The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (16 page)

Second, the religion must ensure that the young are properly infected. This is a time-consuming and resource-intense requirement. For this reason the religion focuses on keeping the family unit intact so it can concentrate resources on infecting the next generation. Many mechanisms are brought to bear on this task, such as:

• Parental guilt, “Am I doing enough to teach my children about god?”

• Sexual fidelity, “Have I taught my children how important fidelity is to god?”

• Viral flooding, “Am I keeping my children busy with religious activities to ensure other religions or secularism can’t influence them?”

• Viral isolation, “Am I doing all I can to keep my children heavily involved with other children at religious school, church camp, Sunday School, Wednesday prayer meeting, Thursday Bible study, youth choir, scripture memorization,” etc.

In a pluralistic society, it is difficult to isolate children from other religions. Until complete infection is achieved, there is a constant danger of attack and infection by another religion, or worse, the idea of no religion. Infection is much more difficult in a pluralistic society than in a more monolithic culture like a village in Afghanistan. When a religion is completely bound to the culture, the culture is brought into the service of the virus with more powerful effect. Since there are no competing religions in the environment,
isolation has already been achieved. This makes infection efficient. It also makes it easier to impose heavy sanctions on wayward children.

Uncontrolled sexuality prevents efficient propagation and risks wasting viral resources. The primary way to control sexuality is to create an environment of prohibition and sanction. All of the major western religions and many of the eastern ones have learned to harness the power of the sex drive in service of the god. This is probably the single biggest factor in the evolutionary success of the major religions today: They learned how to harness the power of the sex drive for viral propagation through the use of guilt, suppression of women’s sexuality, indoctrination of the youth in the virtues of having sex only inside of marriage and other techniques.

Within this context, the religion takes over the mating and reproductive parts of the brain and directs specific behavior. This behavior is NOT what humans are inclined to do and may, in fact, be dramatically different. It may not even be in the best interest of the individual, but it is in the best interest of the god virus. Religion is not concerned with the pleasure aspect of sex. The concern is propagation. This leads to a sex-negative environment that is friendly to the virus.

The power of the virus is so great that it can induce sexual suicide. For example, Catholic priests and nuns are required to stop all sexual activity, including masturbation. Normal, biological drives are redirected or eliminated to allow the vector to focus all its energy on viral reproduction. The process creates huge psychological and emotional issues for priests and nuns, leading many to pathological behaviors.

While Islam does not make such unnatural requirements as celibacy, young suicide bombers in Islam in fact commit sexual suicide by giving up their reproductive capacity in the service of the virus. Virtually all suicide bombers in recent years have been young and clearly of reproductive age.

Control of reproduction is a fundamental strategy of the virus. Where the strategy is undermined, the virus is weakened. For example, god viruses are weak in Europe where access to birth control and abortion is higher than in the rest of the world. Ironically, the abortion rate is far lower in Europe, as are teenage pregnancies. Many religions in the United States claim that they want to reduce abortions and teenage pregnancy, yet in areas where religion is strongest, the rates are far higher. Don’t be fooled by the viral words; if reduction in abortion or teen pregnancy were the goal, it could be achieved in a few years. Look at the following statistics:
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The god virus is not concerned with abortion or teen pregnancy; it is concerned with propagation.

God viruses are highly threatened by low birthrates. That is why many of the Christian viruses are so focused on the question of when life begins. Abortion and birth control limit the potential hosts. Availability of abortion and birth control tends to push the environment toward the more sex-positive.
None of the major god viruses does well in sex-positive environments. Without sexual control, they face a serious challenge to their existence. Can you imagine the Catholic virus as sex-positive? Could you imagine Pope Benedict XVI, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Billy Graham, etc., carrying a sex-positive message of openness, sex as pleasure to be enjoyed to please yourself and your partner or partners as long as it is consensual and safe?

6
Sue Alford and Ammie N. Feijoo,
Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.—Why the Difference?
2nd ed.(Advocates for Youth, 2001).

I don’t think you will hear those sermons soon. As vectors of the virus, their job is to ensure sufficient sexual control to propagate the virus. Therefore, their sermons will be about abstinence, self-control, the terrors of abortion, the scandal of the Plan B drug and the horror of giving birth control pills or condoms to teenagers. Sexual control is the message, and it cannot be otherwise for a sex-negative virus.

