Why Religious Fundamentalists Are Sex Obsessed

There's a reason that religious fundamentalists of both the Christian and Islamic variety share a common obsession with sex.  It is all about control.  Control of people's lives and, at least in the minds of the theocrats, control of people's thoughts.  Thoughts that might lead the populous to over throw the theocrats' influence and control, especially political control.   In Iran, the religious extremist government is waging a war against women who fail to wear head covers.  While utterly different on the surface from the American Christofascists' war on LGBT citizens, the root motivation is the same: power and control - and thought control so that the masses don't begin to release that they are being sold a bunch of fairy tales that help keep their religious elite in power.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at both the sex obsession of Iran's rulers and how it translates to American Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Welcome to Operation Spider 2. Yes, Iran’s War Against Hair even has a code name. In a sting led by no less significant a unit than Iran’s cybercrimes division, eight other models were arrested and charged with “promoting western promiscuity.” State prosecutor for cybercrimes Javad Babaei confirmed that his unit was focused on Instagram and is concerned with “sterilizing popular cyberspaces.” Many of the country’s leading models have reportedly suffered this clampdown. They are accused of promoting "immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity.”

As moderate political forces continue to gain ground in Iran’s educated city centers, establishment clampdowns against “Western promiscuity” are becoming more visible, and more desperate. 

A desire to restrict any of these voices is a desire to control. When enforced on others, religion becomes nothing but a tool of power and control. Sexuality, in particular, obsesses male theocrats more so than any other topic. 

Whether in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women’s dress is government enforced, or in Syria and Afghanistan, where Islamist terrorists seek to enforce it, or across Muslim-majority nations more generally, sexual expression has fast become a dividing line for fundamentalists harboring presumptuous assumptions about a “pure” East and a “promiscuous” West. 

Oddly, hundreds of years ago it was the opposite. A Europe in the Dark Ages, plagued by the Inquisition and conflicts caused by religious intolerance, placed a similar premium on sexuality. Back then, it was the East that European Orientalists fetishized as overly “promiscuous,” while the West valued its prudishness. The one common factor is a correlation between the rise of theocratic demands anywhere, and restrictions on sexuality.

In this way, sexuality has become the axis upon which enlightened values and progress have pivoted between nations. Sexual freedoms have become a litmus test between open societies and closed ones. The drug that dogmatic ideologues are usually addicted to is control, and the thirst for control almost always manifests itself in sexual control. This is why the subject of sex among women, gays and “unmarried” youth fascinates extremists of all bents. And it is why—regardless of our gender or sexual orientation—the struggle against controlling sexuality should preoccupy us all. 

Publisher Pulls Best-Seller About Made Up Journey to Heaven

The pious seemingly will fall for all kinds of snake oil.  A case in point?   "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life Beyond This World"which was pulled by Tyndale House, a leading Christian publisher, after its subject, Alex Malarkey acknowledged in an open letter that he was lying about his supposed experience.  It turns out, the entire storyline was made up by Malarkey who "wanted attention" and seems to have been trying to please others, including Alex's father who co-authored the book.  Sadly, this is not the first book that has publicized supposed visit to Heaven and back.  The sheeple are all too willing to be fleeced it would seem.  CBS News has coverage.  Here are highlights:

A best-selling account of a 6-year-old boy's journey to heaven and back has been pulled after the boy retracted his story.

Spokesman Todd Starowitz of Tyndale House, a leading Christian publisher, confirmed Friday that Alex Malarkey's "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life Beyond This World" was being withdrawn. Earlier this week, Malarkey acknowledged in an open letter that he was lying, saying that he had been seeking attention. He also regretted that "people had profited from lies."

"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," he wrote.

"The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" was first published in 2010 and told of a 2004 auto accident which left Malarkey in a coma. According to the book, co-written by Alex's father, Kevin Malarkey, he had visions of angels and of meeting Jesus. In 2014, Tyndale reissued "The Boy," which on the cover includes the billing "A True Story."

The facts of "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" have long been disputed in the Christian community, which has challenged reports of divine visions in Malarkey's book and other best-sellers such as Todd Burpo's "Heaven is for Real." Last June, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution declaring "the sufficiency of biblical revelation over subjective experiential explanations to guide one's understanding of the truth about heaven and hell." One of the leading critics has been Malarkey's mother, Beth.  In April 2014, she wrote a blog posting saying that the book's success had been "both puzzling and painful to watch" and that she believed Alex had been exploited.

"I could talk about how much it has hurt my son tremendously and even make financial statements public that would prove that he has not received moneys from the book nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it," she wrote.

The same type of fairy tales unfortunately are peddled from pulpits around the world every Sunday.  Some day one can only hope that more people will wake up to the reality that religion is focused on money and controlling others.  If there is a higher being, he/she/it is not what is being marketed by those motivated by greed and a desire to exploit others.

Quote of the Day - What Gay Acceptance is Revealing About the Christianists

The "first kiss" photo of two local sailors (at right) and the YouTube video version of the same continues to provoke a lot of commentary. One comment left on Andrew Sullivan's blog summed up - in my view at least - the reason for the absolute hysteria among Christianists over gay marriage and the growing acceptance of LGBT individuals as normal everyday citizens:

Dan Savage wrote: "The growing civil equality of gays and lesbians—from marriage equality in Canada and New York to the end of DADT in the USA—is revealing a lot of things." Among them, just how non-existent a threat it all was, he says. And I think in retrospect that THIS is what the right was most afraid of. Not that society as they knew if would crumble, or that God would damn everyone. But that things wouldn't change at all. That their story about hellfire and damnation would be revealed for what it was: pure fiction. And that in large measure, their authority (moral or otherwise) would be diminished.

