YOU MUST BREAK OFF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Never associate with other people having the same weakness. Don't suppose that two of you will quit together, you never will. You must get away from people of that kind. Just to be in their presence will keep your problem foremost in your mind. The problem must be taken OUT OF YOUR MIND for that is where it really exists. Your mind must be on other and more wholesome things.

Sounds like someone had a bad experience doing a circle jerk.

4. When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five or six minutes -- just long enough to bathe and dry and dress AND THEN GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM into a room where you will have some member of your family present.

Sounds like a horror movie. Get out of the bathroom! The call is coming from inside the bathroom! The steam will make you horny and then will kill you!!!! Doesn’t the toothbrush look like a dick? Doesn’t the folds of a towel look like a pussy? Get out! Get ooouuutttt!!!!

5. When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes. By the time you started to remove protective clothing you would have sufficiently controlled your thinking that the temptation would leave you.

I have a friend who works at a store called "Chaps" that might have some secure clothes you can wear. You can also pick up a cock ring.

6. If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, GET OUT OF BED AND GO INTO THE KITCHEN AND FIX YOURSELF A SNACK, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are not hungry, and despite your fears of gaining weight. The purpose behind this suggestion is that you GET YOUR MIND ON SOMETHING ELSE.

Enough with the shouting. I’m repressed not deaf. Say did you hear about the rising obesity rates in Utah? I wonder why that is.

7. Never read pornographic material. Never read about your problem. Keep it out of mind. Remember -- "First a thought, then an act."

Does looking at pictures involve reading? It does? Are you sure?

9. Pray. But when you pray, don't pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep [it] in your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for the Missionaries, the General Authorities, your friends, your families, BUT KEEP THE PROBLEM OUT OF YOUR MIND BY NOT MENTIONING IT EVER -- NOT IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHERS, NOT IN YOUR PRAYERS. KEEP IT _OUT_ of your mind!

Again with the shouting. Have you heard of the theory about the white elephant, in which you are told not to think of a white elephant and then it’s all you can think about?

Suggestions:

3. When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell STOP to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind and then recite a prechosen Scripture or sing an inspirational hymn. It is important to turn your thoughts away from the selfish need to indulge.

It’s been a long day. You finally hit the sheets after saying goodnight to the kids. Then you’re jolted awake by a shout from your son’s bedroom. First he screamed “Stop!” and then started singing hymns. Do you:
A) Call the mental ward and book him a room
B) Throw a Penthouse and a towel in his room and tell him to shut the fuck up.
C) Remind yourself to send the Elder a basket of muffins for his guidance in making your son a repressed wreck.

11. In the field of psychotherapy there is a very effective technique called aversion therapy. When we associate or think of something very distasteful with something which has been pleasurable, but undesirable, the distasteful thought and feeling will begin to cancel out that which was pleasurable. If you associate something very distasteful with your loss of self-control it will help you to stop the act. For example, if you are tempted to masturbate, think of having to bathe in a tub of worms, and eat several of them as you do the act.

That’s not aversion therapy, that’s the start of a fetish. “Honey, I’m feeling randy tonight. I’ll be in the garden digging up worms.”

12. During your toileting and shower activities leave the bathroom door or shower curtain partly open, to discourage being alone in total privacy. Take cool brief showers.

Discourage being alone or encouraging voyeurism? The Mormons are so kinky.

17. Avoid people, situations, pictures or reading materials that might create sexual excitement.

Walk around with a bag over your head.

18. It is sometimes helpful to have a physical object to use in overcoming this problem. A Book of Mormon, firmly held in hand, even in bed at night has proven helpful in extreme cases.

Sure it might look like a pocket pussy or a dildo, but I call it my Book of Mormon.

19. In very severe cases it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame with a tie in order that the habit of masturbating in a semi-sleep condition can be broken. This can also be accomplished by wearing several layers of clothing which would be difficult to remove while half asleep.

I’ve tied a few hands to bed frames in my day.

