Sex & God Quotes

“Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“We acquire both the language and religious concepts from our immediate culture – at the same time. A child cannot discriminate between useful survival information and the emotional and psychological manipulations of religion. Once infected, these ideas are deeply embedded and almost impossible to change.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“All religions have something to say about sex, and it rarely coincides with scientific knowledge of sex and sexuality.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Theology has not advanced an inch in the last 1,000 years. How much respect does a profession deserve if it cannot add to the knowledge and understanding of man?”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“It is not very romantic, but reality is a better basis for building a relationship than fantasizing about a soul mate or counting on a god to find you a partner.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Humans love sex. Both men and women are wired to be sexually responsive. Sex is the social glue of the human species. It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human's sex drive.
Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame, and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty. The Adam and Eve story is taught to young children even though they have no way to know what it means.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Religion is evolving to survive but is losing the battle in many regions, largely because of the Internet. Sexual information is far more available now, which interferes with religion’s ability to use sexual guilt to perpetuate.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The abstinence-only programs and reclaimed-virginity movement make men and women ashamed of being sexual creatures before or outside of marriage.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“People develop a conscience with or without religion. Our culture teaches murder and cheating are wrong; we don't need religion to know this.
Guilt comes from a different place in our mental experience, a place that is independent of general cultural training and directly related to religious indoctrination. That is why two people may feel guilt about different things while being equally convinced that cheating and murder are wrong.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Religious guilt causes people to deny their behavior even as they engage in it. Guilt short-circuits rational examination of behavior in favor of supernatural notions like "evil" and "the temptation of Satan.”
― Darrel Ray, ED.D., Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Si otras culturas han sobrevivido 10,000 años sin las reglas religiosas del islam, mormonismo, hinduismo o cristianismo, ¿cuál es el propósito de las restricciones y la culpa religiosas?”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Regardless the options you have, the most important thing is to choose consciously. Don't let ancient religious programming dictate your emotional and intellectual responses. You are a biological and social creature living in a biological and social world. Recognizing this gives you the power to make more rational decisions about how you want to enjoy the only life you have.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Treating depression often requires that a patient identifies and changes self-defeating thinking. Identifying religion as the problem is especially difficult, since people often retreat to religion to deal with their depression. In reality, however, while religion promises peace and fulfillment, it often creates more of what caused the depression in the first place.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“While [female genital mutilation] may have not originated with Islam, it has become an integral part of the religious practice in many regions tied to notions of male dominance and control of female sexuality.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them - fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systemically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Sexual preferences develop, evolve and change over a lifetime. [...] Without opportunities for sexual exploration and discovery, how is a 19 to 20-year-old to learn what he or she likes and how his or her body reacts?”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The more risk averse a person is, the higher his or her religiosity [...]. In other words, risk-averse people don't want to take a chance on getting on the wrong side of god.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, "Did Jesus have sex?" and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, "Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?" or "Did Mary and Martha, 'whom Jesus loved,' ever enjoy a good orgasm?" Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“the more educated and financially successful, the less religious a person is likely to be.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“CHAPTER 13: MODERN RELIGIONS AND THE MISOGYNY OF GOD Religions have systematized violence against women for thousands of years. What is the cost of this repression? “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.” 1 Corinthians 14: 34 KJV”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Religions throughout the world are losing control of sex. Ironically, the result is greater joy and satisfaction, less disease, and fewer unplanned pregnancies and less traumatic guilt around normal sexual behavior.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The realm of “normal” in human sexuality is vast. If you want to masturbate several times a day – that is normal. If you want to have sex with your partner several times a day – that is normal. If you want to be spanked before you have sex – that is normal. If you want to have oral sex frequently – that is normal. If you want to have a threesome – that is normal. If you like to dress up in the clothes of the opposite sex – that is normal. If you get off by watching naked men popping balloons – that is normal. If you want a husband and a lover on the side – that is normal. There is nothing wrong with you if you have normal ideas, urges and drives. If your sexual behavior is consensual among adults and hurts no one else, it is fine. In the BDSM world, it’s called “safe, sane and consensual,” a good way to sum it up. No church has the right to get into your bedroom and tell you what is normal.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Many religious people are the sum of all the shoulds they absorbed in their early training. Because their shoulds define them, they never learn who they are. They are too busy being who their minister, parents, spouse, church or Sunday School teacher says they should be. People who rely on shoulds to make life decisions often make poor choices.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The need to lock in sexual monogamy for life is simply unrealistic for many people and may not even be emotionally or physically healthy. Recognition of this fact would go a long way toward making long-term relationships possible. If people communicated honestly on these issues, other relationship approaches might work for a wide range of people. Of the 50% in our culture who divorce, how many might remain married if other relationship options were seen as viable?169 How many who stay in miserable marriages would find renewed happiness and commitment to one another?”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Eliminating guilt about sex allows a person to talk about needs and desires more honestly and negotiate with possible partners. If a person feels shame about his desires, he is unlikely to talk about it with anyone.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“Wherever religious ideas are taught, there are higher levels of sex abuse, child abuse, divorce and spouse abuse. If we wish to address the problems associated with sexual crime, abuse and harassment, the place to start is in solid, non-religious, sexual education of children and adolescents. This means that religious ideas about homosexuality, masturbation, male superiority, female purity, etc., must be directly challenged.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“To claim that reproduction is the most important part of sex goes totally against our biology.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“The best thing you can do for your sex life is to leave religion”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human’s sex drive. Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality