A youth pastor at First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, explains that the union of husband and wife, culminating in orgasm, is — get ready — a prototype of our eternal relationship with Jesus in Heaven.1
Uh-huh — now there is an image I need to get flushed out of my head. The place to begin, I suppose, is by reminding myself that the Genesis creation tale is childish nonsense, so what is really going on here is construction of a cotton-candy fairy castle according to the peculiar psychology of this particular oddity.
I know ol’ Mark Twain would have thought this sermon is a hoot. Here is what he wrote about the subject of sex in his comic masterpiece, Letters From the Earth.
First of all, I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys — yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything — even his queer heaven itself — to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.
They prize it thus highly; yet, like all their so-called “boons,” it is a poor thing. At its very best and longest the act is brief beyond imagination — the imagination of an immortal, I mean. In the matter of repetition the man is limited — oh, quite beyond immortal conception. We who continue the act and its supremest ecstasies unbroken and without withdrawal for centuries, will never be able to understand or adequately pity the awful poverty of these people in that rich gift which, possessed as we possess it, makes all other possessions trivial and not worth the trouble of invoicing.
Twain would have choked at this sermon, I am certain, and then spent 10,000-words ridiculing it.
But, then, ol’ Josh Duggar may have taken it to heart.
Josh Duggar allegedly had two “terrifying” rough sex romps with a porn star while his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, the traumatized X-rated entertainer claims.
Stripper and adult film star Danica Dillon has revealed details of how sex with Duggar quickly turned violent after the disgraced reality TV star lured her into bed with promises of cash gifts.
Or perhaps the prosaic, humdrum truth was set out by Nietzsche:
With severity and pedantry, the priest formulated once and for all, down to the large and small taxes he was to be paid (not to forget the tastiest pieces of meat, for the priest is a steak eater), what he wants to have, “what the will of God is.” From now on all things in life are so ordered that the priest is indispensable — marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of “sacrifices” (meals), the holy parasite appears in order to denature them—in his language: to “consecrate.”
For one must understand this: every natural custom, every natural institution (state, judicial order, marriage, care of the sick and the poor), every demand inspired by the instinct of life — in short, everything that contains its value in itself is made altogether valueless, anti-valuable by the parasitism of the priest (or the “moral world order”): now it requires a sanction after the event — a value-conferring power is needed to negate what is natural in it and to create a value by so doing. The priest devalues, desecrates nature: this is the price of his existence. Disobedience of God, that is, of the priest, of “the Law,” is now called “sin”; the means for “reconciliation with God” are, as is meet, means that merely guarantee still more thorough submission to the priest: the priest alone “redeems.”
The Antichrist, §26
This has been a bad year for the Godly. The Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, sex scandals ad nauseum — Ashley Madison, Josh Duggar, Todd Courser, Tullian Tchvidjian … I mean, damn, one or the other of them is getting caught with his pants down every day. They’re looking like over-indulged children, like people you definitely don’t want to allow to go messing with grown-up stuff — which certainly includes marriage and sex.
– – – – –
1 No video; you’ll have to skip ahead to about the 24-minute mark in the audio.