Fair Questions: Why Mixed-Attraction Marriage?

To put it mildly, the relationships depicted in the video segment below will generate considerable moral outrage in some social circles, puzzlement in many others, and applause in a few circles.



It will generate moral outrage in some circles because it depicts men who are physically attracted to other men (at least most of the time) setting aside their attraction to do what they believe is objectively morally right: marrying within their religious tradition and raising children.

Why the outrage?  Because those folks believe that the basic moral duty of a person is to fulfill their strong attractions, particularly their sexual attractions, by acting on them throughout life.  Their view is that personal fulfillment happens as a result of consistently realizing our sexual desires (as long as it is between consenting parties).

Also, they believe that a person acting against their strong sexual attractions consistently throughout life is doomed to either fail in remaining chaste or doomed to a host of mental health issues due to sexual repression if they do in fact succeed in remaining chaste.

They genuinely believe that it is fundamentally harmful to people to practice a radical self-denial with regard to our sexual attractions.  Their outrage is at least understandable, whether one agrees with their worldview or not.

Others who are more tolerant live-and-let-live types will simply be puzzled by the mixed-attraction marriages depicted in the video.  They themselves don't see any sense in getting married to a woman unless you're exclusively attracted to women, but they figure...if it makes the couples happy and works for them, why not?

These folks have different feelings and conclusions about mixed-attraction marriages, but one thing they generally agree on is that the purpose of sex is to have fun and to act on our attractions.  It's a hedonistic view of the human person and our moral imperatives.  (I'm using the term hedonistic here not as a pejorative, but rather as a clinical description.)

Those who applaud mixed-attraction marriages, on the other hand, may or may not be hedonistic in their own approach toward marriage.  Some who applaud mixed-attraction marriages are doing so either solely or primarily because the Bible prohibits homosexual acts and promotes opposite-sex marriage as God's plan for human beings.

Out of this group, some are pretty hedonistic themselves.  They too believe that the purpose of sex is to have fun and act on our attractions, although if you have children too, that's Biblical as well.  For this segment of the Bible-believing folks, marriage is the prerequisite for sexual license.  After marriage, you can do pretty much what you like with your spouse as far as sex acts are concerned.

Others, however, do not have a hedonistic view of marriage at all.  Mostly these folks are either Mormons, members of the Catholic Church or part of the Evangelical movement in post-Reformation Christian groups.  They believe in things like NFP (Natural Family Planning) to help regulate the number of children a family has. 

This method requires periodic abstinence and strong self-control, unlike the condoms and pills used by most of their co-religionists.  They propose something antithetical to hedonism: human beings ought to control their transient urges by regular self-denial, and especially with those that are the strongest urges like those related to sex and food.

For them, our lives are a constant sacrifice, an ongoing self-emptying which denies our transient desires for the sake of achieving objective moral goods.  For them, all of us are called to turn everything we desire over to God and follow the divine commands, no matter how hard those cut against our strongest instincts.

It is in this view that mixed-attraction marriages make the most sense.  On this view, those who experience strong same-sex attractions are called to take up the cross of their desires just like everyone else, subordinating those desires to the way of life which God commands for us.

And they have to exercise a radical control over those desires just as everyone else does, in order to turn their lives completely over to God.

What many people will ask at this point is: How healthy is it to deny such powerful desires for so long?  Should we really be recommending this approach of mixed-attraction marriages for everyone?

I don't recommend this approach, myself.  The divorce rates are higher than average for mixed-attraction marriages (which is especially harmful for any children from the marriage), and that seems an important point when deciding whether or not to take the risk of entering into such a marriage.

That said, I'm not sure how much of the higher divorce rate is caused by the mixed-attraction challenge and how much is caused by our culture teaching people that marriage is for their pleasure (which inevitably leads to disappointment and often resentment).  It seems likely that mixed-attraction marriages have been going on for several hundred years in the United States, and it would be useful to know whether the divorce rates for those marriages shot up right after the Sexual Revolution.

If the rates did go up a lot at that time in our history, it would suggest that a more hedonistic view of marriage had a lot to do with causing high divorce rates among mixed-attraction marriages too.  Perhaps more study on this issue would be enlightening.

As far as the question of whether it's healthy or not to deny such powerful desires for so long, my observation is that celibate priests, most of whom keep to their vows and are not sexually active, are generally no more unhealthy from a physical or psychological standpoint than most other folks after taking into account that they have an extremely stressful job.

The existence of a small percentage of priests who find it unbearable to remain in the state of sexual inactivity doesn't provide much evidence for the claim that it's intrinsically unhealthy or impossible to live that way for long. 

Claiming that it does is rather like proposing that the small percentage of the Jain monastic population that commits violent crimes means that radical non-violence is unhealthy or impossible to live out for very long.  And who would propose that?

In the end, the reasons provided by the folks in the video segment for entering into mixed-attraction marriages aren't going to make sense except in the context of a vow that requires us to radically transform our lives in order to reach a transcendent purpose.

Anything less will not be sufficient to provide us with the kind of extraordinary motivation we need to live with profound suffering as we take up our crosses and follow Him.

Unfair Questions: Was Jesus a Buddhist monk named Issa?

Recently, an article which claims that "Jesus Was a Buddhist Monk Named Issa Who Spent Time in India and Tibet" was brought to my attention.

