Why a separate set of rules for sex?

Debating issues regarding sexuality

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Box Whatbox
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Why a separate set of rules for sex?

Post #1

Post by Box Whatbox »

Sexual behaviour seems to attract excessive attention in Abrahamic scriptures. Why is that?
There exist already, in Abrahamic as in other faiths and social customs, sets of rules and agreements concerning how we should behave toward each other, in general.
What is so special about sex?

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Post #21

Post by DanieltheDragon »

bluethread wrote:
DanieltheDragon wrote: [Replying to post 11 by bjs]

There are 24 forbidden sexual relations alone, compared to the 7 commandments on crime. I would say the bible is a we bit excessive about sex. The only thing sex obsessed about our culture is those that want to foist their religious ideologies about sex into others. Everyone else is simply asking them to mind their own business.

Yes beyond coercion and rape laws stipulating that I have to sacrifice a pair of doves if I have sex with my wife while she is on her period seems excessive and obsessed. It seems to me there are bigger fish to fry besides women's menstration cycles...
Is that a sex law or a bodily discharge law? If you will notice, in the same chapter(Lev. 15), a man with a bodily discharge has to do the same thing. How one chooses to organize the various laws can often bias one's interpretation of those laws.

I was under the impression it was a discharge law dealing with sex. So is there a both option? Regardless it does seem a bit excessive whether we are dealing with sexual discharge or just sex. Also I think only the woman had to sacrifice and not the man.
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Post #22

Post by DanieltheDragon »

[[url=http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 048#711048]Replying to post 20 by Bluethread
It has to do with fitness for going to the Temple, which does not exist at this point.
Not sure I understand this.
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Post #23

Post by Goat »

DanieltheDragon wrote: [[url=http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 048#711048]Replying to post 20 by Bluethread
It has to do with fitness for going to the Temple, which does not exist at this point.
Not sure I understand this.

It means that someone is ritualistically unclean. The temple was a holy place, and there was special rules for keeping it 'clean' in a rituralistic sense. The Mikvah bath was used to 'clean' people to a state of purity from for example menstruation, or if they had to handle a corpse, or any one of many 'ritualistically unclean' states. Since the temple no longer exists, the conditions that require you to be cleansed ritualistically don't have a meaning, since it was to allow someone to enter the temple. There isn't any temple to enter, so being 'unclean' is not the kind of restriction it used to be.

Many orthodox, and some conservates still are concerned with it, but technically, it's not really needed.
“What do you think science is? There is nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. So which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?�

Steven Novella

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Post #24

Post by DanieltheDragon »

Goat wrote:
DanieltheDragon wrote: [[url=http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 048#711048]Replying to post 20 by Bluethread
It has to do with fitness for going to the Temple, which does not exist at this point.
Not sure I understand this.

It means that someone is ritualistically unclean. The temple was a holy place, and there was special rules for keeping it 'clean' in a rituralistic sense. The Mikvah bath was used to 'clean' people to a state of purity from for example menstruation, or if they had to handle a corpse, or any one of many 'ritualistically unclean' states. Since the temple no longer exists, the conditions that require you to be cleansed ritualistically don't have a meaning, since it was to allow someone to enter the temple. There isn't any temple to enter, so being 'unclean' is not the kind of restriction it used to be.

Many orthodox, and some conservates still are concerned with it, but technically, it's not really needed.
Ok that makes sense.
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Re: Why a separate set of rules for sex?

Post #25

Post by lamar1234 »

[Replying to post 1 by Box Whatbox]

In a society devoid of birth control, with arranged marriages, no conception of the 'dating' we engage in and, honestly, lacking the powerful and readily available substances that affect the pleasure centers of the brain, I might imagine the pleasure a person in a society like that would experience from and through sex would be almost completely unparalleled. I really tend to find the earthly explanations for the heavenly proscriptions much more plausible.

"Don't eat pork because you might get trichinosis and die" just isn't as persuasive as "God will damn you to hell for eating bacon."

Survival was much more tenuous and a tribe or clan of itinerant herders couldn't afford to have another mouth to feed that was, I'll use a loose definition of the word, 'addicted' to something. If a tribal male spent all his waking hours having sex or shooting heroin (even though there wasn't heroin), the negative affect on the tribe was the same. Many of the Levitical laws seem more aimed at reducing distractions and giving a man the lowest possible access to anything that took time away from his flock and helping to feed the family.

