My spiritual pedigree is a bit less than elite. OK. Understatement. Really, my religious outlook is a mutt. A beautiful, enduring, strong, supportive and empowering mutt, but a mutt nonetheless. I’m a progressive guy, who believes there is a God and a purpose to the universe besides random atoms colliding, and shit contracting and expanding over and over. I think Jesus was a loving Socialist with a wicked sense of sarcasm and a temper beneath the mostly placid surface. I think that God cares less about who and how you worship (or what name you attach to your objects of worship) than about whether you attempt to do right in life, and have some sense of emotional and spiritual growth. In my opinion, Jesus came to clear the air and get us focused on the right stuff, and to be a sort of spiritual “unifying theory” — I think he really is the gatekeeper for God, but he’ll be giving a lot of so-called Christians a rejection slip, and probably a way bigger number of non-Christians a backstage pass.

Also I think that God made sex to be enjoyed, not to be feared or reviled — and certainly not to be boxed up into categories of “this is good” and “this act sends you to Hell.”

Not that my spiritual development along these lines has always been a smooth journey, or a trip with scenic views all the time. Just like any progression through life, we are raised with a lot of expectations and preconceptions from various parts of family and society, and finding a healthy self within all that crap can be a pain in the ass. But mostly it’s progressed well, and it’s gelling together nicely.

Thing is, my spiritual journey started pretty traditionally and simply. Dad came from really Catholic family, and Mom came from a less-devout but also pretty Catholic family. Ergo, I was Roman Catholic. However, my Mom was a shit-disturber and early feminist from her tween or teen years, even though she was born in the late 1940’s (Go, Mom, for bucking the usual trends of your time!). This also meant, while she believed in God, she wasn’t all that fired up about churchgoing or moralizing. So, when she left my dad because of his drinking (don’t hate; he cleaned up his act later; they never put me in the middle of the two of them; he and she stayed friends mostly, and they actually got remarried when I was in college), and took me to a whole other state, church wasn’t a big part of my life, though I went occasionally (mostly holidays). When my Dad moved to the same state as us in my tween years, I ended up going more or less every week with him, as part of our time together.

I went to public elementary and middle school. I did go to Catholic high school, though. (However, I insisted on going to the co-ed one, rather than the all-boys one—I may have been shy and awkward, but I wasn’t stupid enough to deny myself the ability to be around girls at least). Through the years of church-going and Catholic school, though, I really didn’t take religion very seriously. I believed vaguely in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but tended to think there was a lot of idiocy, stupid empty rituals, and not much substance or relevance to my life.

So, I was functionally agnostic, and once I was in college, and later out on my own in the world, I didn’t go to church unless I happened to be visiting my folks. I still believed, more or less, but I didn’t think about religion or spirituality much.

When I met and dated my future wife, though, I started going to her church (she’s a preacher’s kid). I found God. I read the Bible all the way through for the first time, and really got it on a deep level. I put most of the dots together in my spiritual self—at least enough of them to connect with God. I was never one of those annoying holy roller types trying to convert folks (nor was my wife). But I admit for a while, I took the Bible somewhat more seriously than is warranted (as did my wife). Too literally. I NEVER took the whole thing literally, because that would require suspending disbelief in tons of science, but I did take some of the precepts to heart that are more than a little outdated, such as the idea that homosexuality wasn’t a state that one should be in. I never hated on gays, nor thought they were going to Hell simply because of being gay, but I did see it as a sin on some level. Many other things, too, in terms of sexual and other behaviors.

The fact is, though, logic and reason have long been a part of my life, as much so as imagination, and all of those things impact on my faith. I know that for some, the idea that reason/logic can be strong in someone of strong faith is an oxymoron, but it isn’t. In my mind, there is a physical world we understand with science; there is a spiritual one we can only explore via faith. In my mind, the most complete people recognize the need to explore both parts of reality.

