Smoke
Done here.
Sexual relationships are not necessarily the most intimate, unless by intimacy you mean nothing more or less than physical intimacy. If sexual relationships are improved by the constraints you advocate, why wouldn't all relationships be similarly improved? Certainly, it's better if you can have a great deal of trust in your friends, your employer, and your auto mechanic, and those relationships are inevitably damaged when trust is breached.
What is it, specifically, about sex that requires the level of trust and commitment you say it does?
You've missed the point entirely. It is: you have invested marriage with a mystical significance quite different from the mystical significance with which the ancients invested it. You're using your own ideals and standards, which they did not share, to justify rules they formulated. I can't understand why you imagine that any view of sex other than your own "cheapens" it, unless you believe your own opinion is precious above all else.
The essence of all religion is mystery. Mystery is not the same thing as irrationality. You can, and many people do, have mystery and reason at the same time. But when one attempts to rationalize mystery, one inevitably falls into irrationality, and makes a fool of oneself.The essence of religion is mystery? That's new to me. So are you suggesting that my faith (Christianity) should be irrational? If so, then why is it constantly criticized by atheists for being irrational? I thought believing in a religion because it was rational was a good thing.
For example: Early Christians believed that the birth of Jesus was the most singular birth in the history of the world. It made sense to them that such a momentous birth, the entry of such a singular person into the world, should have been accomplished by divine intervention, and they didn't have any trouble believing that the woman who gave birth to such a person must have been a virgin. Early Christians also believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and so must have been a member of the House of David, and quite sensibly (if not accurately) showed Joseph's descent from David to make that point. Mary was the betrothed of Joseph; Jesus belonged to Joseph's house and family, and it was Joseph's ancestry that counted, not Mary's. They didn't bother to get their stories straight on Joseph's actual ancestry, since that wasn't the point. So far so good. All perfectly meaningful to early Christians.
Two millenia later, though, it no longer makes sense to us that Jesus must have been born to a Virgin, so some Christian apologists make the mistake of trying to prove that parthenogenesis is biologically possible, or of trying to prove historically that Jesus was actually born of a Virgin. They are deeply committed to defending nonsensical historical dogma. Some of them will try to make sense of by insisting that Original Sin is passed down through the father, or that the blood is passed down through the father, and must have been sinless to do its redemptive work. The Virgin Birth, for such people, is now completely divorced from the Mystery of the Incarnation, and becomes a matter of great importance in its own right. In their zeal to defend the Virgin Birth, they completely strip it of any mystical meaning it might have had, and while doing so, they resort to absurd "science" and irrational arguments that rightly get them ridiculed for their irrationality.
Likewise, Biblical apologists either go to great lengths to reconcile the two genealogies of Joseph (to preserve the myth that the Bible is inerrant) or flatly contradict their "inerrant" scriptures by insisting that the Lucan genealogy is actually that of Mary, and then they insist -- without any scriptural basis whatsoever -- that Mary is also a descendant of David, because that fits their idea of what being a member of the House of David is.
Early Christians believed that they had a way of connecting with the Divine, which is the greatest Mystery of all. They developed a mythology that seemed conducive to that experience, that Mystery. Many modern Christians have lost the Mystery, but cling tenaciously to a mythology that is no longer meaningful and never did have any value apart from the Mystery. They are like a woman who deserts her husband to devote herself to preserving and defending his high school athletic trophies.
