Atheist rapture

[pim]

At those intimate moments of intense rapture known more prosaically as orgasms how does an atheist express this rapture? Rapturous moments are routinely accompanied by vocalisations ranging from "Wow!" to ... what? Screams? Groans? As the French say: Tout est permis! or whatever floats your boat. Some people are screamers, others are groaners and I'm sure the permutations and combinations are endless. I draw a veil of modesty, gentle reader, over who amongst us is a screamer and who is a groaner. What is germane to the thread topic is not so much the type of vocalisation at a rapturous moment which qualifies as much more intense than a simple "Wow!" moment, but the nature of the verbalisation. For many people the verbalisation consists of a spontaneous invocation of the Deity, or "Oh My God!!!" and what I wonder is how does a militant and conscientious atheist verbalise the moment of supreme rapture? One assumes such an atheist would consider herself/himself a rationalist and would disapprove mightily of involuntary and spontaneous invocations to a deity. So what would a rationalist cry of rapture consist of? "Oh science!"? "Oh maths!"? "Oh isosceles faarkin' triangles!"?


What???


There's a PhD in this for some budding young successor to Masters & Johnson, I'm sure!!

[KTJ]

Have you been hitting the “single malt” tonight?

[pim]

Tonight? No, if you look at the post you'll see it wasn't posted today. And no single malts or any booze last night. That was a considered post from a razor-sharp intellect unbefuddled by alcohol or any other suspect substance. As for today I've been spending the day with family at a 4th birthday. I do own up to having two small beers during the BBQ and I joined in the singing of "Happy Birthday" in a clear baritone. Is that OK?

[fat]

Eureka?

[pim]

"Eureka"? Is that it? The moment that inspires poets and artists, the moment that the ancients celebrated with goddesses like Venus and Aphrodite, Isis (the Christian Mary is a "deformed" Isis, an earth mother figure without the sex) and the act itself ritualised in the Greco/Roman "Bacchanal", all of this poetry is junked by rationalist atheists for an insipid "Eureka"? How boring!

[pim]

Let's see now ... the latest post on this thread before this one was one of mine, on Nov 23. Today being Jan 3 that means this thread hasn't been visited for 41 days which is a day shy of 6 weeks. Or has it!! Yorick referenced this thread this very day to chastise me because he took KTJs word for it that I was drunk as part of a very abusive and personal campaign that Yorick seems to have launched with me as the target. But let's clarify the thread before looking at Yorick's broader and nastier agendas.

My point was about atheists, not sex. People such as myself who are steeped in traditional Catholicism with its rituals, its gregorian music, its incense and its pantheon of saints all wrapped up in 2000 years of history make great agnostics. We reject the mumbo jumbo but at the same time we're sentimental about it. We don't do atheism very well. While Protestantism is about the Word, Catholicism is about the Sacrament. Protestantism is cerebral, Catholicism is sensual. I've left out the third category which is Evangelical non-conformism which in some ways that the great 18th century non-conformist, John Wesley, would never have intended, kinda represents a regression to sensuality in worship. Different from the Catholics but with its charismatic happy clapping and speaking in tongues very sensual nonetheless.

Which brings us to the notion of "rapture". Now I can understand that an Anglican or a Presbyterian might find the notion of religious rapture to be off-putting. I'm not greatly into religious rapture myself. But Catholic mythology is full of religious rapture and ecstasy - "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" is the Latin term which I believe needs no translation. You only need to read the lives of the saints to find plenty of the "tremens" stuff that's very "fascinans". Apparently that's what Ignatius Loyola did when he founded the Jesuits. Google "Teresa de Avila" and you'll get an idea of religious ecstasy. Freudians have a field day with the sexual imagery in Teresa's religious writings. Her hallucinations in which she believed herself to be levitating plus the mysterious stigmata that appeared on her skin, accompanied by the auto-eroticism of her acts of mortification of the flesh, if they happened today, would see her locked away and put on a drug rehab program. Instead the Pope canonised her. She's practically Spain's national saint. She also founded the Carmelite order of nuns which are big in Australia. So despite their sexual hangups Catholic ritual and mythology is full of sensuality. They never quite kicked over the traces of their remote pagan forebears who had effortlessly integrated sexual rapture with religious rapture. Catholicism's problem is that they deformed it by symbolically turning the highly sexual and sensual goddess Isis into the sexless and sex-denying Virgin Mary ... which might be part of the neurosis they have which manifests itself in their kiddy fiddling.