Given that I've studied both Buddhism and Christianity in an unusual amount of depth for a layperson, and that I've seen some interesting parallels between them, you might think that this is something I would leap to believe.  But even when I was first introduced to it, I didn't buy in.  I just thought it was an interesting possibility.

When I went to college for my first degree, I encountered this idea that perhaps Jesus traveled to India and became a Buddhist monk for a number of years before returning to his homeland.  At the time, I thought it was an interesting and exciting idea (partially because this was shortly before I seriously considered converting to Buddhism).

Why does this theory remain so popular?  For several reasons.  The first being its explanatory power.

The explanatory power of this theory is that it explains where Jesus was between the Presentation at the Temple and the period of time shortly before his public ministry began at the Wedding at Cana.  It fills a big narrative gap in the story of Jesus' life, which we like because we are not comfortable with narrative gaps once we notice them.

There's not inherently anything wrong with wanting to fill in gaps in our knowledge.  That kind of desire is generally good.  At the same time, we ought to be careful about how we find the missing pieces of knowledge.  We need a way to assess which explanation is more likely to be accurate before using it to complete the narrative.

This helps us avoid getting conned.  One common way of persuading people to believe falsehoods is to call their attention to a gap in their narrative, and then propose a way of filling that gap which pulls on their heartstrings and their confirmation bias leads them to believe without properly checking the evidence.  (You can see this tactic being used in the BBC documentary displayed at the end of the article.)

The other appeal of the theory is that it fits the intuitions of many people who believe instinctively that for a religious figure to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, he must be a cross-cultural figure with universal appeal.  And because there is a high degree of fascination with Buddhism in the West along with high levels of residual belief in Christ, it's natural to gravitate to a theory that connects them and (from their perspective) lends legitimacy to both religious traditions.

It also pokes those stodgy close-minded establishment Christian groups in the eye and subverts their beliefs, which is another advantage for many who are cynical about the religious groups in their home countries in the West.  These are the parts where the confirmation bias is coming in.

The trick here is validate folks' residual attachment to Jesus as a great religious figure and/or personal savior while also feeding their dislike of traditional Christian religious perspectives.  Everyone involved gets to feel like they are subverting the oppressive traditional and institutional religious groups while at the same time confirming their own more enlightened views.

This isn't a new technique, and it's used quite regularly today, but if we're not aware of it, it's easy to fall for it, whatever your religious views might be.

All that said, what do we use to fill in the narrative gap?

The simple answer is that we examine competing theories and see which theory is supported by the available evidence.

Is the story told by Nicolas Notovitch, the theory that Jesus traveled to India and studied as a Buddhist, supported by the evidence?

No.  Actually, a well-known scholar of Eastern religions (he prepared the English translations of the Jain works in my personal library), found out pretty quickly that Notovitch fabricated his claims.

Even Bart Ehrman, a secular scholar of the history of religions who is happy to prod traditional Christian believers using historical evidence, admits that this theory was just started as a hoax.

It takes only a short time to check this information, and does not require extensive research.

So why would people continue to peddle his theory?

I will leave it to my readers to fill in the gap in the narrative as to their motives.

Related: How similar are the births of the world's major religious figures?

Fair Questions: Why do religions say there are terrible consequences for believing the wrong things?

I was recently posed a question related to why a religion would propose such severe consequences (hell, specifically) for having the wrong beliefs.  Additionally, why do almost all religions propose that there are terrible consequences for wrong beliefs about the spiritual world?

That's a great question, and it's one I want to answer by looking at it through the lens of evolutionary psychology (at least in the sense that we'll see how evolutionary pressure shaped our psychology).

Let's imagine for a moment that you live in the ancient world, before most of the comforts we take for granted were developed, and then think about how that might shape your fundamental assumptions about how the world works.

In the ancient world, if you believed the wrong thing about who your friends were, you would probably die.  If you believed the wrong thing about who your enemies were, you would probably die.  If you believed the wrong thing about where to stop for water and food on your journey, you might well die because of that wrong belief.

If you believed the wrong thing about where to hunt the best game, you might go hungry, and in your weakened state, fall prey to illness or another predator...and die.  If you believed the wrong thing about the right time to plant crops or harvest crops, the same results might obtain.  Over and over, you would see quite clearly that having wrong beliefs about the world and how it works often lead to terrible consequences for people.

To you, terrible consequences for wrong beliefs about the world would just be a feature of the world as obvious as the land you walked on and the moon above your head.  And because most people saw no clear division between the material world and the spiritual world, it would be natural to believe that this principle applied to the spiritual world as well.

So it would make perfect sense for people to conclude that just as wrong beliefs about the material world probably lead to material suffering and death, so too the wrong beliefs about the spiritual world would probably lead to spiritual suffering and death.

It also makes sense that as we grow more distant from the constant harsh survival pressure under which our ancestors operated, we would find it increasingly difficult to understand their intuitive conclusion that the wrong beliefs could lead to spiritual death as easily as material death.

This may be why the idea of Naraka, Diyu, Mictlan, Jahannam, Tartarus, and so on are relatively uncontroversial amongst the ancients.  For them, these terrible consequences were just as natural as the terrible consequences for getting lots of other beliefs wrong; they noticed that when they got it wrong, there was hell to pay.

Note: The above is a painting of a Buddhist hell (naraka) from Thailand in which people are being judged and thrown into a vat of boiling oil.