--- Human Sexuality

History testifies that theological discrimination against women by institutional religion is advanced politically in patriarchal societies, and, with destructive and dysfunctional effects on the individual person and on society.

Fraudulently evolved prerogation of male primacy underlies cultural traditions of discrmination against women. Misinformed patriarchal theologies have poisoned women and men in their relationships and have brought about familial and societal dysfunction.

When a journalist asked Pope John Paul II for his response regarding Catholics who reject Church teachings, he told the journalist when children go off and disobey what their has taught, a father does not love them any less.

Now more than ever, we need to reinforce the teaching: as you judge so shall you be judged. This means that if you judge another without compassion, you will be judged without compassion. If you judge another without love, you will be judged without love. Judging others is a very, very dangerous thing, and it's critial to ask God for His forgiveness and His help on this matter.

There are forces afoot that would justify sexual sins. This is so obvious in our secular culture today, that one would have to be unconscious to not see it. Casual sex, open living-together arrangements, homosexual sex - anything goes. If it isn't "going" openly now, just wait a bit; it is coming. After all, are we not "free"?

Even some priests are asserting that sexual sins are not the most serious, so we should not be so concerned about them. More serious is our obligation to the poor, whether we are kind to one another, and to other social justice issues. As a result, there is growing moral confusion in the Church. Some couples are openly living together unmarried, some are in active homosexual relations, some are divorced and remarried outside of the Church, others are in other situations that are objectively sinful - and yet they feel free to bypass repentance, remorse and conversion, and instead receive Holy Eucharist without compunction. No wonder the Church is so weak, and is weakening.

In the recent issue of National Catholic Reporter, Kris Berggren has this excellent article on sexuality on secular and catholic college campuses titled Sexual Ethics: Even on Catholic Campuses Hook-up Sex Prevails.

http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1072

I really greet seeing this issue addressed in research and in NCR.

My personal feelings on extra-marital sexuality has always been that when you become sexually involved with someone--in or out of marriage--you give away a piece of yourself. Whether this spending of the self is a true gift or spendthrift behavior is often determined by the futures but nothing is more repugnant to me thanso-called hook-up sex. So much is given up for ostensibly only a sexual outlet--since it is implicitly non-committment oriented.

Oh, love is handsome, and love is fine. The old British ballad “The Water is Wide” manages, in a brief space, to etch finely all the phases of love. Love is handsome, fine, a jewel. Love grows old and cold and fades like morning dew. Love is the sturdy oak against which we rest our back, only to find the tree snaps.

And we cannot help what love does to us. In love, we know not when we sink or swim. We find ourselves “in” love, without our devising or without knowing how we have come to be there, its waves long since over our heads.

St Paul speaks of the “groaning” of Earth under life’s constant strain of transformation, even as it ever self-renews in cycles of pro-creation. The very person of every woman, and of every man by association, is to be in concert with nature (groaning) to self-fulfill life, to sustain the human species and other species.

The processes of sustaining Earth/ Life are about the pro-creation of all life (each its own kind), processes of perpetual renewal and terminal transformation, in which the human self, in the iterations of birth, prevision/ provision, and death, transforms from self-identity into Other, on and on, and on — and — by which transformation, the individual self is subsumed by and into other, what is “the process of evolution”.

The Current Issue of NCR features an article by Gordon J. Hilsman titled , 'Toward A Catholic Kama Sutra'. I call this bold because it forces us to take seriously the human experiences in a shared history of humanity and give them their due in historical context. It is refreshing in that it urges a departure from the attitudes of an infractional view of spiritual practice. The marital relationship is repeatedly cited as the source relationship in the family core of the church, but the Freedom of the Laity is given short shrift and negligible encouragement in practice.

While the subject matter “intrinsic disorder” is under discussion under another strand (Everything under the Sun) it might be helpful to introduce here a discussion of “intrinsic order” from the perspective of social gendering.

Sometimes subject matters become so freighted with ideology that words themselves are distorted by meanings acquired in the context of conflicting ideologies. This may be what is happening in the joined context of “intrinsic disorder” and personal gender, whether, heterosexual, bi-sexual or homosexual.

If people are interested in having a discussion about God, Neitzsche and the papacy, visit James Aire's blog at:

http://jamesaire.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/deus-est-etiam-mortuus-god-is-still-dead/

Post comments on that site.