Lilith
07-23-2006, 06:06 PM
Carnal Knowledge
By Faye Flam (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2003143125_carnalknowledge23.html)
McClatchy Tribune News Service
Thanks to Jason Weeden, an evolutionary psychologist at Arizona State University, I now have fresh insight into the following missive that arrived on my voice mail late one night:
"Miss Flam, I've been meaning to call for about two weeks per your [unintelligible] column on [unintelligible], comparing plastic shopping bags to the aggravates of sodomy, adultery and bestiality. I don't know how you got this column, but I think you're non compos mentis and you don't deserve a column. Bestiality, adultery and sodomy are hideous sins." (Funny, others told me I don't deserve a column because I once hinted I lacked an intimate acquaintance with the vibrator known as the Hitachi Magic Wand.)
The column in question listed three different practices: premarital sex, masturbation and homosexuality. I've never written about bestiality unless you count that article about human stragglers who allegedly continued to mate with chimps after the two species separated.
So why the hostility?
"We tend to massively underestimate the number of people who are fundamentally not like us," said Weeden. The caller would probably be surprised to know how many people measure sin in grams of saturated fat. Others can't imagine their fellow citizens expending emotional energy over the notion of bestiality, hideous or not.
In June, Weeden presented a talk at the Human Behavior and Evolution meeting in Philadelphia, in which he proposed that sexual behavior, morality and religion work together to create a deep cultural divide. "The culture war is really a reproductive war," he said.
And it's not just that being religious influences your sex life, he told the meeting. Your sex life can also make you more or less religious.
Apparently he wasn't talking about the cries of "Oh God" at those climactic moments.
"The standard story is that you're raised religious or not and end up adopting a set of beliefs that's imbued or not, and that leads you to behave in a certain way," he said.
He suspected a more complicated cause-and-effect relationship among sex, morals and religion. So he looked at data from the general survey, which posed a variety of questions to a sample of 30,000 Americans. Some dealt with relative monogamy or promiscuity, some with religious belief, and others with moral views on such issues as premarital sex, abortion and homosexuality.
His conclusion: Religion, morality and sexual behavior influence each other in all directions. "Adopting a more monogamous mating strategy can make you more religious," he said.
But this doesn't explain the bitterness. Can't we all just get along?
Weeden said no, because those of us with a more "promiscuous" bent really do pose a threat. Imagine you're a woman who quits college or never goes, marries the first man she has sex with, bears lots of children and lacks job skills.
"You'd want your culture to encourage stable marriage because that's the thing that's making your life work," he said. You are going to feel threatened by people who not only practice premarital sex, but say, as I did in that column, that there's nothing wrong with it.
"This isn't about biblical texts; it's about animals with conflicting reproductive strategies," he said.
That doesn't mean all religious people are at war with gays and nonvirgin, unmarried women. Randall Balmer, an evangelical Christian and professor of religious history at Barnard College, said he cares much more about the torture of prisoners and poverty here in the United States.
Abolition of slavery, female suffrage and other issues of human rights and social justice united the evangelical movement, he said, a history he details in his recent book "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America." "The Bible says almost nothing about homosexuality or abortion and yet these are the issues they've become fixated on," he said.
And don't forget the all-important hideous sin of bestiality.
Faye Flam's column appears Sundays in The Northwest Life section
By Faye Flam (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2003143125_carnalknowledge23.html)
McClatchy Tribune News Service
Thanks to Jason Weeden, an evolutionary psychologist at Arizona State University, I now have fresh insight into the following missive that arrived on my voice mail late one night:
"Miss Flam, I've been meaning to call for about two weeks per your [unintelligible] column on [unintelligible], comparing plastic shopping bags to the aggravates of sodomy, adultery and bestiality. I don't know how you got this column, but I think you're non compos mentis and you don't deserve a column. Bestiality, adultery and sodomy are hideous sins." (Funny, others told me I don't deserve a column because I once hinted I lacked an intimate acquaintance with the vibrator known as the Hitachi Magic Wand.)
The column in question listed three different practices: premarital sex, masturbation and homosexuality. I've never written about bestiality unless you count that article about human stragglers who allegedly continued to mate with chimps after the two species separated.
So why the hostility?
"We tend to massively underestimate the number of people who are fundamentally not like us," said Weeden. The caller would probably be surprised to know how many people measure sin in grams of saturated fat. Others can't imagine their fellow citizens expending emotional energy over the notion of bestiality, hideous or not.
In June, Weeden presented a talk at the Human Behavior and Evolution meeting in Philadelphia, in which he proposed that sexual behavior, morality and religion work together to create a deep cultural divide. "The culture war is really a reproductive war," he said.
And it's not just that being religious influences your sex life, he told the meeting. Your sex life can also make you more or less religious.
Apparently he wasn't talking about the cries of "Oh God" at those climactic moments.
"The standard story is that you're raised religious or not and end up adopting a set of beliefs that's imbued or not, and that leads you to behave in a certain way," he said.
He suspected a more complicated cause-and-effect relationship among sex, morals and religion. So he looked at data from the general survey, which posed a variety of questions to a sample of 30,000 Americans. Some dealt with relative monogamy or promiscuity, some with religious belief, and others with moral views on such issues as premarital sex, abortion and homosexuality.
His conclusion: Religion, morality and sexual behavior influence each other in all directions. "Adopting a more monogamous mating strategy can make you more religious," he said.
But this doesn't explain the bitterness. Can't we all just get along?
Weeden said no, because those of us with a more "promiscuous" bent really do pose a threat. Imagine you're a woman who quits college or never goes, marries the first man she has sex with, bears lots of children and lacks job skills.
"You'd want your culture to encourage stable marriage because that's the thing that's making your life work," he said. You are going to feel threatened by people who not only practice premarital sex, but say, as I did in that column, that there's nothing wrong with it.
"This isn't about biblical texts; it's about animals with conflicting reproductive strategies," he said.
That doesn't mean all religious people are at war with gays and nonvirgin, unmarried women. Randall Balmer, an evangelical Christian and professor of religious history at Barnard College, said he cares much more about the torture of prisoners and poverty here in the United States.
Abolition of slavery, female suffrage and other issues of human rights and social justice united the evangelical movement, he said, a history he details in his recent book "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America." "The Bible says almost nothing about homosexuality or abortion and yet these are the issues they've become fixated on," he said.
And don't forget the all-important hideous sin of bestiality.
Faye Flam's column appears Sundays in The Northwest Life section