Different strokes

So once again, a member of the extreme evangelical fringe of Christianity has launched a campaign against our taking pleasure in something which we are biologically hard-wired to find pleasant.

Yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia alerted me to the fact that Mack Major, a Christian writer from Philadelphia, has written a book called Sex Magic: Flirting With the Demonic in which he claims we shouldn't masturbate because masturbation can "summon a sex demon."

Here's a direct quote, in case you think I am making this up:

There are such things are sex demons.  And the danger in masturbating is that one could inadvertently summon a sex demon to attach itself to you through the act of masturbating.  And once that demon attaches, it is difficult to get it to leave.  It will drive you to masturbate, even when you don’t want to.  You’ll be hit with urges to play with yourself so powerful that only an orgasm will allow you some temporary relief.

Notwithstanding the fact that if this were true, the millions of teenage boys worldwide would be keeping the sex demons busy 24/7, Major seems convinced that by engaging in what my dad referred to as "shaking hands with the unemployed" you are writing yourself a one-way express ticket to hell.

Presumably with the other hand.

Major is also vehemently against any use of gadgets for increasing your enjoyment, even if those are used with a partner.  Erotic toys provide yet another means of ingress for those pesky sex demons:

Many of you who are reading this have sex toys in your possession right now.  And whether you want to accept it as fact or not: those sex toys are an open portal between the demonic realm and your own life.  As long as you have those sex toys in your home, you have a doorway that can allow demons to not only access your life at will, but also to torment you, hinder and destroy certain parts of your life as it relates to sex and your relationships.

Which highlights yet again my disagreement with the devoutly religious over the definition of the word "fact."

Besides the scary sex demons, it turns out that pleasuring yourself can also cause volcanic eruptions, and he's not using that in its justifiable metaphorical sense.  He means literal volcanic eruptions.  He tells us all about the pornographic scenes found on the walls of Pompeii, many of which involved the god Priapus, who was depicted as a naked dude with an enormous hard-on.  And he links that directly to what happened:

He [Priapus] was really popular in the ancient city of Pompeii…  The walls of many of the homes and palaces were painted with detailed frescos of very graphic pornographic sexual scenes…  Keep in mind that Pompeii was suddenly destroyed and thousands of lives were wiped out in an instant.

So yeah, that was a really unhappy ending.  Be that as it may, it's hard to see the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius as having anything to do with jacking off, or there'd be a major explosion underneath every adult theater in the United States every single night.  And the headquarters of PornHub would right now simply be a giant smoking crater.

My main reaction to all this is that I feel cheated.  I have never once been visited by a sex demon.  I mean, what the hell, sex demons?  What's the problem, here?  Am I not good enough?  I'm giving it my all, over here.  It's enough to make a guy feel a little inadequate.

The exasperating thing about all this is that masturbation is 100% normal, nearly everyone does it, it relieves stress, helps you sleep, and (for men) decreases the risk of prostate cancer.  What we have here is simply another way for the extremely religious to make everyone feel guilty, uptight, and anxious over something entirely harmless, and to maintain their control by convincing their followers that they're hellbound if they don't follow the leader's advice to the letter.

Major ends with one last cautionary note:

When we imagine having sex with another via masturbation, we are actually summoning the power of the spirit realm to manifest the thing we are imagining.

Don't I wish.  Manifest away, spirit realm.  Hey, I'm bi, so there's twice the manifestations I'd be perfectly happy with.  Either Jenna Coleman or Liam Hemsworth, for example, would do just fine.

So anyway.  My advice is: in the privacy of your own home, do what comes naturally, enjoy it, and find something else to fret about.  I'm guessing that even if there is a supreme deity, he/she/it has much better things to do in Universe Management than keeping track of what you do in your "Alone Time."

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TechNoah

I try to avoid simply writing day after day about people saying loony stuff, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

That's why today we're going to consider a scientist in Turkey who believes not only that Noah's Ark and the Great Flood were real, but that a 500-year-old man and his kids were able to build a gigantic boat by themselves because they had access to nuclear power, drones, and...

... cellphones.

I wish I was making this up.  Yavuz Örnek, who is a lecturer at Istanbul University, admitted during an interview on a talk show that the traditional account was unlikely, but then takes the position that the whole thing becomes plausible if you assume something even less likely.

There were huge 300 to 400-meter-high waves and his [the Prophet Noah’s] son was many kilometers away.  The Quran says Noah spoke with his son.  But how did they manage to communicate?  Was it a miracle?  It could be.  But we believe he communicated with his son via cellphone.

And as far as how the Ark survived the forty-day-long storm, he said it was "built of steel plates" and was "powered by nuclear energy."

Then there's the problem of how Noah got two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth on board, not to mention keeping the carnivores from doing what carnivores do:

But Örnek has that part solved, too.  He says that the usual picture of the Ark as filled with lots of animals is incorrect; instead, Noah just collected gametes from each species, and stored those.

This brings up a couple of questions:

1. Does he really think that prior to the Flood, Noah went all over the Earth, finding animals, and obtaining sperm and eggs from every single species?  Like, he went to Australia and jacked off a wombat?  Because, um, that's kind of a disturbing image.
2. What happened after the Flood?  Because if all the animals were gone -- drowned in the flood -- having stored sperm and eggs wouldn't do you much good, as there'd be no (for example) female wombats left to incubate the embryos even if you could fertilize the eggs in vitro, rendering your wombat handjob a little useless.

