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I don't remember masturbation being mentioned in the bible.
Usually it's the ones hitting others over the head with crap like that with the problem. Serial masturbator feeling guilt because he was scolded as a child and now must overcompensate. Beefcake is a good touch. Teh homosex repression is apparent as well.
I don't remember masturbation being mentioned in the bible.
Don't try to understand 20th / 21st century evangelical Christians. I was raised in that environment, and find it difficult to comprehend in retrospect. This specific factor (not masturbation per se, but rather a literal adherence to the unaccountably random interpretation of the specific text of the NIV version of the Christian bible by people who appear only to have read the Cliffs' Notes version of it) was actually one of two causal factors in the dissolution of a relationship which I honestly thought was "the one."
Sometimes people just miss the forest for the trees. I'm guessing this person was just fine fornicating with you but they couldn't get past some other issue they decided wasn't so fine? People are funny.
Edit:
Needs picture for this thread.
Here's a decidedly Nordic depiction of an average-looking Jewish man. :sigh:
Last edited by sixshooter; 07-11-2019 at 06:52 AM.
I'm guessing this person was just fine fornicating with you but they couldn't get past some other issue they decided wasn't so fine?
Pretty much. She was a little uncomfortable with the fact that I wasn't totally enthusiastic about the church, and I came to realize that I wasn't ok with someone who was.
And yet the sex was amazing (and surprisingly violent at times) which I think was largely indicative of the relief of years of pent-up frustration on her part of framing romantic intimacy within the boundaries of the modern evangelical church.
It was an amicable parting, with no hostility or anger.
Actually, writing this post reminds me of something, While heading back from a weekend at a very nice little B&B in the Blue Ridge mountains, we stopped for the night at her parents' house in NC, where of course we spent the night in separate guest bedrooms*. Anyway, while there, I happen to recall taking particular note of literally the one single bookshelf that was present in the very chill, relaxed den on the second floor that was open to the first floor and had a killer view of the sunrise across the mountain range through some very large windows.
And I took a picture of that bookshelf. Took me a few minutes to find that photo, but it was so memorable that I had no doubt I'd taken it. Here it is:
That's it. That was literally all the literature there was in the house. Well, ok, it was actually about 3x what you see in the photo (I wanted to be sure that the titles were all visible) but you know what I mean.
I'll be honest, that freaked me out. Not in a way like I feared for my safety or anything- totally different vibe. More like "Holy cow, people like this actually exist in a form which otherwise passes for normal / undetectable."
* = It was such an odd thing. Her dad is basically a dead-ringer for Robert Denero in "Meet the Parents." And so there was this air of "Look, I know that you are nailing my daughter, and you're both adults and so that's your business. But while you're under my roof, we're going to all pretend that nothing like that is happening, and we're not going to feel awkward about projecting that fiction, ok?"
Pretty much. She was a little uncomfortable with the fact that I wasn't totally enthusiastic about the church, and I came to realize that I wasn't ok with someone who was.
Was this a new revelation, or did you think you'd be able to get past it? I've known since high school I couldn't be someone who was overtly religious, it just causes too many conflicts because of how differently people view things.
I dated a girl toward the end of my college career that became very serious. Here parents were Greek Orthodox, she wasn't really religious, but her parents were over the top with it. Like, "You stayed the night with him?" 22-year olds in college, they immediately bought me a plane ticket to Houston so they could meet me. Had to go to Church with them, all kinds of stuff. Her dad was saying "If you're going to start a family, why aren't you married and starting it yet, etc" We weren't engaged or anything and her parents hit me with both barrels.
Needless to say, one more trip down to Houston that summer, and our relationship was over. I knew I'd never survive with them being the in-laws.
Damn, don't get me started with in laws. Actually, my father in law is pretty cool.
