Making a virtue of necessity: Australian Anglicans tell schoolkids how great sex is

February 19, 2015 • 9:25 am

Reader Scott from Australia sent me this short video of two of his religious countrymen (countrypeople?) discussing whether God wants them to have sex. The answer was a resounding “yes,” and when I was told this was a video designed by Anglicans to be part of the religious curriculum in public schools,  I thought it was a joke. But it isn’t. As Scott noted, “it is by a group called Youth Works run by the Sydney Anglicans.”

Apparently, a secular group called “Fairness in Religions in School” (FIRIS) nabbed the video and slapped it on YouTube before the Anglicans could take it off their site. As you may know, in some Australian states “special religious instruction” is allowed in the public schools, and it’s supposed to teach about the characteristics of faith rather than promote a particular faith.  FIRIS fights this because it has indeed been used to proselytize kids. (See here for one example.) I understand that kids can also opt out of this instruction, though readers from Oz might educate us in the comments.

At any rate, it puzzles me that a country as secular as Australia still has government-sponsored religious education in its public schools. But maybe it’s not so bad if it teaches stuff like this!:

It’s hilarious!  Some quotes:

“God actually invented [sex], and so he thinks it’s good. . . These physical parts that [God] has created are different, but they go perfectly together. . . And not only that, but they come together in a way that’s actually pleasurable for us, and God made it that way so that we’d actually enjoy having sex together.”

It goes on, and Steve and Naomi Chong (I think they’re married, not brother and sister) later add that God designed sex to be enjoyed in marriage, and it’s physically and emotionally “damaging” if that plan is obviated, but I doubt that kids will pay attention to that part!

And you just know that after the cameras are turned off, these two went for each other like a pair of lustfully crazed weasels. . .

109 thoughts on “Making a virtue of necessity: Australian Anglicans tell schoolkids how great sex is”

      1. And how did they (the ‘most’ people’ that Steve mentions) ever get to the point of this formulation of either “sex but not god” or “god but not sex”? Sure it has to be a little weird to believe that this god being is cognizant of all sexual activity in the universe… but really, there is a real concern that the godly are eschewing sex because they don’t understand .. oh never mind it’s just weird.

        1. False dichotomy? I wonder if there has been a religion where people are encouraged to have sex because I have seen scant evidence of it in the Bible. If Gawd wanted people to enjoy sex then why does he make a widow marry her husband’s brother if they never had children (kind of creepy)? And if Gawd made the parts that ‘fit perfectly together’ in order to be enjoyed then why are there so many passages in the Bible which treat women who menstruate as “unclean”; surely Gawd knows that it is all part of a woman’s biology as he “made” it? And why no mention of clitoris or the G-spot, or orgasms for that matter, only references to “and he went unto her”?

          2. Had to be the Gnostics…either that, or the early Christian bonobos.

            [Off stage whisper] Emily Litella: What? You said Christian sects? Oh, never mind.

          4. Generally different Indian philosophers had different takes. In the Upanishads, there are quite graphic depictions of sex acts (not sure if this is an artifact of translation or if the Bronze Age people in the Middle East were prudes in comparison) but they are in relation to specific rituals for conceiving a son, etc. I haven’t read the Kama Sutra but I presume that is is specific to a marriage union, whereas I have never yet come across a religion that encourages sex outside of marriage.

    2. I am not resisting the temptation to be pedantic, and to point out that you really should have put a comma after the word “No” in your post! 😉

  2. I have always wondered, if man is made in god’s image, has this god got gigantic organs of generation? Female? Male?

  4. > …lustfully crazed weasels

    Thank you for the mental image.

    Also, why weasels, specifically ? Just because the name is funny (“weasel”…) or do they actually have unusual mating habits ?

    1. Certain words are funny in themselves. I laugh most at words with K and P and Z. WEASEL has the Z sound which adds to the mirth of the mental image. The Z in CRAZED helps a lot too. I think I shall write a best selling book about my theory.

        1. It says there: Dilbert uses his computer to determine the funniest words in the world, coming up with chainsaw, weasel, prune.
          That wikipedia sure is a vast suppository of information.

  5. I don’t think it’s possible to say g*d that many times in 2 minutes and expect to remember anything about sex. Obviously, without g*ds great help, there would be no sex.

    I prefer the birds and the bees. They don’t need a license or g*d.

    1. Yes – it reminded me of a Republican seeing how many times he can refer to Reagan in a speech.

      I also wondered about the association between God and sex for them, given the number of times they focus on the association. You’ve got to wonder at the effect the word God has on them, and if going to Church is a form of foreplay for them. I think Jerry was on the money with his last comment!

      We still have weekly RI (religious instruction) in schools in NZ too. You can opt out, but children who do are often put in a negative situation.

  7. Most people I know (myself included) have found sex very pleasurable outside of marriage, so I wonder what they’re on about.

    1. I’m sure that they would just spin it as, “he doesn’t know g-d’s love so he can’t understand.”
      That’s the one I usually get from my christian relatives.