It took a while for my newly “born again” status to wear off enough for me to completely begin to dissect the Bible and sort out the works of men from the works of God, in the New Testament in particular—especially when it came to gender and sexual issues. I find it interesting how the apostles and the early Christian church, for all of their liberal social and economic activities, began to add more and more of the Old Testament conservatism into Jesus’ new covenant. I believe that the gospels do a pretty good job of presenting Jesus, and in recognizing the failures and foibles of those who followed him. The other aspects, though, of the New Testament start going into areas (like sexuality) in ways that Jesus never focused on, because Jesus wasn’t there to set the agenda anymore. Mere humans were.

From my vantage point now, I see that for what it is: Control. And, in fact, it might have been necessary control at the time, much like the Old Testament was. The Bible as a whole is both a potentially uplifting and life-enhancing book, as well as being open to all sorts of abuse—said abuse usually being made possible by Christians failing to read, study and think about the Bible, and allowing others to tell them what it means. Following it to the letter had a time and place, but that time and place is long gone, and we have to revise our approach based on context. Jesus didn’t live in a world with a middle class, or modern healthcare, or the Internet, much less all the prophets and others who came before him.

Why would God care whether the ancient Hebrews had gay and lesbian sex? Why would God care whether you masturbated? Why would God care whether you had sex with animals? Or adultery? Or marrying non-Hebrews?

In many respects, I think God never cared. But if the Hebrews were the place He chose to begin to lay the path for Jesus’ arrival, then it made sense to close them off to some degree from outside influences. It made sense to encourage them toward siring offspring, something that could only be done through male-female intercourse. And whether or not God specifically directed the many laws of the Old Testament, or the priests alone did as a form of societal control, it may have been ultimately useful for the health and expansion of that group of people. There are negative aspects, to be sure, but many negative and repressive laws existed in ancient history—and modern history. That’s human nature. And things that are good or bad in one stage of history may be the opposite in another.

I tend to think that in the New Testament, the apostles and their successors were trying to keep the young and sometimes disorganized church cohesive in a time of great risk to all of them, and in a time when we didn’t have fast means of travel or communication. So I can forgive much about the intentions of those efforts, even if I suspect many of them weren’t divinely ordained.

But in the light of modern times, it’s reprehensible to use the Bible as a means of social control, sexually or otherwise.

Science, for example, has clearly shown that Genesis was wrong about the Earth being created in seven days—Genesis is essentially the “Creation for Dummies” book, because no one would have understood astrophysics and cosmology back then. God gave us the brains to figure out the world, and we should be using those brains to understand where reality ends and symbolism and metaphor begin. The Bible is a way of putting the spiritual and carnal into context and perspective, not a cut-and-paste handbook of behavior for all aspects of life, nor an explanation of how the universe came to be or how it works.

If there was a flood and an ark at all, there was no global deluge, and two of every creature weren’t stowed away. Maybe Goliath wasn’t a literal giant. Perhaps the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were a bit more complicated than anal intercourse. If there was an Adam and an Eve, they probably weren’t the first humans but rather the start of recorded spiritual history. Gotta start somewhere, right? Even if the tale get twisted to blame Eve, when it’s clear that Adam was the one who didn’t follow directions that were given to him specifically.

And you know what, God didn’t make it so we could develop sexual organs just because he wanted to make sure we’d fuck up and commit sexual sins and get on His bad side. Sex was made enjoyable for a reason. We’re expected to use it responsibly, and what responsibility entails changes with societal development. Our spiritual view of sex, therefore, must also adapt.

C’mon…when people only lived to be in their 40’s or 50’s, if they were lucky, you had sex with girls shortly after they hit puberty, and maybe before. That makes sense. Everything gets moved up chronologically under such circumstances. Life is short, hard and brutal, and you grow up fast and have kids early. In modern society, there is no excuse for having sex with someone undeveloped, immature, and unable to give real consent because they aren’t anywhere near adulthood or fully rational decision-making. A grown man or woman having sex with a child is just abusive and wrong. It’s amazing how conservatives can recognize this truth, and yet still enforce every other sexual rule in the Bible. Why don’t Bible-thumpers advocate sex with minors, which was clearly the norm in biblical times? Because they pick and choose the rules they think are important.