But my mother in law won't talk to my sister in law because she got a divorce. This was to a guy who converted from Jew to Catholic as an adult in order to get married (in the church). Literally removed all photos of her from their home. MIL was fashionably late to the dinner we had to ask for their blessing on marrying their daughter, didn't say much during the whole thing. I bet it was because I wouldn't take communion at church.
People are crazy. Church is just another place where you can see a continuum between sane and insane or rational and irrational, friendly and completely isolationist. I've interacted with crazy, irrational, or isolationist people at various times with a wide range of backgrounds unrelated to a church.
Joe published some time back a matrix of religious belief structures that I thought was pretty good. Maybe he can find it and post it again. As an evangelical (though realistically not highly evangelistic) who raised his children as Young Earth Creationists, but has since come to believe in a very long time-frame for the existence in the Space - Time universe in which we live; I can attest that one's beliefs can span a very wide range; and tend to be quite personal.
I have become quite the fan of Jordan Peterson, who struggles with identifying as a Christian because he says that the meaning of the word is "Christ-like" and, really, who of us can make that claim.
Humans can get quite certain of a belief structure when we group together with others of like mind and tell the same stories to each other. Left, right, Atheist, Muslim; whatever.
Joe published some time back a matrix of religious belief structures that I thought was pretty good.
I honestly have no recollection of that. But if you do happen to find it, I'm interested.
And I also don't want it to sound as though I have anything against any specific religion, or religion in general. Quite to the contrary, I think that at a very basic, foundational level, most religions which are practiced in the present day have their origins in some form or another of "Don't be a dick."
And that's a good thing.
Where I do start to have an issue is where people start to use religion as a tool to deny fact. As an example, my mother & sister are both very firmly convinced that the universe was created six thousand years ago over the span of six 24 hour days, that a dude gathered literally every single species of animal on the entire earth into one specific point in the middle east and then went on a nice boat ride with them because more water than exists on the whole planet all fell as rain at once, and so on. And to be fair, it doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things whether you personally believe in angels and magic bushes or not, so it doesn't really get under my skin all that much.
Where I have even more of an issue is when people to try to impose their own religion on others. Like saying "You can't be gay-married because this book says that that's evil. (It also says that I'm not allowed to eat shrimp or wear clothes made from two different materials, but that part doesn't count.)"
Or saying "You're not allowed to teach science to children in schools, because this book, which was written by people who didn't understand that the earth revolved around the sun, says that it happened a different way."
That's a bad thing.
And the problem I have is that, in my experience, a very large number of people who profess to be "Christians" use that identity as a tool to justify oppressing / judging people who they don't agree with much more often than practicing the whole "love thy neighbor" bit.
In my specific case, religion itself wasn't an issue per-se. It was more the fact that I could sense that she was never really going to be happy with someone who wasn't a hardcore, bible-thumpin' fellow in Christ. We spoke openly of this on many occasions, and I even went to church with her on many occasions. (In fact, one of the highlights to one of her visits to Chicago was that we attended Sunday services at The Moody Church, which is apparently some famous, nationally-recognized megachurch that has its own radio network.
But I was just never into it in the way that she was, and kind of felt like a fraud pretending to go along with the rituals. And I hate feeling like a fraud. I consider myself to be agnostic, in the sense that I'm not closed to the idea that there is more to the universe than I am capable of comprehending, but I doubt that whatever that surplus is exists in the form of a roughly human-shaped invisible person (or persons) who lives in the sky and requires that I love him under penalty of eternal torture.
Her parents were actually extremely cool people. Like, I wouldn't at all mind having had them as in-laws, aside from the whole scene from Catch Me if You Can in which the candy-striper's parents are grilling Frank Abagnale to be sure that he's the correct kind of Lutheran. I didn't mean the Robert Denero thing as a criticism, it was actually kind of funny, and we all acknowledged it.
-=>HOWEVER<=-
This is the random pictures thread, not the religion thread, and so here is a picture of a thing which, so far as I have been able to ascertain, is actually a real thing:
07-10-2019, 10:47 PM
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