But don't worry about that, Örnek says.  "I am a scientist," he reassures us.  "I speak for science."

As Hemant Mehta points out over at the wonderful site Friendly Atheist, this was hardly the first time that the host of the show, Pelin Çift, had to listen to so-called experts spouting off bizarre theories.   While interviewing Turkish theologian Ali Riza Demircan last year, she collapsed into helpless laughter when Demircan explained that there were certain kinds of sex that were forbidden to devout Muslims, including "oral sex in advanced dimensions."

Whatever that is.  Although I have to admit it sounds like it could be fun.

Then there's theologian Mücahid Cihad Han, who in 2015 was being interviewed and said that people shouldn't masturbate.  A caller to the show told Han that there was nothing wrong with masturbation, even in Mecca during Ramadan.  Appalled, Han told the caller that if he jerked off, he'd "find his hands pregnant in the afterlife."

Which would mean the vast majority of us guys would be saddled with hand-babies in heaven.  Or hell.  Or wherever we're going to end up.

But back to Yavuz Örnek, he of the steel-plated nuclear-powered Ark filled with tubes of eggs and sperm, wherein the captain can communicate with the rest of the crew via cellphones.  What gets me about all this is that saying this stuff doesn't get him laughed out of the country, or at least out of his university.  To be fair, it's not that much weirder than what the American young-earth creationists claim, and they're still widely regarded as intellectually respectable.  (Hell, the whole faculty of Liberty University believes that stuff.)

In any case, all of this proves that there's no idea so completely ludicrous that you can't embellish so as to make it way stupider.  And it also means that, as unlikely as it seems, we have a creationist who is even more ridiculous than Ken Ham.

Which, honestly, is kind of a miracle in and of itself.

Different strokes

So once again, a member of the extreme evangelical fringe of Christianity has launched a campaign against our taking pleasure in something which we are biologically hard-wired to find pleasant.

Mack Major, a Christian writer from Philadelphia who owns the site Eden Decoded, has written an article that claims we shouldn't masturbate because masturbation can "summon a sex demon."

Here's a direct quote, in case you think I am making this up:

There are such things are sex demons.  And the danger in masturbating is that one could inadvertantly [sic] summon a sex demon to attach itself to you through the act of masturbating.  And once that demon attaches, it is difficult to get it to leave.  It will drive you to masturbate, even when you don’t want to. You’ll be hit with urges to play with yourself so powerful that only an orgasm will allow you some temporary relief.

Notwithstanding the fact that if this were true, the millions of teenage boys worldwide would be keeping the sex demons busy 24/7, Major seems convinced that by engaging in what a friend of mine calls "shaking hands with the unemployed" you are writing yourself a one-way express ticket to hell.

Major is also vehemently against any use of gadgets for increasing your enjoyment, even if those are used with a partner.  Erotic toys provide yet another means of ingress for those pesky sex demons:

Many of you who are reading this have sex toys in your possession right now.  And whether you want to accept it as fact or not: those sex toys are an open portal between the demonic realm and your own life.  As long as you have those sex toys in your home, you have a doorway that can allow demons to not only access your life at will, but also to torment you, hinder and destroy certain parts of your life as it relates to sex and your relationships.

Which highlights yet again my disagreement with the devoutly religious over the definition of the word "fact."

Besides the scary sex demons, it turns out that pleasuring yourself can also cause volcanic eruptions, and he's not using that in its justifiable metaphorical sense.  He means literal volcanic eruptions.  He tells us all about the pornographic scenes found on the walls of Pompeii, many of which involved the god Priapus, who was depicted as a naked dude with an enormous hard-on.  And he links that directly to what happened:

He [Priapus] was really popular in the ancient city of Pompeii… The walls of many of the homes and palaces were painted with detaield frescos of very graphic pornographic sexual scenes… Keep in mind that Pompeii was suddenly destroyed and thousands of lives were wiped out in an instant.

So yeah, that was a really unhappy ending.  Be that as it may, it's hard to see the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius as having anything to do with jacking off, or there'd be a major explosion underneath every adult theater in the United States every single night.  And the headquarters of PornHub would right now simply be a giant smoking crater.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The exasperating thing about all this is that masturbation is 100% normal, nearly everyone does it, it relieves stress, helps you sleep, and (for men) decreases the risk of prostate cancer.  What we have here is simply another way for the extremely religious to make everyone feel guilty, uptight, and anxious over something entirely harmless, and to maintain their control by convincing their followers that they're hellbound if they don't follow the leader's advice to the letter.

Major ends by telling us one last cautionary note:

When we imagine having sex with another via masturbation, we are actually summoning the power of the spirit realm to manifest the thing we are imagining.

Which is patently ridiculous, because if this were true, Kate Beckinsale and Liam Hemsworth would never have a free moment.

So anyway.  My advice is: in the privacy of your own home, do what comes naturally, enjoy it, and find something else to fret about.  I'm guessing that even if there is a supreme deity, he/she/it has much better things to do in Universe Management than keeping track of what you do in your "Alone Time."