Dishonour God's Temple

For the last 15 years I have put the words “BDSM” and “Christianity” into Google (or similar) at least once a year. There used to be a few interesting websites and especially a forum that I remember as fairly open minded but with some well researched articles. Unfortunately the good links have disappeared and one of the top ranked links is this.

Okay before you read it please take it at face value that I completely and utterly disagree with this author. I am entirely opposed to such a literal reading of the bible. But with a somewhat lazy start I will structure my initial comments the same way as his introduction.

So let us start with God’s Temple. The author implicitly tells us that BDSM encompasses several actions that dishonour our bodies in its role as God’s Temple. In principle I fully agree. It makes sense – and I do not need a God to tell me this – that I should look after my own body, make sure I look after my health and so on. In BDSM we call this “Safe, Sane and Consensual.

A healthy body leads to a more confident personality, better health and a longer and less troublesome life. So before any fellow Christian judges me on my activities and their effect to my Temple of God, think where this is going. BDSM is not for the body, it is for the spirit. It helps to create a mindset. Most practices are not damaging the body or leaving marks and those that do hardly leave harmful marks. Certainly those do exist and I would never engage in them or recommend doing this as in those few circumstances I would agree that it does dishonour your body and as such God’s temple.

But let me look further. What this really is saying is that we should maintain a healthy lifestyle. This is not directed to any particular sexual practices. Quite the contrary. I am not doing very well following this advice but to me it means:

• Keep a healthy body weight
• Eat Healthy
• Be Active
• Groom Yourself

All these are things that come to mind are things to do, not things I should not do. I am convinced this is not because there is nothing that I should avoid doing in order to please god (I should avoid committing suicide, self hurt for starters) but it is that in my spiritual mind the BDSM related things I would engage in are far from critical and by comfort eating and gaining weight and lack of excercise I damage this temple much more in a potentialy harmful way than by any BDSM practice I am likely to engage in.

With that let me make a resolution to act healthy in my vanilla life and to only play safe.

[Via http://sexandchristianity.wordpress.com]