      1. In my experience, the Puritans’ stance is that we hedonists just don’t know what we’re missing. If you’d simply accept Jesus as your savior, then fifteen minutes of missionary position twice a year solely for the purposes of procreation somehow becomes more pleasure than you should ever need.

        Also, Jesus (and Allah) help you realize how unfun an alcohol buzz actually is, and that sparkling grape juice is much, much better.

          1. Sure. Me, too. But it’s just one option among the many that make up a full palette. A lot of theists think you can paint a compelling picture with only one color.

        2. I saw an article once explaining why Christian sex is BETTER than non-Christian sex. Man, it seems like EVERYTHING is better with Christianity!

          1. So, what ingenious ingredient or position have the Xtians thought of that heathens haven’t discovered for themselves…?

  8. I saw them making 3 main points within the “God loves sex” video:

    1.) The constant emphasis on the important sexual differences between men and women is a not-so-subtle jab against gay sex.

    2.) The moral of the story at the end is that sex is really only for marriage: no fornicating, it will go wrong and sex won’t be great.

    3.) Hey, look how hip and cool religion is! Don’t you want to be like us?

    1. RE: point 3 – A similar ploy is attempted by the people behind Fight Church. You can be a Real Man and love Jesus too!

      1. I have a friend who regularly announces that she “used to be a staunch atheist” and is now quite Spiritual instead (she’s even some sort of teacher/minister.) Of course I ask her what changed her mind.

        Basically, it comes down to the Communist group she was in wasn’t supportive and some black friends took her to their church and it was so filled with joy and confidence that she decided she wanted to have what they had.

        Apparently this is all it takes for some people. Theological low-lying fruit.

        1. Essentially why Richard Coles, formerly of the Communards, became a priest; because he found peace within a religious community after the heady days of S&D&R&R.

          /@

    4. Have you seen any of the ads from the “I’m a Mormon” campaign? They are simply a person telling us what they are: dr, mom, dad, teacher, etc, and also a Mormon. Not “here’s what we believe; let us try to convince you”. Just a Borg-ish “you [should want to] be assimilated”.

      “You’re a mom?! I’m a mom! I should really give this Mormonism a shot!”

      1. I think a lot of that is around: We’re just like you-all, so PLEASE elect one of as your President!

        That’s the way it plays to me anyway.

        1. Ah. That could be. The LDS church has done commercials in the past. It didn’t occur to me that this iteration could have had the additional dimension of trying to make Romney more palatable, but that makes a lot of sense.

      2. I believe the technical term is “bait-and-switch”.

        One notices, en passant, that the churches nowadays go for *any* hook *except* for the doctrine of the church, and the beliefs and behaviors that are expected of church members. Significant, I’d say.

  9. In America, some denominations have been going (“swinging”??) this way for a while.

    An interesting takedown of the undercurrent of prudery under the superficially modern embrace of the goodness of sex in a Presbyterian book can be found in Camille Paglia’s essay “The Joys of Presbyterian Sex” first printed in New Republic then in her anthology “Sex, Art, and American Culture”.

    Similar sex-positive material from the United Church of Christ is entirely accepting of homosexualitt.

  10. Listening to this reminded me of Ray Comfort’s banana-fitting-into-hand-and-mouth-perfectly argument.

  11. I do so love God’s planning. Those who think that “God actually invented [sex], and so he thinks it’s good …” can’t see the malevolent implications of His planning. By this thinking – since God invented everything – it follows that “God invented evil” – or suffering, or any number of things – and so He must think it’s good. He must, otherwise He would have invented a world without such things. Even if He existed, who with any moral capacity at all could worship such a monster?

    1. He also invented woman with pelvises, and other parts, too small to pass new-born’s heads without high existential risk to mom and babe, and entailment of more pain than just about any other experience they will ever have.

      What a swell guy.

      1. But making the pelvis a whole lot bigger would make bipedal walking and running less efficient.

        Or there could be an extended puberty for girls that kept the average proportions but made women into resource intensive giantesses. Perfect world for R. Crumb, but it seems natural selection disfavors this tradeoff.

      2. No, no, no: Your theology is ALL WRONG.

        Woman is supposed to bear children in pain and live in fear of death from childbirth. Good for her moral fiber, dontcha know?

    2. Who created The Devil if not God? If God is so good, how did he know what to create? It’s yet another failure of the God myth.

  13. Hilarious.
    Reminds me of a cartoon.
    God creates Adam and Adam is really happy and awed that he exists. Then God says: ‘And how about this?’ and *bing* Adam has a fully erect penis.
    Adam is ecstatic. “Yeah God! Woo Who! All the way with God!!”
    And God says “Wait, there is one thing…, you can’t use it.”
    And lo, Adam is really bummed.