21. Do not let yourself return to any past habit or attitude patterns which were part of your problem. Satan Never Gives Up. Be calmly and confidently on guard. Keep a positive mental attitude. You can win this fight! The joy and strength you will feel when you do will give your whole life a radiant and spiritual glow of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Now I know why Mormons play so much basketball. I have to remember to bring really dark sunglasses when I go to Utah; all that spiritual glow is hard on the eyes. Have a good weekend and lock the bathroom door, kids.

Slipping Off the Tightrope

If I was forced at gun point to choose a religious order, it would probably be either Judaism or the Jesuits. Only because they honor learning as opposed to the evangelicals who claim only to take the Bible literally (which is a lie, for they cherry pick what they like and ignore the rest. If they followed the Bible literally most of the money they make would go into helping the poor and not into big houses for its rich preachers.)

But this learning entails questioning everything and questioning leads to leaving the leap of faith behind. James Joyce left the Jesuits. His commitment to truth and art (and sex) lead him to literature instead of the Eucharist. Noah Feldman writes of his slight excommunication from modern Jewish Orthodoxy in a superb article in the New York Times magazine.

Feldman married someone outside of the fold and for that he was taken out of the school reunion picture and his accomplishments are never recorded in the alumni newsletter. Small matters indeed, but Feldman questions it, analyzes it and ends up with more questions than answers, which is in accordance with his religious teachings.

What he ends up with is the dichotomy that haunts every religious person: how can I resolve my belief in outdated religious writing and live in a modern world? We see this battle with varying levels of failure. The radical Muslims, who want to institute Sharia law and repress women, retard science and technology and destroy non-believers, will lose this battle. You cannot return to a medieval state in a modern world. All you will do is increase suffering. The evangelicals, as Feldman points out, oppose stem cell research and push for creationism.

Feldman brings several interesting examples of trying to straddle Orthodox Judaism and contemporary life. They seem like failures of living in the modern world to me. For instance in the kosher diet:

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world… The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

Another example is when a doctor, who was visiting Feldman’s school, stated that he would save a non-Jewish person on the Sabbath not because of keeping the peace with the gentiles but because he was a human being deserving medical attention:

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah…if…you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Which leads me to wonder, when one does engage with the world, does one have to cast off certain religious principles? The answer is yes, if the principle is one of exclusion. Exclusion is more than just not treating the goyim or eating kosher, it’s also viewing unbelievers as beneath you, such as when a Catholic believes the apostate will go to hell, or a Muslim thinks exposing a woman’s face as sinful. The price for modernity is to let people be.

Of course the reason people are religious is comfort. To belong is a treasured feeling. Feldman talks of the joy when reading the Book of Esther with is children. But in belonging, you need to set rules and exclude those who don’t conform, just as Feldman and his children are excluded from the newsletter. And that leads to sorrow. Feldman married out of love, I assume. To leave the Orthodox religion when he could have easily married a nice Jewish girl certainly points to romantic choice. But he obviously feels conflicted. And what about homosexuals who are excluded from the start? Do these people have to suffer for an outdated religious belief?

Feldman acknowledges, correctly I believe, that we live in contradictory lives. We are paradoxical men and women. And religion is not going to go away. Some of us must straddle that line between ancient beliefs and modern living. Just don’t think you’re outdated beliefs will rule over me.

Next Spokesperson: Virgina Crossleggs

Will you look at this girl from the photo from a recent New York Times article? She stands near a field; salt of the earth, she is. And even though she has cutesy heart jewelry, she wears a jaded, world-weary look. Actually, she looks pissed off. Her name is Jami Waite, and she is the public face of Virginity Rules, an abstinence propaganda machine.

Teen pregnancy is down, although abstinence programs are not the reason for the decline. I’m guessing pregnancy is down due to better information being available. Studies have shown no difference between those who have abstinence indoctrination and those who don’t. Because of the lack of success, funding for these religious programs is being threatened, thank God.

