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woman’s menstrual cycle and seven days after. The practice is based upon ancient ideas of female uncleanliness. What is the message to a woman if she is told she is unclean for one third of each month?
    All religions say that sexual prohibitions are in the interest of greater enlightenment, salvation, freedom from sin and closer communion with god. If you take away the supernatural or spiritual, the whole scheme falls like a house of cards. Why would I deny myself one of the greatest pleasures in life? Without the promise of a great supernatural reward or greater punishment, such self-denial makes little sense. Plus, it is entirely possible that your sexual sacrifice will be in vain.
    If the Muslim god is correct, then the Christians may as well enjoy themselves since they are going to Islamic Hell. If the Baptist god is correct, all the abstinence and celibacy by Catholic priests is a big waste of potential pleasure and a lot of suffering for nothing.
    Once you recognize that sexual restriction is critical to religious propagation, you can construct a new sexual framework for yourself. To construct that new framework, to design a map that has some relationship to reality, we must understand biology, psychology, history and anthropology. It requires us to look at sex across many times and cultures, to understand the breadthand depth of human sexual practices. Armed with this information, we can begin to make informed decisions about our sexuality. We can also learn the appropriate place of sex in creating and supporting the joy that comes from bonds formed in long-term committed relationships.
    Removing religion from sex allows for an exploration that is unencumbered with dogma. Ethics become more important than religious notions of morality. In the following chapters we will look at religious sexual myths.
     
    9 Joseph Smith had a total of 34 wives in all, some as young as 14. Eleven of his wives were already married to other men when he essentially stole them under the command of his god (See http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/ ). Brigham Young, leader of Mormonism after Joseph Smith’s death, went several steps further and married 55 women. At least six had living husbands before he stole them.
    10 Congress made elimination of polygamy a condition for statehood.
    11 Guttmacher Institute News Release, 19 Dec 2006, “Premarital Sex Is Nearly Universal Among Americans, And Has Been For Decades.” Online at http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2006/12/19/index.html .
    12 A very informative editorial in the
Bangkok Post
decries the sexual corruption of the Buddhist clergy. If one simply substituted Catholic for Buddhist, the article would be virtually identical to any that might have been written in
The Boston Globe
or the
Irish Times
; (Sanitsuda Ekachai, “Sex in the monastery,” available online at http://www.bangkokpost.com/blogs/index.php/2009/01/30/sex-in-the-monastery?blog=64 ).
    13 As reported online at http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_india-ranks-as-low-as-141-in-condition-of-women-survey_1591332 .

CHAPTER 3:
SCREWING WITH RELIGIOUS MYTHS
    Many common sexual beliefs are founded in religious indoctrination. They often impact us profoundly without our knowledge
.
Common Myths
    Many myths are built into our sexual ideas. Most people never question or examine them. In fact, to question the myths is to question the religion. How does one question the virgin birth without questioning Catholicism? How does one examine the pedophilia of Mohamed marrying a nine-year-old girl without questioning Islam? How does one talk about Joseph Smith’s revelation in the 1840s that Mormon men can have many wives and President Wolford’s “about face” revelation in 1890 that Mormons can only have one wife, without questioning the foundations of Mormonism? All of these are sexual myths.
    The very first story in the book of Genesis is a sexual myth, “… then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were