Chapter 19: Myth—Sexuality Doesn’t Matter

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Then there is Onan who refused to climax and ejaculate into Tamar’s vagina to impregnate her. The Word says that every time he was with

Tamar that “he spilled his seed [semen] on the ground” and that God killed him for this behavior. Several church teachings could easily have emerged from just this one story. I.E. Sex is strictly for procreation [begetting] because we are not meant to enjoy it. Sex is a duty to procreate and it is a

sin to practice any form of birth control. And, of course, masturbation [which is an often presumed behavior of Onan] is bad for you. We’ve already discussed this story and what made God mad was that Onan did not honor his brother with a child. That was the custom of the time under

Jewish law when a brother died. The story has nothing to do with sexual pleasure, birth control or masturbation.

The church might even ponder Onan’s willful destruction of his semen [seed] and then conclude this fact alone is a good cause to condemn

masturbation. The Catholic Church claims masturbation is a “gravely disordered action” 29. A “grave sin” can become a mortal sin in Catholicism by being accompanied with a) deliberate action, and b) knowing it is not what God wants and still ignoring that fact. Therefore, in Catholicism,

masturbation can be either a “venial” or “mortal” sin depending upon conditions. The Bible states, “There is sin that leads to death and sin that doesn’t” (1 John 5:16). However, I know of no qualifications to the sins that God itemizes and states will lead to the lake of fire and a second death. The

question then becomes whether masturbation is sexually immoral falling in the same category that God has put homosexuality and lesbianism. The same basic question can be asked of oral sex. Is it sexually immoral?

Therefore, the sound mind that God has given us takes such a theology to task. First of all, just in the act of mating, literally hundreds of millions of sperm will die each month with only one lucky sperm actually mating with an egg on one day [to survive sex]. Yet even this sperm does

not maintain its identity; it becomes one-half of the zygote’s beginning. See Miracle of Life section in the last chapter for further discussion. Secondly is the fact that the testes in the male are a “sperm factory” that never shuts down throughout the male’s life. Thus, in every ejaculation whether in a

vagina or out of a vagina, the male produces hundreds of millions of sperm of which 99.9999999% will be destroyed during every male’s life.