To return to the original point about rapture and atheists. Religious faith can and does provide a channel through which one can express ecstasy and rapture. The name of God can be exclaimed as an expression of bliss. Do atheists find that when they experience a blissful, ecstatic or rapturous event (sexual orgasms surely qualify on all three counts) that they have an OMG moment? Do they too invoke the name of God? If so, then that's interesting ...


Sorry, KTJ and Yorick, if my talking about this makes you feel uncomfortable. And no drop of alcohol has passed my lips today - yet! Mind you the sun is over the yardarm ...

[pim]

Thank you for sharing that very intimate little vignette with us, Yorick. You were under no obligation to answer for yourself and I wasn't issuing any challenge to any individual. Given that atheists by virtue of their humanity would experience bliss/rapture/ecstasy so how do they express it if they've cut themselves off from the channels that religious faith offers them. If they don't invoke the name of God - and let me remind you of all those Gen Y girls who shriek OMG at everything, one gets the impression they'd be lost without OMG - what do they invoke? Somehow "Oh maths!" and "Oh science!" don't quite cut it. And let's face it, would you really fancy someone who expressed a shared blissful moment by yelling something about isosceles triangles??

[pim]

"hung up"? <sigh> you and your hyper bowl ...

[pim]

Jan 3, 2016 18:04:50 GMT 10 Gort said:

Well ... since the act is ... "carnal" ... I wonder why on Earth you are so "hung up" about the expression used by atheists?

Surely "carnal" by it's very nature is the opposite of "spiritual" ?

We all "over egg" our descriptions in our hyper bowl, Yorick, as you did with your "hung up". The difference is I admit it, you fly up your own arse in a cloud of obfuscation as you attempt to defend the indefensible.


I'm not denying the carnal element of sex. How could anyone deny it!! Your claim that "carnal" by it's [sic] very nature is the opposite of "spiritual" should be framed and put on display with the caption "This is what a guy who claims to be an atheist said to me in a conversation about sex and atheism". Yorick what you just said about he carnal and the spiritual being mutually exclusive is probably the most "Christian" statement I've seen on a discussion board. It's more Christian than anything I've posted, or Occam, or Fat or any of the drivel gushed forth by the likes of Matt or Skippy (btw I wonder what Matt's religion du jour is these days ...). No other religion attempts to deny the carnal like Christianity which has to be an important part of the explanation for Christianity's most appalling and egregious neurosis, the sexual abuse of children by Christian clergy.

It seems that with you, Yorick, you might be able to take the atheist out of the Christian, but you sure can't take the Christian out of the atheist

[pim]

Jan 4, 2016 8:54:38 GMT 10 Gort said:

Doddery old fool.


O.K. I placed an inadvertent apostrophe ... a hanging offence?


Oh, and I'm in a state of the following .... (This new adjective will get right up your nose.)

Oh chortle chortle and a snicker from the gallery from KTJ. Is that it? And Yorick laboured, and brought forth ... I'll leave it to the Latin poet: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus


On the point of "it's" and "its", it's fair enough for Ponto to snap at me when I pedantically pick him up on a minor typo since his posts are frequently linguistic spaghetti and meatballs. The guy faces so many language issues of a far deeper order than its/it's that he's entitled to be cut a little slack. But you, Yorick? You? Mate I cheerfully own up to being board pedant on language matters but fair dinkum over the years as I've observed you with other posters I get the impression that you're trying to outdo me in language pedantry.


And btw Yorick if you think I'm trying to engage in some sort of sexual congress with you then, alas poor Yorick, you are sadly deluded.


Moving on ... and returning to the main point which is your very interesting and most revealing statement that "carnal by its very nature is the opposite of spiritual", I note that once again you respond to reasoned argument with personal abuse. But I insist. What that statement means is that the realm of the flesh, and that includes the pleasures of the flesh, and the realm of the spiritual are mutually exclusive. Which is probably the most "Christian" statement I've ever seen on any discussion board. Yorick as you once famously said to Jockstrap when he made some fatuous claim about climate change: "This one's a keeper". Let me repeat to you, your "carnal by its very nature is the opposite of spiritual" deserves to be framed with the caption: "This is what a guy who claims to be an atheist said to me in a conversation about sex and atheism".

