Was Sex Involved in Original Sin?

 

Sex was not Involved in Original Sin

Through these flawed, legalistic, and ignorant ideas, the notion has been indoctrinated into the Church that sex was somehow involved in original sin.  The classic example of this was William Jennings Bryan and his famous debates with Clarence Darrow in the last century.  In one of those debates Darrow asked, “Mr. Bryan, what do you believe that the Bible teaches about sex?”  William Jennings Bryan’s startling and disappointing answer was that there was no doubt in his mind whatsoever but that the Bible teaches sex was original sin.  There has been an enduring religious notion that there is something nasty about sex, that the naked human body is disgraceful, in and of itself, that deriving pleasure from sex is sinful, and that the only sanctified reason for sex is to procreate, or in other words to conceive children.  To pursue this subject to any length would take us far from our subject of nakedness and how we are to think about it, so I will leave it for now by saying that no such notions, when advanced by the Ante-Nicene Fathers, the Puritan Fathers or the Catholic Fathers, are either true or Biblical; and they have visited untold pain and destruction on both the Church and the home.  In and of itself, there is nothing subnormal, proscribed, or venal about the naked body and nothing inherently sinful about a male and female being naked in the presence of one another.