Is religious faith a political sin?
I’m not very religous; but just like I’m less repelled by pro-life arguments than by pro-choice arguments, I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with the anti-religious bigotry coming out of anti-christians.
I do not understand the vitriol, even from some people on the right, to Christine O’Donnell’s adultery PSA from the nineties. O’Donnell is a Catholic. Catholics believe that adultery is a sin; they believe that adultery in thought is also a sin. These are basic teachings of Catholicism.
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.—Matthew 5:27-281
O’Donnell’s PSA added to this the obvious observation that a normal person doesn’t masturbate without lust.
We have God-given sexual desires, and we need to understand them and preserve them to be used in God’s appropriate context. Masturbation is a part of sexuality, and it is important to discuss this from a moral point of view. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. You can’t masturbate without lust.
The hatred for this view means either having an issue with the basic Christian belief that sinning in your heart is a sin, or that masturbation involves emotion. I’d be more wary of someone who masturbates without emotion, than someone who believes lust is a sin.
Further, O’Donnell wasn’t asking for intrusive laws forcing everyone to pay taxes and buy into her belief system. It was a PSA. She was a young adult and a Christian committing to her faith in the irreligious nineties—and it took a lot of courage to come out for faith back then, especially on MTV. I expect it still does. Do I agree with Catholicism on this? No. But it is standard, normal, everyday Christian belief. To claim that this belief is beyond the pale for politicians is to deny Catholics the right to serve in public office—and to deny this right to many other Christians, too. When President Carter confessed to lusting in his heart, he was referencing exactly that belief, and acknowledging it as sinful within his Baptist faith.
That’s from the King James Bible. The Catholic version runs:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
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- Matthew 5 at United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
- Matthew, chapter 5, from the Catholic New American Bible. “He went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them.”
- Rachel Maddow Sexualizes Christine O’Donnell: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection
- “Liberal feminism is dead, and has been for years.”
- The Sixth Commandment: You shall not commit adultery at Vatican: the Holy See
- “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of the sexual relationship in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.”
- Straight Talk About The Catholic Teaching on Masturbation
- “Masturbation is… often accompanied by ‘adultery in your heart’ through pornography and fantasy.”
More Election 2010
- Don’t mess with the deck chairs, fix the boat!
- Advice for the incoming House. Make them deny it! And don’t try to fool us by changing the deck chairs.
- End of media; to delete this media…
- There will be a crisis: but this time they got caught manufacturing their crisis. And it’s a crisis of a most despicable kind: falsely tying a candidate to child molestation.
- San Diego’s proposition D: tax first, reform afterward
- San Diego’s proposition D is an attempt to raise taxes and then reform—which is, of course, an attempt to raise taxes and not reform anything at all.
- Nick Popaditch debates Bob Filner in CA-51
- Popaditch comes off as far more responsive to the needs of the community in this debate.
- There will be lies
- The media takes a blunder by Coons on the first amendment—and outright changes what both candidates said to make it look like a blunder by O’Donnell.
- 10 more pages with the topic Election 2010, and other related pages
More elections
- Texas 2023 legislative priorities
- The Texas legislature is in session now for 2023; other than special sessions, it won’t meet again until 2025. Everyone has their priorities. Here are mine.
- Election 2024
- Positioning for election 2024 is already started; the campaign will heat up very quickly after November 2022.
- Write your rep on ballot security and open elections
- Your state should be a model of secure, open, and self-auditing elections. Here’s a sample letter to your representatives.
- Bean counting and ballot counting
- We treat money far more seriously than we treat the future of our country.
- Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
- John Fund’s Stealing Elections is a concise, easy-to-read description of just how much of a disaster is looming toward us when vote fraud finally catches up to a major election—as may already have happened in places like Florida.
- Three more pages with the topic elections, and other related pages
More hard faith
- Lord, thy will is hard
- We all fulfill God’s will. From the mightiest to the lowliest, we all are a part in God’s plan. Ask any Christian, and they’ll tell you that they believe this. Get down to the specifics, however, and you’ve touched on a central, and difficult, part of Christian faith.