ceo_esq said:
If most Christians were truly "anti-sex", I suspect we'd find far fewer Christians in the world.
It is as implausible to describe the majority of Christians as "anti-sex" as it is to describe the majority of pro-choicers as "pro-abortion". It's a very crude and fundamentally misleading characterization.
No, it's not implausible or even crude. Misleading? Only a little bit; I'd call it oversimplified.
If my 25 cents worth of anthropological reading serves me, societies can be characterized as "sex-negative" or "sex-positive" depending on how they view sexual activity. At one end of the scale we have Polynesia, the most sex-positive cultural group known (well, known to anthropologists). At the other end of the scale, some place Ireland, specifically the village societies of the west, where, supposedly, a majority of husbands and wives never see each other naked.
The sex negative-positive scale isn't meant to measure the actual amount of wimbo-wambo going on in a society, of course, but only to characterize the
attitudes toward sex a particular group holds. But I don't think you'll see as much rogering in a sex-negative society as in others, simply because opportunities for nookie are curtailed by a lack of acceptance.
The Western world has been Christianized for most of two millennia, and Western societies are pretty uniformly grouped toward the sex-negative end of the scale, as far as I can see. (Our Danish contingent will speak up about now, exclaiming over how positive Danish attitudes toward sex are. Maybe so, but I'd like to hear it from an outsider.) Who can deny that across most of Christendom sex is nasty?