As I said: you can take the atheist out of the Christian but you can't take the Christian out of the atheist

[pim]

Y-e-e-e-s ... and? Alas poor Yorick thank you for your c & p of the dictionary meaning of "carnal". Dictionaries are not prescriptive. A dictionary gives you a snapshot of a language at a given point in time - with all its cultural loadings. And "carnal" is very very culturally loaded! The very fact that, as you correctly point out, it comes to us from Latin is because it was transported to English from Rome via Christianity. Since the gravamen of my argument (and a very reasonable and reasoned argument it is too! ) is that Christianity more than any other religion has as one of its core principles that the carnal and the spiritual are mutually exclusive I'd prefer to reference the New Testament - namely Paul's third epistle to the Colossians (Colossians 3:5) in which he exhorts them to ... Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Ya gotta love Paul when he gets all fire & brimstone, and he gets especially fire & brimstone about the dreaded "carnal". I think the KJV is best at this. I mean, it has words and phrases like "concupiscence", "fornication" and "mortify your members". I shudder to speculate what he means by "mortify your members". Think of the worst case scenario and that's probably it. "Concupiscence"? Ya gotta love it! What's it mean? Basically it means what you feel when you've got a hard on. Concupiscence!!! What a word! I think we should make it the word of the day!

But I guess we have to find a more prosaic version of Colossians 3:5. Here's the New International Version: Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.. Still a trace of fire & brimstone with its "put to death" but compared with the KJV I think its a bit "meh!" a tad humdrum. So the "modern" trendy bibles for the sanitised version, which Protestants love so much, and the KJV for the blood & guts and the poetry.

Either way there's no doubt about it: Paul was the true founder of Christianity. Jesus began a movement but it was Paul who channelled it to address Hellenistic paganism with its sensuality in which sexual pleasure and eroticism was so bound up with the worship of the gods that to become a temple prostitute was an honoured calling. Paul waged a furious campaign against pagan sensuality and it was under Paul that Christianity assumed its denial of sex which is so graphically expressed by Paul in epistle after epistle and is symbolised in the castration of the goddess figure (the Egyptian goddess Isis, who became very popular in the Roman world and had quite a following) and its deformation into the Virgin Mary. The icons you see of the Madonna and Child are almost identical to earlier pagan depictions of the goddess Isis with the infant Horus. Mary is in effect the castrated goddess of Christianity. That's the extent to which Christianity has gone to separate the carnal from the spiritual. Seems Christianity succeeded brilliantly in that regard with you. As I keep saying: you can take the atheist out of the Christian but you can't take the Christian out of the atheist!

[pim]

Jan 4, 2016 14:27:24 GMT 10 Gort said:

The premise of your thread is totally and utterly flawed.


You would have done better to ask why on earth ... Christians would choose to utter a godly utterance?

Not just Christians! All those Gen Ys who text and shriek OMG! It's not "choice". It's visceral.


Do try to keep up!

[pim]

<sigh> You can always tell when people like Yorick are getting out of their depth, they resort to irrelevancies and personal stuff. The thread and my posts are 100% consistent with the Religion Board. Why are you participating, Yorick?

[pim]

You're entitled to that point of view, but it does beg the question: if that's your opinion of the Religion Board why do you participate?

[pim]

So there you have it, gentle reader: one casts pearls before swine and this is what you get.


Yorick, some free advice ...

[pim]

Oh, and Yorick, that bit about casting pearls before swine? It's a biblical reference: Matthew 7:6


You heard it first on the Religion Board

[pim]

Oh, being knowledgeable about the most seminal artefact in Western culture and to be able to draw from it appropriately and in context makes it fraudulent to say one's an agnostic? Now there's another keeper! Not up there with "carnal and spiritual are mutually exclusive" but as an example of "I'm hopelessly out of my depth so I'll just talk bullshit", it's not bad! Oh, and Yorick? Do you want the last word? Go on, you know you do!! Here's your chance 'coz I've gotta cook dinner. Toodles!

[KTJ]