Sex and Religion

by Ved Prakash

Recently a friend of mine who is in his fifties or late forties sent me an e-mail message containing a sexual joke. His message began as follows:

A guy from Uttar Pradesh (UP) was away from his family for about 4 years while his wife was in Jaunpur (UP).

At the end of 4 years he distributed sweets to his colleagues in office stating that his wife had delivered a son...

I wrote back to him saying that he should not send such messages.

Some people take delight in circulating jokes with sexual themes. This is understandable but hardly worth encouraging. Just as some publications print articles, essays and stories with sexual themes, in order to attract readers, some people circulate sexual jokes thinking that their friends will appreciate them.

In this regard I remember the three monkeys on Mahatama Gandhi's desk. One monkey had covered his ears, while the second had covered his eyes, and the third had covered his mouth. The message of the monkeys in the modern context is that we should neither send sexual jokes by e-mail, nor read them when they arrive in our mail box. We should also not view pornographic images when they arrive in our mail box or when we come across them when surfing the Net.

Is sex a bad thing?

Sex is not such a bad thing after all. Sex between a man and a woman who are in love and who are married leads to children who are a source of immense joy to the parents. Parents keep busy in properly raising their chidlren, and in ensuring that they get proper ecucation and grow up to be successful citizens of the country. When parents get old, their children take care of them, until they die. This cycle of birth and death keeps going, and has been going on ever since man came into existence.

Let us look at sex from another angle. Had it not been for sex, the world's population would not have doubled from three billion to six billion in a few decades. The great number of people means that we have great talents to solve world's problems. Also the more people means that we now have the numbers to explore space and to colonize other planets.

This means that a few million years from now, even if our mother Earth gets knocked out by an asteroid and plunges to death in the vast expanse of dark space, our human race will survive because some of us will be living on another planet, perhaps in a far away galaxy.

Sex is smiliar to religion

Did you know that sex and religion have great similarities. It was the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who said that sex and religion are basic necessities of man and that any attempts to suppress them leads to serious consequences.

Religion too is a basic necessity of man. But man makes the mistake of believing under delusion that his religion alone is the true religion and that all other religions are false. There are many countries in the world which are theocratic states meaning that they are based on one religion. Such states do not allow other religions to build their own places of worship or to propagate their religion. This is based on erroneous thinking that their own religion is the only true one.

And in China, the state does not allow people religious freedom that people in the West and in India enjoy. In China the followers of the Falun Gong religious movement have been brutally suppressed. This religious movement started by Li Hongzhi is based on Buddhism and Taoism and its followers perform breathing exercises. This movement apeals to the Chinese people who have been disillusioned with Communism. They want to believe in an ideology, especially a religious ideology. The Chinese people had believed in Communism but they find that their government and leaders have abandoned the true principles of Communism but do not want to admit it and continue to call their party the Communist Party.

In the same way though sex is the basic necessity of man, man often gets carried away and gets addicted to sex. Some people get so much addicted that they think about sex all the time. When a man becomes addicted to sex he tends to become weak. Such a man can not become a great scientist or a great artist, which requires great concentration of mind and of energy. Similarly when a society places too much emphasis on sex, it too becomes weak and morally corrupt..

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