In fact, it was xianity’s f*cked-up notion of sexuality that, inter alia, led me to Paganism. “All acts of love and pleasure are rituals of the Goddess” was a large part of what led me here.

I am opposed to sentient beings getting hurt. Given that, what other people do with their plumbing is their business, not mine.
But that’s just me …

You know, I really cannot add anything more than to reiterate this:
“But to my mind, within our community no one spends any time worrying whether someone else’s way of relating sexually constitutes a problem, so long as they are consensually involved with adults”
As long as the act is between consenting adults who understand the potential consequences(pregnancy, STD’s), have at it. If anything, I wish the couple ENJOYMENT!

I have to second Hecate in that it was the knowledge of the view of sex (and frankly women in general) in the Roman Catholic church that first led me to consider that another path might be for me.

Since I was old enough to feel sexual desire I have had an instinctual knowing that sex was part of the great web of life and a powerful way of feeling more deeply my connection with the Divine. When I was 28 I finally had to admit that a lot of the struggles I was having related to sexuality, whether or not to leave a marriage I was not happy with, had to do with having been raised Catholic and the messages I received that went counter to my inner knowing.

Yes. It’s good to be Pagan and maybe a little more sex wise and sex positive.

Sex is one of the main joys in life! A basic need for every healthy person.
Teaching that we are “guilty” and “not worthy” and must be “saved” from our natural state is the cornerstone belief in some religions. Convince people that they are “wretches” and that sex is somehow dirty and our bodies are shameful, and you have expressways to guilt and the ability to control people through it.

Didn’t everyone know that “sex” is only for “procreation!!” )

Sexual taboos are not unique to Christianity, of course. That having been said, Christians—or many of them, anyway—do seem to obsess about it.
According to John Shelby Spong, this likely can be traced back to the period before the 7th century BCE, when the Hebrew worshippers of Yahweh were locked in an ongoing ideological, political, and military struggle with the surrounding peoples, whose religion centered on the worship of Baal and Asherah. The latter was, in Spong’s words (in Living in Sin), “a fertility cult tied to the cycles of the seasons and the fecundity of the soil and womb.” Sexual fertility was honoured as the source of all life. Yahweh, on the other hand, was seen as a solitary Divinity Who neither had nor required a mate, and who created by speaking a Word. This struggle, according to Spong, informs every page of the Jewish scriptures. Spong treats it as an explanation of the pervasive anti-female bias of the Hebrew scriptures, but, in my view, it could apply in the same way to the negative attitude towards sexuality in general—sometimes explicit, sometimes subtextual—that also pervades these scriptures.