I have no problem with people abstaining from sex, especially teenagers. Sexuality is a complicated beast (with two backs) and pregnancy and diseases can happen. What bothers me is the message that sex in a monogamous marriage is worth waiting for and completely satisfying. These kids are being sold a flesh pipe dream and that fur pie in the sky turns out to be not so tasty. Instead of giving these kids all the information and letting then make rational decisions, they give them bizarre metaphors. Here’s a quotation by Eric Love who runs Virginity Rules: (Eric Love? Jami Waite? Who named these people? Charles Dickens or perhaps Thomas Pynchon?)

…Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Besides the risible dorkiness of the symbolisim, the message is premarital sex amounts to a piece of tape on a dirty floor. Why don’t they just force sexually-active girls to wear a red S on their shirts to announce their sluttiness. And this is mostly aimed at women. Why have the girl up above be the spokesperson? A double standard exists, and since these programs are faith-based the onus is on the woman to hold off and her reward is a relationship in which she is subservient to her husband.

Another sad fact is people change over time and not necessarily in sync with their spouses. According to statistics, 43% of new marriages end in divorce. And that’s not including all the people who stay in miserable marriages for the sake of religion or kids. I hope the best for Ms. Waite as she waits, but I advise her to have pre-martial safer sex. She should get to know her body, her likes, dislikes and her level of kink (or her complete lack of kink. I assume she has a low libido.). Knowledge of yourself will help a marriage far more than the religious platitudes about sex.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon

I have to admit there have been certain days when I prayed for the end of days. Most likely, it was because my head was throbbing or I was broken hearted or I was filled with corporate-work ennui. But I never really wanted the world to end, and certainly didn’t put an exact date on it. But through the centuries, religious groups have predicted the end of the world. In an article about the newest version of the apocalypse comes this paragraph:

Light and darkness—heavenly forces and a corrupted earth—are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe—and we are always wrong.

Yup, always wrong. Such hubris, to think that one can know when the earth will flutter out. We might not make it, but the earth will be around. But insecurity is so strong that folks have to believe in it

…according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group—all of whom share secret knowledge—and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.”

This reminds me of clubs that little kids make in which they exclude a gender just to feel special. And of course it’s not just the religious. New Agers have their own religion, but their myths and icons are all too similar:

“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,” Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. “We’ll be literally living in a new time,” Arguelles said, “by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication.” As for the many who “have not evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality,” Arguelles predicts they will be taken away in “silver ships.”

Not interested in telepathic gardening? Oh well, get on the silver ship—destination unknown. Hard to believe that people buy into this, but then again, people buy into Jesus rising from the dead and Moses parting the Red Sea. According to the Mayaist (They believe the Mayans predicted the end of days), the end is either 2011 or 2012. Being that the idea of heaven bores me, and the New Ager idea of telepathic gardeners is even duller, I’ll go to hell on the silver ship.

What amazes me is the amount of work people put into this. They study ancient cultures and write books and even change their names, all in a quest that will end in disappointment once the end date passes to the next day. The sun will set and the sun will rise. I’ve seen this elsewhere. At a hippy reggae festival I had a pleasant woman at a booth try and convince me that the World Trade Center destruction was caused by controlled demolition. There were books and videos and here she was manning this booth, spending her free time and energy on this pointless mission. I tried to be polite, but I had to ask, isn’t more important to work against the right-wing demagoguery in this country rather then silly, paranoid conspiracy theories. But I misunderstood the powerful human emotion to fantasize rather than deal with cold, dull truth. Oh well, while you are on the mountain top waiting for the rapture, I’ll be in the bar, telling jokes.

On Your Knees, Boy

7:1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
Epistles of St. Paul
1 Corinthians

The great thing about being secular is that your sexual outlook is your own and is not governed by what some asexual obsessive wrote thousands of years ago. Morals are what keeps us civilized, by keeping us from hurting one another; they shouldn't govern what is pleasurable and hurts no one. I bring all this up because of an article in the Los Angeles times about ex-gay leaders admitting that sexuality is innate and not a choice. This is a good thing: people admitting the obvious, but there are details from the article that drive me crazy.