So, "Hey, man, don't spend all day listening to music or dancing" morphs, over time, into "Music is the devil's pipes and dancing allows demons to enter the world through your gyrating hips."

Try and imagine the utter dullness yet utter tenuousness of that life. Even with itinerant herders, they probably lived their entire lives in a 100 square mile area. Much less when villages, towns and cities developed. Never moving faster than a horse could run and horses were owned by a tiny minority of any of those populations. No bars. No nightclubs. No movies.

If one of a tribe's male members had sex too much on the brain it was going to mess up the cohesiveness of the group. Maybe his wife ends up pregnant too often and the tribe struggles to feed everyone. Contraception was dodgy, at best. It's an irony that religions often struggle the most with the idea of moderation. Many Biblical passages seem to rule out moderation in many areas as even possible. Not even worth the effort of trying to be moderate, it seems that the default answer to most anything was 'No.'

I admit, it's a cheap dig, but I can't help myself, can't say I've seen a great deal of change in that area, since those times in religion.

There had to be fairly strict rules for sex to protect every individual member of the group as much as the group at large. You're either living in cramped close quarters in a founded city or you lived in a close, itinerant or agricultural group, both needing discretion to avoid as many problems as could reasonably be avoided.

As a foolish young man I might tease a girlfriend about wearing a bikini, for instance. They are utterly ridiculous, are they not? By the time you get down to the size of the more risque ones, what's really the point of wearing one at all? I might ask a question similar to 'Why do girls wear clothes at all?'

I remember on one occasion a rather thoughtful young lady I knew answered me with a pitying shake of her head "we wear clothes so as not to make OTHERS uncomfortable." I think the taboos about sex are also tied to that sort of feeling. In and of itself, where's the real harm in two people just engaging in sex right there in front of everybody? The harm seems to be not from or with the two people but others who'd think or say "I don't want to see that!"

It's pretty easy to turn "I don't want to see that!" into "God doesn't want to see that!"

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Post #26

Post by bluethread »

DanieltheDragon wrote:
bluethread wrote:

Is that a sex law or a bodily discharge law? If you will notice, in the same chapter(Lev. 15), a man with a bodily discharge has to do the same thing. How one chooses to organize the various laws can often bias one's interpretation of those laws.

I was under the impression it was a discharge law dealing with sex. So is there a both option? Regardless it does seem a bit excessive whether we are dealing with sexual discharge or just sex. Also I think only the woman had to sacrifice and not the man.
Lev. 15:1- "The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'When any man has a bodily discharge, the discharge is unclean. Whether it continues flowing from his body or is blocked, it will make him unclean. This is how his discharge will bring about uncleanness: " 'Any bed the man with a discharge lies on will be unclean, and anything he sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches his bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. Whoever sits on anything that the man with a discharge sat on must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. " 'Whoever touches the man who has a discharge must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. " 'If the man with the discharge spits on someone who is clean, that person must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. " 'Everything the man sits on when riding will be unclean, and whoever touches any of the things that were under him will be unclean till evening; whoever picks up those things must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. " 'Anyone the man with a discharge touches without rinsing his hands with water must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. " 'A clay pot that the man touches must be broken, and any wooden article is to be rinsed with water. " 'When a man is cleansed from his discharge, he is to count off seven days for his ceremonial cleansing; he must wash his clothes and bathe himself with fresh water, and he will be clean. On the eighth day he must take two doves or two young pigeons and come before the LORD to the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and give them to the priest. The priest is to sacrifice them, the one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. In this way he will make atonement before the LORD for the man because of his discharge."

This is the exact same chapter and the exact same requirements that apply to Niddah(menstruation). It is not about sex , it is about blood.

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Post #27

Post by Hamsaka »

[Replying to post 26 by bluethread]

Fascinating. What is the significance of evening time, as the point past which the person becomes clean again?

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Post #28

Post by bluethread »

Hamsaka wrote: [Replying to post 26 by bluethread]

Fascinating. What is the significance of evening time, as the point past which the person becomes clean again?
Evening and morning were the first day. The new day starts at sun down.

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Post #29

Post by Hamsaka »

bluethread wrote:
Hamsaka wrote: [Replying to post 26 by bluethread]

Fascinating. What is the significance of evening time, as the point past which the person becomes clean again?
Evening and morning were the first day. The new day starts at sun down.
Thanks, I'd never thought of it that way.

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