Handbook of Reason
Raise not your children in disdain of Israel; I say unto you, take out the venom from your Scripture so that my people may live!
D. D. R.
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
The one and only Pope ever to speak out in behalf of the Jews, Pope John XXIII before his death had composed a Prayer of Repentance in which this true vicar of Christ begged God’s forgiveness for the untold suffering brought upon the Jewish nation by the members of the Catholic Church. On his deathbed the Pontiff urged that this prayer be said in all Catholic places of worship. Up to now, this has not been done; the good Pope’s wish should be neglected no longer.
Quoting from Pope John’s Prayer of Repentance:
“We admit that over hundreds of years our eyes were blinded, so as not to see the Beauty of Thy Chosen People and not to recognize the features of our firstborn brother. We admit that the sign of Cain is upon our forehead. For centuries Abel was lying in blood and tears while we had forgotten Thy love. Forgive us, O Lord, the curse we unjustly spoke out over the people of Israel. Forgive us, that in their flesh we crucified You the second time! We did not know what we were doing.…”
ABSTRACT
Art of old, sometimes siding with the good by drawing, sculpting, and painting ennobling themes, sometimes siding with the devil by glorifying conquering dictators—art has deserted both the angels and the devils for no one in particular. It just vanished into the abstract, nonobjective night of unrecognizable splotches on canvas, rules and dots and cubes, seen through a rock with a hole in the middle.
The savage who failed at music fell to beating drums; the painter whose brush fumbled jumped at “nonobjective” scraping or abstract paint-dripping; the musician sans harmony hailed dissonances; the sculptor with five thumbs on each hand delighted in “molding” crazy rocks or senseless metal ding-dangs. In short, the losers won the game.
It is amazing to read emphatic and concise “reviews” of nonobjective “paintings” or “sculptures” by presumptuously didactic critics who have as little idea what the erratic brush work or chisel-chipping means as the cynical “artists” themselves. Much noise about nothing; we live in an era where farmers get paid for not planting and painters for not painting. Only the totally incompetent need apply, since a mere shade of talent would disqualify the participant.
There is, however, a side alley open to the cunning: gimmickry like dripping paint on the floor or magnifying a pebble or painting with one’s own mop of hair or with an untidy brush, and the like. For the contemporary reckless pseudo-achiever, there are practically no restrictions on artistic chicanery and bluffmanship. Paint a whole wall brown or throw a brown drop on a white wall, just so the “critics” can have some hook on which to hang their multi-adjectives. They too are in this for the same reason as those on whom they lavish their belabored syntax. What a six-year-old would hide in embarrassment, they help sell for good money to frightened old ladies who wish to be avant-garde.
ACHIEVEMENT
Achievement lies not in becoming a bigger man but in making this a better world, not in what you do for yourself but in what you do for the people. Look at Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin—they crowned themselves with fame and power, yet in one snuff of nature, all was blown to nothing except the million murdered bodies. I have seen the sword of Alexander, the crown of Napoleon and the pipe of Stalin. They all, even under glass, bear the stench of rotting flesh.
What price power! And what shame to build monuments to such monsters!
ADULATION
Adulation is gilding. The Romans were masters at it. That’s why we rarely see a Caesar’s bust without a garland in his hair (a sow’s head with a rose in its jaw). In our day, we have had no shortage of poets and romancers weaving wreaths about the brows of current political monsters—and quiet flows the Don.
AGNOSTICS
Men who think never fail to hesitate and wonder. Only fools and drunks speak of the great and ultimate things with arrogant absolutism. Whatever we know is only a tiny thread in the eternal web of wisdom. We are all agnostics—yet we believe, we hope, we search.
AMBITION
Spinoza reckoned historic ambition among the great failings of mortal man. The fame-greedy would step over mountains of corpses, betray friends and family, desecrate the holiness of life, just to gain the vainglory of historic eminence. They crave for lands not because they need or even want them, just for the glitter of living on in history as conquerors. At the end no one possesses more than a tiny lot of land: three by six.
History vanity is at the root of a thousand wars and a thousand massacres. The conquerors in history pretend to fight for a cause. Deceivers they are, all! Their banners carry slogans of self-sacrifice and devotion but in their hearts is nothing but personal greed for historic fame.
What a price to pay for vanity!
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
American democracy may have its imperfections, yet no man ever deserted its shores and found a better form of government elsewhere—not because we have the best civitas; rather, all others without exception are worse.
AMERICANS
Americans are gluttons for self-criticism. They stage huge rallies because a demented assassin is put away but raise not an outcry if Russia ships any and all opponents to Siberian jails or China decapitates them in the public market-place.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS
Some anthropologists enjoy pontificating from a peak position. They take an old Gibraltar monkey jaw and solemnly swear this is the missing link a million years old and tomorrow they uncover a caved-in skull and that they assure us with vigor is the long-searched-for (image). Hesitance is the road to science; impressing the ignorant may bring one closer to success but not to the truth.
