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ago with no roads and maybe a few animal paths. A map of that reality would be of little use today.
    An accurate map of a city or country requires measurement, constant adjustment and updating. No map can display every aspect of a particular landscape. Does a road map tell where the sewer pipes are? Does it show where the best soil for planting is? Maps are only an approximation of the territory.
    Religion tries to give us maps of sexuality that are no better than a 2,000-year-old map of my hometown. In addition, each religion also tries to convince us that their map is never wrong or inaccurate. If you have trouble understanding or interpreting the map, you need only talk to your imam, priest or minister. They can show you the way.
    If I were convinced that my 2,000-year-old home town map was god-inspired and totally accurate, I would ignore buildings, concrete, trees, cars and any other object that was not on my map. I would refuse to believe what was right before my eyes, and then very likely something terrible would happen – like crashing a car into a tree or a building. It seems like an absurd idea, but it is roughly the same as someone trying to use the Bible as a guide to sexuality. In the last 100 years, we’ve learned a lot of about human sexuality and sexual development.
    There are hundreds of Christian books on marriage. One of the long-time bestsellers is
Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy
by Gary Thomas (2000). Using this book as a map for sex and marriage teaches how to pray better, deal with conflicts through faith in Jesus and how to deny sexual appetite. Nowhere does the book discuss how to negotiate a fetish scene with your partner, nor does it contain information on fun, healthy sex. But it does have a lot of ideas about how wrong sex is in the eyes of god. The underlying message, repeated ad nauseam, is one of guilt couched in “spiritual” language. Sex is a minor part of god’s plan and shouldn’t be an important part of a faith-based marriage. It is not until Chapter 11 , “Sexual Saints: Marital Sexuality Can Provide Spiritual Insights and Character Development,” that Thomas discusses sex.
    Thomas’ book, as well as most Christian marriage books, is an excellent exercise in how to create huge amounts of guilt between two marriedpeople. The irony of groups that study books like this is that many, if not most, had sex before marriage, masturbate and peek at porn occasionally, all the while pretending they never do such things. In other words, they are behaving like human beings even as they pretend that some ethereal, spiritual entity inhabits their bodies and watches them day and night to keep them righteous.
    The book is all about god. It is really a threesome, with an invisible man in the middle constantly meddling with the pleasure and bonding that ordinarily develops between married couples. This is a formula for disastrous sexual communication, and ultimately, divorce or a sexless marriage. Having talked to and witnessed uncounted Christian marriages, I have concluded the product of this kind of training is anxiety and guilt. Within a few years, sex loses meaning and fun, becomes perfunctory and may cease altogether.
Don’t Defile Yourself (or you will go blind)
    All religions have something to say about sex, and it rarely coincides with scientific knowledge of sex and sexuality. How many times has a young person suffered through the night, praying and asking Jesus or Allah to help him not defile himself by masturbating? How many young lives have been destroyed in Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia because religious parents caught their daughter kissing a boy? How many Baptists or Catholics have suffered through years of sexual deprivation because their religion prohibits premarital sex? How many pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases have children of evangelicals contracted because their religion disapproves of sex