Catholics Talking About Sex Again!
Marc Barnes, who at the tender age of eighteen has as much wit and wisdom as an octogenarian, writes an insightful article on the shibboleth that the rituals of Heaven are boring: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/03/christopher-hitchens-and-groaning-during-sex.html An excerpt:
If Heaven is merely an eternal choir, it may as well be a Hell. Any action infinitely repeated would be intolerable. I swear, if I get handed a harp and am told to “start playing, never stop,” I’m pulling a Paradise Lost, Book 6.
Thankfully, it’s a ridiculous understanding of Heaven. (I’m surprised Hitchens never stopped to realize that the only people agreeing with his interpretation were literalist Christians.) He should have paid less attention to bad theology and more attention to having sex.
A sex life is monotonous. It is repetitive. It is ritualistic. It is the carrying on of certain motions that lead to certain results, again and again, forever and ever, till death do you apart, or some other tragedy occurs. It is a routine (more and more so as the children grow up, I imagine. (I know a girl who at 20 just figured out what her parents daily nap-time was all about. (Sorry if I just scarred any one for the rest of their lives. (Please still read my blog.)))) But you’d be slapped — and rightly so — if assumed that all this monotony means that the act is boring.
Sexual union in its fullness – and unfortunately I can only go by literature here — is not a limited thing, but an experience of infinity. No couple views sex as a finalized experience (it’s this awesome and no more), but as an attempt at infinite joy. Thus everyone, atheist or otherwise, naturally gasps things like “more,” “God,” and other such infinities during the act. Ritual unveils the infinite.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