In the context of Makarios’ posting, here are some excerpts from an interesting essay on a site called “Wesley Center for Applied Theology”: “Toward a holiness hermeneutic: the Old Testament against organized religion”, by John Wright http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/26-30/30-2-04.htm
(See original for the full text and footnotes; order slightly changed here for flow).
“Until fifteen years ago, the Canaanite goddess Asherah received little attention within the study of Israelite religion. She was deemed a foreign, deviant scourge rejected by the leaders of Israelite society.
We know most about her role in Canaanite religion from Ugaritic texts found at Ras Shamra. Here Asherah is the wife of the head of the Canaanite pantheon, El. Surrounded by her children, her “pride of lions,” she has the ability to seduce El (thus her role within the fertility cult of Canaanite religion). Iconographic evidence and the Hebrew Bible agree that her statue, her cult image, was a wooden pole….
Recently discovered inscriptions… have placed Asherah at the center of an important debate: Did Yahweh, the Israelite deity, have a consort?….
A series of inscribed potsherds, found at Khirbet Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, a pilgrimage site in northern Sinai, provides an entry point. Two eighth-century inscriptions, blessing graffiti left at the site, explicitly link Yahweh with the goddess Asherah. While the texts possess their own ambiguity, one inscription reads, “I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and by Asherata,” while another reads, “I bless you by Yahweh of Teman and by Asherata.” The inscriptions suggest a wide geographical spread of this dual devotion to Yawheh and Asherah, with Yahweh, first designated, the more prominent male deity. Though found in a southern site, the inscriptions locatively assign Yawheh to the north in Samaria as well as in Edom in Teman, a geographical association found also in Hab. 3:3. Furthermore, drawings accompanying the inscription on Pithos A clearly signify the cult image of Asherah.
Perhaps these data could be minimized as the deviant religious beliefs of a few wayfaring Israelites were it not for a similar tomb inscription found at Khirbet el-Qom, a site in Judah between Lachish and Hebron. Accompanied by a hand reaching up, itself possibly a symbol of Asherah, this eighth-century inscription reads: “Blessed is Uriyahu by Yahweh and Masaryahu by Asherata, he has saved him.” Again, devotion to Yahweh is accompanied by a female goddess, Asherah. Given that Uriyahu could afford a tomb with an inscription and its Judean location, it seems that devotion to Yahweh and Asherah existed among the Judean elite.
… Perhaps most interesting is the study of the earliest cult object found at a known Israelite site, the beautifully preserved ninth century cult stand from Taanach. While earlier interpreted as devoted to Baal and Astarte or Asherah, J. Glenn Taylor has convincingly argued that the stand actually images Yahweh and his Asherah. The stand contains no epigraphic evidence to aid its interpretation. Its iconography, however, reveals the same Israelite piety found in the Kunjillet ‘Ajrud and el-Qom inscriptions.
Four tiers compose the stand. The first, uppermost level contains a horse below a solar-disk with wings, all flanked by freestanding pillars. The second tier contains an asherah, a wooden pole/tree with a pair of ibex reaching into it, with lions on its side. The third tier has a vacant space between two cherubim. There is no evidence that any image ever stood between the cherubim. Finally, the bottom, fourth tier has two lions, exactly like level two, which surround a naked woman with exaggerated breasts, a typical fertility goddess.
The key to the interpretation of this stand is the obvious identity (shown by the lions) between tiers two and four. Both tiers refer to Asherah, tier four personifying her image, tier two symbolizing her image in the asherah. … Tier one … symbolizes Yahweh with a solar image, an identification found directly and indirectly in the OT. Israelite Tanaach worshiped Yahweh with his consort, Asherah. As in the inscriptions, Yahweh, the male deity, receives the highest devotion in the top tier, supported below by his “wife” Asherah. Yet the two belonged together in the Israelite mind, the image of God male and the image of God female. While the above data take place relatively early in the history of Israel, evidence within the Hebrew Bible also indicates that this devotion continued throughout the sixth century, if not beyond. … .
Unless we dismiss or ignore these data, the conclusion seems clear: Israelites imaged (the) god(s) as male (i.e., Yahweh) and female (i.e., Asherah). Yahweh, the male, owned the privileged place in the Israelite pantheon, with Asherah, the female, his subordinate. The evidence provided does not limit this devotion to a specific demographic, geographic, or chronological location. Israelites across many generations in various social strata, especially among the elite and within the cultus, imaged God as Yahweh and Asherah, a divine couple ensuring the fertility of the land. Though found elsewhere in the ancient Near East, Asherah was not a foreign import into normative Israelite worship, but an indigenous expression of normal Israelite piety.

Thank you for the link, Vida. Very interesting. For those who may wish to go into more depth, Raphael Patai devotes the first section of his well-known The Hebrew Goddess to an extensive discussion of the Goddess Asherah, and the second to Astarte.

well, I think that monotheists tend to become traumatic/problematic/frustrated/opressed in his/her sexual life/sensuality.
the funny is when they try to justificate/refute this obvious problems.

You’ve done it once more! Superb read.

Are there really any religions who don’t treat sex as a taboo topic? I think this will forever be an eternal struggle between “real life” sex and religion.