“The Church did much to instil shameful feelings regarding the undraped human figure. These distorted, unnatural emotions survive today.”
Scott Cunningham – Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, p49
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Curious Christian 
Thats not a myth, it is the truth plainly spoken.
There are countless numbers of Christian religionists out there who are disturbed by their sexuality.
Witness the “moral” outrage in Puritan America when Janet Jacksons breast was exposed on TV. Or when a Parenting Magazine featured a baby suckling its mothers bare breast on its cover.
Plus whenever Christian religionists talk about morality and “sin” you can be sure that they are talking about sexuality and what people do with their bodies. This is especially the case with right wing religionists.
Indeed my Spiritual Master points out that the overcoming, or rather transcending of, this all pervasive negative social script re sexuality and the body is the necessary key for the emergence of a culture of sanity.
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John, your perennial mistake is to confuse a part for the whole. Yes, there are elements within the church that get thingy about nakedness, but then, there are elements that think horse and buggies are a hoot. But is that true of Christianity as a whole? Not at all.
And that’s where the mythmaking comes in. It’s when people like yourself make claims of “the church” that are, at best, true of only part of the church, but not the whole.
The truth of this is easily demonstrated by the five seconds of searching on Google that it took me to find this counter-example to your examples, examples of traditional Christian artwork featuring Jesus suckling the naked breasts of Mary: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/06/23/article-1028888-01B7392E00000578-245_468x602.jpg It’s not hard to find, it only takes a willingness to look.
So this is where I’d invite you to look closer at the above painting from the Sistine Chappel. If you look close you’ll see a penis. Not the biggest penis in the world, but a penis all the same. Now, is this an obscure piece of Christian artwork? Is it tucked away in a dark corner somewhere? Is it considered particularly maverick? No, it is one of the most famous examples of Christian art anywhere in the world.
How do you square that fact with your “facts” John?
This is precisely where you’re criticisms of Christianity always fall flat on me. It’s because they never have anything to do with Christianity as I’ve experienced it. For starters, I’m not right wing. You’ve universalized your own experience, and refuse to consider that it’s anything other than a God’s eye view. In so far as your attacks are valid, they’re valid for a brand of Christianity I have little to do with. In so far as you universalise them, they’re invalid, they’re mythological projections.
If you really want to mount a serious challenge to Christianity you need to become conversant with the broader Jesus movement. You preach holism but all I see is you being extremely reductionistic. Your behaviour lags behind your rhetoric.
Now I am not expecting you to respond, since you rarely stick with thorny questions, but how about surprising me? How about actually commenting on the picture and how that squares with your view?
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The naked body don’t bother me in art or life… It is not the naked body that is perverse or hideous in form.
It is the mind/spirit and what it projects onto it…
God knew that =’s enter the fig leaf number. But of course we take it to new heights of madness through history. I think all religions have adopted a bit of hysteria about nakedness and women have fared worse often portrayed as temptress/whore/commodity… the woman made me ‘sin’ palava. Yeah ur right in ur comment to John masses of christian art through history has portrayed naked human bodies. I think if i was to point the finger of accusation it would have to be at the catholic church doctrines of the past giving one unease at having a body and shock horror! – sexuality. But the blame can extend to all religions eastern as well for freaking out re nakedness. The old eastern transcend ur sexuality number is just as twisted… It confuses one into splitting off from self and is a trap. Been there done that. Come into life naked and we are gonna go out the same way. End.
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Mary, yet even within the Catholic church there is diversity. Note again that this picture is a Catholic one. From my own researches into the history I get the impression that a lot of the anti-body stuff that you refer to infiltrated Christianity via the Gnostics and NeoPlatonists. That is, it was a foreign import. Your last comment is very pertinant in that respect. In Genesis, the covering up in shame that we read about was a “post-fall” development. Nervousness about nakedness had no place in the Creator’s creation prior to that. So, it was the covering up that was the mark of our sinful nature, not the nakedness. Without sin they had nothing to hide, only with sin did hiding emerge as a human behaviour. This positive respect for the body in scripture carries through to the New Testament where the central miracle is the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which revealed him to be the embodiment of God. I think you hit it on the head when you said its not the body that’s the problem, its what we project onto it.
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