Sex and Death -- Our Neuroses in the West

For at least 1000 years, we've not handled sex and death well in the West. Maybe not in the East either, quite possibly not in the Middle East, but definitely not in the Judeo/Christian, mostly Christian, West.

And why?

My guess: We've been neurotic about it ever since the vast majority of us bought into the notion that the Messiah, the Son of God, God incarnate, was born of a virgin, lived a virgin, and after dying, didn't stay dead.

So what does this story, especially as it is more and more glorified, imply? Well, one idea it seems to promote is that sex is too scandalous for a god, too carnal, even for incarnation. Tricky story here: On the one hand, we can't have a god born of an unmarried woman. Way too scandalous. On the other hand, we can't have a god born of a married woman who has had sex with her husband. If God is the father (and the Son as the Gospels would have it, thus giving us a family dynamic that at least casts a glance at Oedipus), then some mere mortal can't be involved . . . except in the giving birth part. But virgin birth? What's the point of that? Why is sex unworthy of a god's entry into the world? The Hindu Rama had a mama and a papa . . . on earth. Why not Jesus? I suspect it's because if Jesus comes from or goes to dust, the rest of us really are just dust to dust.

So a Child is Born in a manger and he, too, grows up to be a virgin before . . . .



Dying. But he doesn't stay dead. Or so we’re told. (As a child, I was instinctively skeptical about the Resurrection of Jesus. Sure, I wanted to believe it, but c’mon! My pastor didn’t cotton to skepticism. “If there’s one lie in the Bible,” he preached, “then it’s all lies!” This hard line struck me as troubling. It shut down the discussion instead of, perhaps, tending the sparse kindling of my flickering faith. And, of course, I didn’t really know about metaphor or allegory or even myth then.)

Death must be defeated. And if the Messiah can’t defeat death, what chance do the rest of us have? We call him the Messiah because he defeats death and shows us “the way.” Does the way require abstention, poverty, and crucifixion? Well, yes, it would seem so. After all, sex is suspect; we are plagued with wanting more than we have; and the anxiety about our mortality is the cross we all bear.
Now, there's much to inspire us in the resurrection part of the story, but only so long as we don't get the idea that consciousness cannot die and we can live forever in some sort of immaterial realm, i.e., as long as we don’t take the resurrection literally.

Why do we imagine that consciousness is eternal? Because we can’t imagine not being. It’s oxymoronic: to imagine not being. And so we create myths to help us wrestle with death. We let these myths work through the culture, through us as individuals; we revisit them and we try to derive some wisdom from them. It’s hard because we’re surrounded by what appears to be the finality of death. “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where . . . . ”

The 19th century French thinker Senancour struggled with faith and said, “if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us act as if it is an unjust fate." My response is, well, you do that. I can appreciate how unjust nothingness seems, and I can understand how hard it is reconcile to this. I sure don’t want to not be. So I can see how we’d create myths to helps us place all of this in perspective.

Perhaps the ancient Mesopotamian text “Gilgamesh” does this best. Our eponymous hero spends much of the time raging against the night after he sees his best friend, Enkidu, die. There is no bringing his friend back to life and Gilgamesh quickly surmises that the same awaits him, even him, the part divine, biggest, baddest, somfabitch in between the Tigris and Euphrates. So he looks for the elixir promising immortality. He finds it. Then loses it. Only then is he open to the wisdom of an elder who tells him that there the immortality of a memorable legacy is available to him, and that’s all, but it can be good, really good, if we can see the wisdom in it. Gilgamesh does, in fact, happily reconcile himself to this figurative immortality and then, guess what? Everything he found unsatisfying in life becomes glorious. And a life of wanting more, more, more only to be unsatisfied, unsatisfied, unsatisfied, becomes a life of fulfillment.

Great story!

But not good enough apparently for some of the seers to follow in the Fertile Crescent. I can hear them now, sitting around the fire, listening to the tale of Gilgamesh: “Yeah, yeah, I got your legacy, but don’t tell me that my mind will be snuffed out like a oil lamp.” What’s the point, after all, if we all just really die?

So we create myths and legends to help us deal with it. But let’s not create an industry around the idea that there is a literal life after death.

If it turns out that consciousness is eternal, then I wonder why there’s no firm evidence of that? We’re an ingenious species, a sentimental species. Wouldn’t someone in the after-life have figured out how to contact us in the here and now? You might say that God forbids this. But no one has rebelled against this edict? You might say that our temporal life will seem so . . . yesterday to us once we enter the Empyrean.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t buy it.

When we’re dead, we’re so dead. Death is like the bullet that destroys our brain before we hear the report of the gun that’s been pointed at us.

We rage against the night. As well we should. And we create a god to create a celestial, unlike the material realm around us, to support the afterlife. But if upon arriving in the afterlife, my consciousness is so expanded that I'm just la-dee-dah about Tina, then I'm not really me anymore. I might as well have died.

And since death is a door that has remained closed, we keep telling ourselves, via the afterlife industry, that there’s no brick wall behind it. And we have to keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves, because if there IS anyone on the other side, they just don’t seem to care enough about us to make any contact with those of us on earth. Our insistence on an eternal consciousness is an afterlife addiction.


There’s a lovely, and gently honest, definition of faith in the Christian New Testament. In Hebrews 11:1, our unknown epistler explains, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It’s hard to know if the claim of “evidence” in the second clause is figurative or literal, but if it’s literal, it’s qualified playfully, I think, by the first clause which states that the substance of faith is hope. Just hope. Not evidence. And I admire Kierkegaard’s leap of faith whereby he embraces the second clause in its more literal sense. And what did he leap over? The Abyss of Doubt? Yes. And rational thought. And these two – the Abyss and rationality -- are inseparable because rational thought tells us that nothing awaits. Even that phrase, “nothing awaits,” seems to anthropomorphically suggest a consciousness that we will greet in some fashion, however briefly. No, let’s just stop hoping for what cannot be . . . nothingness does not await. It simply is.


My life is good. Sure, I don’t want the goodness of it to end. But nothingness means that I can’t possibly find myself in some realm where I’ll miss my earthly life.

I like the word “off” as a verb here. Disease, old age, or some calamity will off me. And I will not be in any form whatsoever ever again.

The Christian story of resurrection and the Gilgamesh legend of the partially divine being reconciling himself to immortality can inspire us to consider the figurative immortality we might achieve. But not if we take them literally. Then we just get neurotic as our beliefs fly in the face of what we see around us all the time, but are unwilling to accept and encouraged not to by the peer pressure of the after-lifers.