Abstinence-only programs, advocated for by American fundamentalists, are a miserable failure according to most research. Nevertheless, these programs have the effect of creating sufficient guilt and fear in children to keep them bonded to the religion. The research shows these programs don’t reduce pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, age of first sexual intercourse or the number of partners.
⁷
As can be seen by the accompanying graph from a large meta-analysis of abstinence programs, there is no difference between abstinence groups and control groups. The groups are virtually identical.

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Mathematica Policy Research funded by the U.S. Congress to evaluate abstinence-only programs found, “That youth in the four evaluated programs were no more likely than youth not in the programs to have abstained from sex in the four to six years after they began participating in the study. Youth in both groups who reported having had sex also had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same average age.” See Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.,
Impacts of Four Abstinence Education Prgroams
[article on-line] (accessed 22 November 2008); available from
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/abstinencereport.asp
; Internet.

If these programs are so clearly ineffective, why does the government keep funding them with millions of dollars? It gives the new civil virus and allied god viruses a direct line to children in the public school systems. Abstinence is not about sex, it is about exposure to the god virus with the assistance of public school money. If reduction of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases were the real goal, why not emulate non-religious European societies where all of these are far lower? Most of Europe has cheap birth control and appropriate sex education for the young. These ideas are anathema to the god virus because every hour of training in an abstinence-only program helps imbed the guilt cycle into young persons so they will become more infected. They then get relief from their guilt through the god virus.

The Catholic Church has only recently been brought to task over the priest sexual abuse scandal, but Protestant churches have a scandal of their own that is yet to be fully exposed. In a January 23, 2007, article about two North Texas Baptist pastors accused of molesting young girls, Joe Trull, professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, had this to say:

Possibly if you looked at the statistics, I think there would be a higher incidence in nondenominational and Baptist churches because of a lack of accountability. Pastors there have not been prepared by their denomination. There is still that attitude in seminaries and colleges that prepare these pastors that they’re on their own. It’s that CEO mentality. And the thing that grieves me is that there’s absolutely no sense of how this misconduct affects other ministers and churches.

Trull goes on to say:

In other denominations, [pastors] know that if charges are brought, truth will win out, Doctors and psychologists know if they are caught, they will lose their credentials and there will probably be a malpractice suit. Most Baptists and nondenominational ministers know that “If I get caught, I can move to California and start a new church.”
⁸

Oversight is extremely difficult in these independent churches, as their
governing structures are entirely dependent on the vector. While they have governing boards, the vector is largely responsible for their appointment and knows how to run someone off who asks too many questions.

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Associated Baptist Press,
Baptist churches more vulnerable to clergy sex abuse, experts say
[article on-line] (23 January 2007, accessed 21 November 2008); available from
http://www.abpnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1753&Itemid=120
; Internet.

Continuing from the article mentioned above, Trull writes:

Christa Brown, an attorney from Austin, Texas, insists that Baptist leaders would not let autonomy delay action if they truly cared about protecting children from abuse. Brown works with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an organization of clergy sexual-abuse survivors. She maintains
www.stopbaptistpredators.org
and has asked the Baptist General Convention of Texas to hire independent experts to investigate sexual-abuse cases within the convention.

This is strong proof that the virus cares more about protecting the preacher than stopping abuse. It is unlikely that Baptists will take effective action in the near future. The independent model has been extremely effective. I have personally witnessed five different congregations torn apart by pastoral sexual affairs.
⁹
In each case, the pastor was able to overcome those who asked too many questions and eliminate them. After several incidents occurring over 10-15 years, in each case, the minister was finally forced out but only moved on to continue his predatory behavior at another church.

Those infected have great difficulty seeing inappropriate behavior in the vector. They are virtually hypnotized into believing he can do no major wrong.
¹⁰
Sex-negative religion sets everyone up for some kind of fall: whether divorce, sexual abuse, sexual dysfunction, pedophilia or adultery.

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The congregations represented Presbyterian, Baptist and the Independent Christian Church.

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How often do we see headlines like this: “Megachurch leader in mega-sized sex scandal”? It seems to happen quite often. This was the headline on
MSNBC
, Nov. 19, 2007, about an Atlanta mega church where sexual misconduct of the founding minister was ignored for 35 years despite many complaints by women, until DNA testing found that his “nephew” was really his son by his brother’s wife. Sounds like something out of the Old Testament. MSNBC,
Megachurch leader in mega-sized scandal
[article on-line] (19 November 2007, accessed 21 November 2008); available from
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21888916
; Internet.