Many Christians have a sex problem.

Now, it's not the traditional opposition to evils like chronography or so-called free love and its disastrous consequences.

Instead, it's an attitude that's told to millions of young people that leads them down one of two dangerous paths.

Specifically, it's this.

It's treating sex as a hazard to be avoided instead of as a gift to be joyfully cherished.

When many Christians learn about sex, it sounds like the religious equivalent of the sex ed scene from mean girls.

Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.

Now, it's good to teach people to not fornicate, but if the only thing Christians are taught about sex

is that it's bad outside of marriage, but good in marriage, then sex becomes a meaningless

taboo. The 18th century explorer Captain Cook discovered that Polynesian men and women were not

allowed to eat together. When his sailors asked why the indigenous people weren't allowed to do that,

they said it was taboo. But even they couldn't explain what the word taboo meant. It just meant

don't do it. And so it's not surprising that when the taboo was later repealed, nobody cared.

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,

if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable.

We see this today when many people leave the Christian faith because they disagree with sexual ethics that to them seem arbitrary.

Or if they do stay, they might live

within this taboo in a way that leads to bad outcomes, what I call the pervert and the Puritan.

Let's start with the pervert. I'm not a pervert. To pervert something means to distort

its intended function, and so a sexual pervert is someone who uses sex in a distorted way.

For example, I've addressed the perversion of bestiality in previous episodes because human sex is

meant to only include humans in it, which can be easily discerned from the procreative elements

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