So, we see how age rules change.

What about animals?

Look, animals can’t consent. I don’t think God’s going to send you to Hell for fucking a sheep, but it’s just plain gross, OK? We have rules about consent for a reason. A dog may hump anything that moves sometimes, but we’re more discriminating than that. We have a pretty active frontal lobe—we can do math, science and philosophy. Aim higher than Fido. If you don’t want a human ass, pussy, mouth, hand, tits, feet or whatever, there are plenty of cheap sex toys out there you can get. Or make from common items. Leave the critters be. We shouldn’t need God to tell us that.

Sex before marriage? Why not? God doesn’t have marriage among the animals, even those with similar gonads as ours, so why is it a requirement for moral behavior? It isn’t. Sex is a tool for procreation, pleasure and emotional bonding. Marriage is a tool for social order. I think marriage can be very healthy, but it’s not a prerequisite for sex. Just as we’ve changed the approach to marriage (love over arranged marriages in much of the world, for example…and desire to be together over the requirement to spawn and create workers for the family farm or whatever), we also need to change the way we view sex vis-a-vis marriage.

Masturbation? It’s not even covered in the Bible. Onan didn’t get zapped for jacking off. His story is about what happens when you don’t obey Levitical law, and you refuse to marry and have kids with the widow of your late brother to keep the heir’s bloodline going. Spill your precious spermatozoa-filled speed on the ground, spray it against the wall, or all over your raisin bran. Whatever. The testicles produce millions of sperm, and your body absorbs them and makes new ones if you don’t ejaculate. If you were committing a carnal sin by jacking off, you would also being doing so every time you fail to have sex frequently. Abstinence “kills” as many sperm as masturbation does.

Gay sex. Look, I’m just going to mention two names: Jonathan and David. (If you can’t see, in reading about King David, that those two, despite David’s love of the ladies, had a thing going, you’re an idiot). Prohibitions of gay sex were no different than making women stay outside the camp during their periods. There was probably some health, social and/or other reason for it once—but God probably doesn’t care unless your gay or lesbian sex is cruelly abusive to another person.

To be honest, sexuality is perhaps one of the greatest gifts to humanity. We’re not ruled by instinct and mating seasons like many animals. We have the inventiveness to take sex to levels than even the most lurid chimp or bonobo monkey couldn’t imagine—and even they use sex for pleasure and commerce.

If you really read the New Testament, you’ll notice that Jesus didn’t talk much about sex, just like he didn’t harp on dietary laws or other minutiae. He was about social justice, being kind to others and eschewing violence. He spoke of love, and of seeking spiritual wholeness, not being such a slave to rules that we forget how to live. Jesus wasn’t a hedonist, but neither was he a prude. He understood human nature better than most of us, and what few things he did say about marriage and sex have been horribly overemphasized and taken out of context. If sexual behavior was that important, he would have decried butt-fucking amongst certain folks in Rome and Greece. He would have encouraged the stoning of the woman brought to him after begin caught in the act of adultery. He would have cast out the prostitutes instead of the moneychangers in the temple.

Sex can be one of the most spiritually enlivening acts around, especially in a committed relationship. Folks like the wiccans and the tantric folks have ritual and self-empowerment that is sometimes centered on sex. Even in Christianity, God let a lot of weird-ass sexual liaisons among high-profile prophetic and kingly folk go completely unchallenged, and the fact that he didn’t kills swaths of Hebrews daily is probably evidence enough that he didn’t give two shits what they were doing in their bedchambers.

I don’t think that the only path to find God is by accepting Jesus. Neither do I think the only right way to have sex is the way the apostles did. Or maybe I do—they might have been regular freaks when the lights went out.