Onan, Not Again
God and I were having one of those rambling conversations and somewhere in it I got a new insight. Somehow we got around to the subject of onanism, which is an old obscurant term for masturbation, and to the biblical story from which the term comes. Just in case you’re not all up on your Bible, here’s a quick version: Onan agreed to provide for his brother’s wife’s sexual needs after his brother was killed by God. However, Onan didn’t want any bastards so rather than completing the act he “spilled” his seed “on the ground.” God didn’t like this, so he killed Onan as well. From this, certain interpreters of the Bible have concluded that any non-procreative use of semen is a sin and so masturbation is bad stuff.
Now don’t ask me how I made the connection, but my great insight is that, tenuous justifications of Onan aside, the real reason to disallow mastubation is ancient homophobia. See the Bible teaches us that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Well, if one of the ways that we love ourselves is masturbation then it follows that we should masturbate our neighbors, even the ones that are the same sex.
God told me that my logic and train of thought were no worse than those of many clergy and other Bibleists. Before I could get too proud, he then pointed out that many of them were crazy, or at least just wrong. We verbally wrangled a bit and I never did get him to flat out tell me I was wrong, but he did tell me that if people need to go to two-thousand-year-old books for justifications for their prejudices that just maybe they should rethink their lives a little.
No comments yet.