Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is definitely not true, at least for Catholicism. My source is that I just recently went through the pre cana process (for those who don’t know, this is the Catholic marriage preparation, basically a retreat where you do various activities with your soon-to-be-spouse alongside other couples; it was a very good experience actually, happy to explain more to the curious) and they were very clear that a husband and wife are supposed to enjoy sex together. Sex is a hugely important part of romantic attraction and the general human experience, not to mention for procreation, and God made it feel good for a reason. You’re just not supposed to enjoy with people other than your spouse, or while using contraception other than cycle-tracking methods (of which the church offers a surprisingly robust suite of resources to help with, including services like biomarker tracking to help precisely identify a woman’s fertility cycle; they also included an array of secular scientific studies showing good success rates for the methods, I found it all very interesting). I admittedly can’t cite the biblical references off my head but I can tell you with absolute certainty that the Official Church StanceTM is that sex is good, actually.
Edit: reading further down the page I see that @urquan has included a key term I forgot to use, which summarizes the position and reconciles the attitude that “sex is good” with the attitude that “celibacy/chastity is good”. Marriage is, in and of itself, a vocation in the religious sense. There’s a reason it’s a sacrament after all. The priesthood, of course, is also a vocation. Priests are not “missing out” on something religious by being celibate and unmarried, nor are married couples “missing out” on part of the religion by not becoming priests and nuns instead. They are simply two different callings.
More options
Context Copy link