  15. I had to do religious education at high school around 1990-91 in Wollongong Australia. I thought it would be some kind of comparative religious studies kind of thing but it turned out to be utterly flaming galah nutbag evangelical weirdness.
    My parents wrote a note excluding me from the class and I ended up with 40 minutes a week forced to go to the library – oh how I suffered 😉

      1. Galas are stupid. Rather than flying off the road to the side as you approach in your car, they think they can fly straight ahead faster than you’re driving … 

        /@

          1. Auto-correct is the source of much humor in my life. Yesterday my girlfriend had a beagle with cream cheese for breakfast!

          4. Ha ha! (And at the puns below as well.)

            A woman on my birding forum meant to tell us that many birds were attracted to her pomegranate tree, but it appeared as “Pomeranian tree.”

            Her next post was something like, “Dam* autocorrect!

            “Hmmm…think of all the raptors I could attract with a Pomeranian tree!”

          10. Most trees avoid self pollination. I think they might evolve toward some symbiosis with another organism to carry genetic material between trees. Kind of like bees in the orchard.

          11. Ben, LOL!

            rick–OK, so Pomeranian trees could be diecious. The raptors can’t handle the bee role…

            I think the thought train grinds to a halt pretty fast, here…

          12. I’d agree. As far as I’m concerned, raptors are A roll material. Any movie that leaves them for the B roll, circling for dramatic effect over a corpse, say, is probably wasting its A roll on a bunch of apes using tools to do violence to each other.

            b&

          13. I knew a superior intelligence could carry on where my imagination failed me. With a nice political statement as well.

        1. Wait a second. SEXWEASEL is an awesome (sorry) band name. I’d use that, or sell it, right now before someone else takes it.

  18. “God designed sex to be enjoyed in marriage”

    As a software designer, I know enough about design concepts in general to say that humans were poorly design if the above was the goal.

    You should never design a user interface that allows a user to try to do something that he shouldn’t do. Displaying an error message is far inferior to just making the option unavailable. Most of the time.

    If humans were not intended to have sex in the 13-14 age range, then those features should not have been enabled until the marriage vows were said.

      1. There’s an hilarious YouTube video about how our “design” when it comes to sex is actually pretty bad. Unfortunately I can’t remember it’s name, and there’s no telling what I’ll get if I go looking.

  19. I’ve had it insisted to me that the Catholics are sex-positive too. Which of course they are, if one limits oneself to heterosexually married and such, but …

    In other words, what other restrictions are they implicitly adopting? I don’t think there are many denominations these days which would swear off sex for all – the Shakers, for example, I think, are effectively extinct. (I saw some in Maine in the 1980s, but they were all 70+, so …)

  20. Is it ‘bad’ of me to me wanting to see this little PSA done over but this time using a religious polygamist and his 5 or six wives explaining how perfectly he was made by god to fit into each and every one of them, even though they are all different…

    There is just such a comical element in the way they try to explain how the male and female sex parts work with each other… at any moment you’d think that they might show what they mean by using medical cut-away models…

    The whole notion of intelligent design (of which this obviously depends) is so silly as to make everything the spins off of it, ridiculously funny (to me at least).

  21. Now I am thinking this would be better had Bill O’Reilly, explained it all: “Penis goes in, penis goes out, never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.”

  23. For some reason the blather about God inventing sex reminds of the Far Side cartoon about God inventing snakes (bloggingtheodicy.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/god-makes-snakes/).
    It’s mind-blowing to imagine the goings-on in the celestial laboratory when God was busy inventing sex. It would make a great Monty Python sketch (“Let’s see, should the penis be detachable? And maybe I should give the humans sheaths…Nah…”).

  25. Religious instruction (SRE, special religious education) classes explicitly teach about religion, usually Christianity. They were introduced in the 1950s when people stopped going to church, only about 5-6% of Australians attend church these days.

    Parents may opt out of having their children in these classes but the school is explicitly forbidden to do anything useful or educational for them while the rest of the class is being indoctrinated.
    There has been a lot of push-back against these classes lately with FIRIS leading the charge in Victoria (my home state). They have two main goals, to make sure the system is opt in rather than opt out (which it used to be), and that parents get truthful information about what is taught in these classes.

    When this happens enrollments typically go down to around the 25% mark and the school abandons the whole program as unmanageable. Principals have the option to not run them if they don’t want to. Most parents imagine their children are getting a broad based education about world religions. In fact they are being missionized in the most shameless fashion, and once parents realise this few of them are willing for it to continue.

    FIRIS has a Facebook page if you wish to follow their efforts. It’s been a long fight and is not yet over. Governments are terrified of getting the religious offside. It’s hard to know why really, since so few Australians are religious, and even the moral high ground they used to occupy has been severely undermined by the child abuse scandals, which never seem to end.

  27. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”.

    They’ve obviously figured that nothing can beat sex, so they’re taking a ride on the bandwagon.

    Next question – does God do Internet porn? 😉

    1. Years ago I saw a “commercial” for preventing STDs (really a gag in which a guy has his naughty bits painted to look like a face, and giving the speech). The final line was “A bird in the hand is better than a bird in the bush”.

  29. God made sex … to enjoy with the virgin girls who have survived after your tribe has slaughtered all their loved ones. (Numbers 31:7-18)

Comments are closed.