Schuetz

Human beings are obsessed with sex. According to psychologists, men think in sex about fifty times per day. That is a lot considering that during most of the day they are supposedly working, studying or doing some other productive activity.

Women are not obsessed with sex but they are fixated with love and that ultimately ends up leading to the bed.

Through time, those regulating the functioning of society have tended to censure sex and have tolerated it only for the purpose of reproduction. Religion, which during 99.9% of history had a predominant role in policy making, almost always adopted this position. The Church demonized sexual intercourse and classified it as bad, evil, or immoral.

Considering the extremely low level of technological development of the world during the bulk of history, it could be said that such a position was inevitable.

Since there were no artificial contraceptives, sex translated almost always into pregnancy and that created a burden on a society that was always enduring hunger. Bringing more people into a hungry world was not the ideal thing and by condemning sex, religions succeeded in restraining the strong sexual urges of people. Such a policy thus, ultimately acted as a contraceptive.

There was also the problem of the demolishing effects that numerous pregnancies had on women. Up until the nineteenth century, women in Europe and America who would make it to their forties would usually die from cancer in the uterus. Since women would start having children in their teens, by the time they reached their thirties they had given birth to more than a dozen babies. Such intensive activity of the reproductive organs would frequently translate into a rapid deterioration of them.

There was as well the problem of sexually transmitted diseases, which have existed since the earliest of times. AIDS is of recent creation but syphilis, gonorrhea, and many others have preyed on humans for centuries and during all that time there was no way to treat them. The technology to cure them appeared only until the twentieth century.

An apologist of religion would thus argue that humanity must thank the creeds of this world for having helped society to deal better with its troubles during those hard epochs.

The truth of the matter is that religions systemically hindered the efforts of scientists to come up with solutions to the many problems that sex causes. Had they not imprisoned and murdered so many scientists, sooner would contraceptives and antibiotics made their apparition.

It was actually religions which prolonged the suffering of humanity. There is thus no good that came from the irrational position of the Church. At present, religions continue to condemn sex as immoral while offering no credible alternative other than prayer. Worst still, is that they continue to oppose science in all its fields and not just in those dealing with reproduction.

Science demonstrates that sex is not immoral or evil. It is just a mechanism of survival, like so many others, that was drilled into our genetic structure over millions of years of evolution. Without a very strong drive towards copulation, our specie would have disappeared in its early stages because during the bulk of history infant mortality was extremely high and life expectancy extremely low. A rapid system of reproduction was thus needed and without a very potent sexual urge it would have not been possible.

Although not immoral, sex nonetheless, still has the potential to wreck havoc on an individual and over an entire nation. However, like everything else, the solution is not prayer or moral preaching, but technology.