Here's what they say about the head of an ex-gay movement, Alan Chambers:

With years of therapy, Chambers says, he has mostly conquered his own attraction to men; he's a husband and a father, and he identifies as straight. But lately, he's come to resent the term "ex-gay": It's too neat, implying a clean break with the past, when he still struggles at times with homosexual temptation. "By no means would we ever say change can be sudden or complete," Chambers said.

"Mostly conquered." Doesn't that sound like Bush pronouncement of the war? It's a good thing we've mostly conquered the Iraqi insurgents. He hasn’t conquered anything; he’s repressing.

But even gay counselors are backing this new pronouncement. The role of therapy is to bring happiness, I guess at any cost. Here's a quotation from an ex-ex-gay, Michael Bussee:

He and other gay activists — along with major mental-health associations — still reject therapy aimed at "liberating" or "curing" gays. But Bussee is willing to acknowledge potential in therapy that does not promise change but instead offers patients help in managing their desires and modifying their behavior to match their religious values — even if that means a life of celibacy.

So what's wrong with a life of celibacy? I know what it's like; I was married for a while. But here's the crux: sex is major component of love. You love a friend, mother or pizza, but love with a partner is partly erotic love. So those who choose celibacy are limiting themselves immensely. Plus, what about those poor religious women who have to put up with the Ted Haggards in their life? Who wants to be with someone who doesn't desire them? Can you imagine a society where heterosexuality sex is only for procreation and not for pleasure? That’s a view of strict religion. Seriously, fuck that.

Between the repressed sexuality that religion brings and violence it inspires, secular humanism is the way to go.

H. E. Double Toothpicks

Pope Benedict XVI is traveling through South America, denouncing Marxism, Capitalism, abortion, gay marriages, and other affronts to the waning power of the Catholic Church. I don't care what Pope Ratso Rizzo says, but I did see a reference to an earlier speech he gave in March. In that earlier speech, he confirmed that Hell is an actual place. The London Times says the pope stated, "Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanize the faithful. He also noted, like Milton does in Paradise Lost, that "God had given men and women free will to choose whether 'spontaneously to accept salvation...the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind.'"

Of course, Hell has been used by the Church for centuries to keep the faithful in line. James Joyce uses this for great effect in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Young Stephen Dedalus is awakening to the sexual urges in his body. The priests are well aware of the urges the students are going through, so they take them on a retreat. During the retreat the priests give a sermon on hell. It goes on for many pages. Here is an excerpt just on the smell of hell:

“—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.”

I have no doubt that in Ratboy's eyes, I am condemned to hell. I do not accept Jesus as my savior and I certainly do not believe in the Catholic Church. Plus I'm for abortion and gay rights. Hey... did someone turn on a heater? Does it feel hot in here?

Of course, the pope isn't the only one to invoke hell. When I went looking for his comments on hell, I found some evangelical websites proclaiming the last pope is in hell because he wasn't evangelical. I used to think Hell would be more fun, y’know, like when Billy Joel sings, "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. / The Sinner are much more fun." But now I'm thinking hell is filled with all these religious nitwits and there is no heaven. For me, personally, when you die, you finally get to sleep in, and that's all I ever wanted.

If you still feel you might end up in hell, check out other visions of hell:

You're all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don't. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell! (Amos Starkadder from Cold Comfort Farm)

Now the d and the a and the m and the n and the a and the t and the i-o-n
Lose your face, lose your name / Then get fitted for a suit of flame
(Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell”)

Hell
Hell is for hell
Hell is for hell
Hell is for children
(Pat Benatar “Hell is for Children”)

And I leave with a link for a quiz. It tells you what level of Dante's hell you'll end up in. I ended up in the Heretic's City of Dis, the 6th level.