The far right Christians' (and the Catholic Church's) opposition to gay rights and marriage equality has ultimately nothing to do at all with "protecting marriage." Rather, it's all about maintaining control of others. But even more importantly, it's about not facing the fact that much of their lives have been based on myths and lies. This terror of realizing it was all untrue and that they've led needlessly miserable lives is what is the strongest motivator of all. Of course, there are also those like Maggie Gallagher who want to make a ton of money marketing hate and division.

The Lucrative Business of Sainthood

For most of organized religion - regardless of the faith - the three pillars of the faith business come down to power, control and not least money. And few institutional religious focus on these three pillars more than the Roman Catholic Church, especially in terms of money and control. All power flows from Rome in a model not too different from that of the Roman Empire upon which the Church's power structure came to be modeled. And as for money, as in the days that led up to the Reformation, the Vatican is all about money and ways to generate money - including making saints as a lure for pilgrims to come to Rome where they can be separated from some of their hard earned cash. And the master of utilizing sainthood to benefit the Church's bottom line (and by ripple effect the merchants and hoteliers of the City of Rome) was John Paul II who has now been beatified himself. I'm on the record against the raising up of a man who knowingly allowed and/or sought to cover up the molestation of countless thousands of children and youths. Such is anything but saintly behavior. A piece in New York Review looks at the monetary side of John Paul II's sainthood factory if you will. Here are some highlights:
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Do Romans really feel the way [Mayor] Alemanno thinks they should about fasttracking John Paul II for sainthood? Roman merchants, at least, are keeping all their bases covered. Newsstands offer 2012 calendars with “Saint Giovanni Paolo II,” John Paul biographies, John Paul key chains, John Paul refrigerator magnets
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It was, after all, John Paul himself who discovered how lucrative the mass encouragement of sainthood can be, both for the city and for the Church. Over his two-and-a-half-decade papacy, he beatified 1,340 people and canonized 483—more than his predecessors had done in four centuries, attracting millions of Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican in the process. His Vicar for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, supervised the creation of a bus tour called “Christian Rome” modeled on the city-run Archeobus, which led from the Forum down the Appian Way; now the yellow open-top buses of Roma Cristiana are a huge business . . . .
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The way Rome’s residents actually feel about the late pope depends on their own experience. For Eastern Europeans, he symbolizes the great change in their own lives. Romanians now make up the largest foreign community in Italy, having exchanged the Soviet bloc for the European Union. Their ranks in Italy include a large population of Romas, many of whom, desperately poor, live in makeshift shanty towns underneath viaducts, amid the rushes in the flood plain of the Tiber, in the bushes of the city’s parks. . . . For these people, John Paul is a powerful symbol. Italians and native Romans, many of whom saw the late pope in person, run the gamut from faithful Catholics to rabid anticlericalists; opinions show the same range among most of the foreign communities in Rome outside the former Eastern bloc.

Regent student gets flak for Robertson photo on Web site

Closer to home than Tulsa, Pat Robertson's Regent University's administration is having hissy fits and threatening a law student with expulsion because he dared post an unflattering photo of Robertson on a Face Book page. No doubt, Robertson thinks God has appointed him censor of the world. I, like a number of people in this area, find Pat Robertson to be a regional embarrassment and a deterrent to progressive business moving into the area. Thus, I am dumbfounded, for example, as to why Norfolk International Airport has allowed Pat/Regent to buy a huge advertising space on one of the main concourses. How many people has Pat's face scared away from deciding to relocate their business to the area? But, like Richard Roberts, Pat throws his money around and often gets what he wants while people look the other way.

In any event, I digress. Here are some highlights from the Virginian Pilot's story (http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=134434&ran=10232&lpos=spot3&lid=homePO) on Regent's war against a single student. I am sure Regent is not happy about the coverage:

Regent University officials have threatened to discipline a law student for posting on his Facebook page an unflattering photo of Regent President Pat Robertson. The student, Adam M. Key, defended his action as constitutionally protected free speech in a 14-page legal brief he presented to the dean of the law school. Regent officials gave Key two choices: publicly apologize for posting the picture and refrain from commenting about the matter in a “public medium,” or write a brief defending the posting. He faces punishment that could include expulsion.

Key, a second-year law student, said he refused to apologize and “be muzzled” by the university, so he composed the document, which includes citations from noted First Amendment cases. The picture, posted on Key’s Facebook social-networking Web page, shows Robertson making what appears to be an obscene hand gesture.

Key said that Jeffrey Brauch, dean of the law school, rejected his brief and that he now awaits disciplinary action under the university’s Standard of Personal Conduct. At one point during the controversy, Key said, he was escorted by three armed security guards from the university’s public relations office.

Unlike public institutions, private universities do not have to adhere to First Amendment guarantees in enacting codes of student conduct, said Howard Wasserman, visiting associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law. “But in my view, any university, in its role as a place for robust and uninhibited debate, should commit itself to the principles of the First Amendment, even if it offends the president,” said Wasserman, who has written about free-speech issues. He noted that Regent, as a Christian school, “may have a different view of how the speech issue fits into its mission.”

Wasserman said Harvard University, like Regent a private institution, probably wouldn’t take such an action against a student “because they know faculty members would be outraged and there would be public ridicule.” He characterized a university punishing a student for posting satire on his personal Web page as “a dangerous action.” “The more the power structure starts to get at private expression, the more it looks like they’re engaging in thought control,” he said.

Thought control? Do you really think so? That's the Christianists' main agenda - thought control and the elimination of knowledge, reason and logic. P.S. as with the Roberts family in Tulsa, Pat Robertson lives most lavishly over at Regent University. Having a "ministry" is very lucrative.

Other publications carrying stories include the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/11/america/NA-GEN-US-Christian-Critic.php),