Секс, религия и атеизм

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Sex, Religion, and Anti-Religion
Sex, Religion, and Anti-Religion

The present age has been justly called the Post-Christian Age. Traditional Christian teachings are crumbling everywhere. It is not, perhaps, very difficult to find arguments in support of the view that this is a good thing, or that it is a bad thing. It largely depends on what we want to put in place of the dear departed. But in any case, one can scarcely avoid feeling a pang of sympathy for the Christians, especially perhaps the Christian clergy. Most Christian ministers of all denominations are, after all, decent, upright, hard-working and conscientious men who are desperately striving to do a good job and at least save something worth-while from the wreckage. They are usually desperately under-paid, they preach to their dwindling flock to the best of their ability, and they are stuck with an impossible situation. They may often be ignorant and sometimes bigoted, but they find themselves mocked by those who are often enough equally ignorant and bigoted, and whose sole aim is frequently to replace their creed, however inadequate, by something ever more negative and destructive. If the Church, even in its present enfeebled state, were to disappear totally from the scene, the loss, despite all doctrinal inadequacies and absurdities, would certainly be greater than any conceivable gain. It is not quite true that any religion is better than no religion, for some forms of religion (including some Christian sects) are unbelievably awful. But the best, or even the second-best, of Christianity is assuredly a lot better than most of the purely secular substitutes for it. This, as Buddhists, we should be freely prepared to admit, without thereby in the least falling into the trap of saying, "Well, it's all the same thing really," when it quite obviously isn't. The basic Christian attitude to sex is well enough known, and has been briefly outlined above. It can assume thoroughly unhealthy forms, but in its more moderate aspects it can perhaps still serve as a fairly useful basis for decent behavior. At least it does provide some reasons which a good many people can accept as a basis for morality.

Now of course one can have morals without religion. It is not too difficult to produce purely social reasons for a lot of moral conduct, sexual or otherwise, and the best of the anti-religious propagandists today are at pains to do this. But some others do not. Their policy is simply to controvert anything and everything the Churches teach and stand it on its head. Sensuality and aggression, it is argued, are basic drives in man which it is dangerous to dam up and which should, accordingly, be allowed free play. In the case of aggression, the fallacy is so obvious that there are few who would literally subscribe to this, though some societies in practice seem to allow it plenty of scope. But in the case of sex, complete permissiveness really is openly preached in some quarters, and in fact a Swedish doctor has even announced that he wants to organize a corps of volunteers to provide everybody with sexual intercourse. This would apparently make everybody happy and the millennium would have arrived.

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Редакция перевода от 20.03.2015 14:22