I remember once reading an article about Novak Djokovic – an earthy guy (must be being born on that Taurus-Gemini cusp), who doesn’t mind expounding on sex and who said, “It’s what God put us on this earth for.”
That stopped me cold, because if there’s one thing you very rarely read, it’s a sentence in which God and sex team together. The Bible tells us to multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, but let’s face it, we’ve been defining the conditions of the multiplication ever since. It really has applied only to heterosexual couples who don’t use birth control. Everyone else can forget the multiplication, let alone the filling and subduing.
Religion hasn’t always been hostile to sex, particularly the goddess movement. But the sky-god faiths, especially the Abrahamic ones, seem determined to control women’s bodies.
I must confess that as a practicing Roman Catholic, I, too, bought into the notion that sex was somehow dirty unless it was in the strict confines of a birth-control-less marriage. But as I became more educated, I realized that this wasn’t about sex or religion but sheer economics...
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Read MoreWhen I was a child, one of my favorite books was Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” set against the backdrop of revolutionary Paris and its archrival, London.
It’s a story about many different kinds of rivals and doubles, chiefly Charles Darnay, who’s noble in every sense of the word but finds himself paying for the aristocratic sins of his family, and Sydney Carton, the ne’er-do-well English barrister who nonetheless is capable of great courage and love.
Both men are in love with Lucie Manette, the daughter of a doctor whose mind has been ravaged by his imprisonment in Paris. Darnay wins her but Carton, who could be his twin, remains devoted. And when Darnay is unjustly imprisoned by revolutionaries and condemned to the guillotine, Carton hits on a plan to change places with him. But first he undergoes some soul-searching, wandering the streets of Paris. He takes comfort in the biblical words he once heard at a funeral:
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whoever so liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
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