ANTI-SEMITISM
Anti-Semitism is a particular parasite. It has infected and still does infect some of the best growth in nature. Augustinus, Voltaire, Luther, Herder, Hegel, Marx, Proudhon—they reached out to the heavens; yet they were all infested with the rot of Jew-hate. Their tongues babbled with words of love, but suddenly they would swing about and snarl epithets of bloody hate against a people that never touched or hurt them.
“Burn the homes and Talmuds of the Jews!” bellowed Luther. “Keep the Jews as slaves forever,” sermonized Saint (!) Augustinus. “Exterminate this race like vermin,” said “gentle” Herder. And Shakespeare, who never saw a Jew in his whole life, branded them with the sign of usury.
What a pack of vicious wolves those Christian reformers be!
APPEASEMENT
You can’t pacify despots, you can only disarm them. A crocodile is harmless only when its teeth are out.
ARGUMENT
Usually arguments are not originated by those who present them but by one or a few who are hidden behind the speakers or writers. Stalin set a million tongues and pens in vivid motion; they spoke as if from a personal conviction while indeed they were only mouthing his. And the very next day when Stalin decided to drop his anti-Nazism and join Hitler as ally in war against Poland, to supply him with weapons, fuel and food, most of the million defenders of Stalin’s anti-Nazism turned into protagonists of Stalin’s pro-Hitlerism. All this, as quick as the new line could reach them.
Rare are the people who present and defend their own arguments; as a rule they are no more than mouthpieces for a distant schemer or ideologue.
ASTROLOGY
Astrology has been assiduously practiced by learned astronomers. Thus Learning is no obstacle to the cultivation of most absurd superstitions.
ATHEISTS
If this world exists, then God exists, If I exist, God exists—unless I assume that nothing is nowhere. If this universe of galaxies developed out of a bag of gases, no matter; somebody put the bag here. The rest is silence.
I know not what is beyond the billion galaxies. I know not what or who put the bag there. And those who say they know, they know less, because they don’t even know that they don’t know. No two people have the same God. No two people think God alike. But we know there is more—much more, a billion years more, aeons more—than we know. So let us be hesitant, and wonder and search.
Saying a meaningless word like atheist means nothing. There remains this infinite universe with infinite attributes and infinite modi of existence. And an ocean of mysteries in the air, in the distances, in the far unknown. So let us search and seek and wonder and have humility in our ignorance. It is so little we know.
AVARICE
Avarice is one of the three mainstreams of desire tossing man’s ship of life away from the straight course of personal well-being, the other two being Ambition and Lust. Such is the philosophy of Spinoza, the sage of Amsterdam. Spinoza reasoned that if man by concentration and deep insight learned to comprehend the vanity of honors bestowed, the dangers of submission to libidinousness and the destructive results of greed, he would raise the horizon of his thinking to the high level of eternal concepts and endeavor to see Creative Nature in its harmonious glory. The deep pleasure and satisfaction that accompanies such intuition, seeing all sub specie aeternitatis, would make man forego the petty pleasures accompanying erratically an existence given to greed, ambition and lust. The great joy of living in the light of reason makes the pleasures of disturbing bodily affectations fade into the background; man is no longer tossed about by the Tempting Three and serenely leads a free life.
Spinoza’s Free Man is decidedly an ethical individual, since he in his wisdom of the Infinite understands the great causal laws of the universe and therefore hates no person, a mere mode of Nature, nor does he love any thing or creature except in an intellectual form or manner, as he loves God, or to say it clearer, Creative Nature. Free man is dedicated to this amor Dei intellectualis in which he finds all things and all creatures in their proper causality. He understands the enemy as he accepts the friend; he is cognizant of hate as he is of love, of rancor as he is of generosity, of envy as he is of brotherhood, of patricide as he is of self-sacrifice. They are all manifestations of Great God Nature and have to be perceived not individually as most people do, but universally, cosmically. Free man thinks the Cosmos, lives the Cosmos, enjoys this Cosmic Vision, and is little perturbed by the turmoil of specific events. To him they are neither good nor bad, neither baleful nor lovable. The Free Man loves his enemy as he does his most devoted friend, as phenomena of Nature, and he would as little strike an offender as he would hit back at a chair; he would as little caress a benefactor as he would pat a flower for giving off sweet scent.
In a deeper sense, however, Spinoza’s Free Man is ethical. By freeing himself from all hate and animosity, he would not hurt people by design or deceive them on purpose or seduce them to vulgarity or evil. The Free Man may live in a world of delusion, in a tower of emotional isolation, but to whatever degree his resignation is guided by intuitive insight, he will do no wrong to others. That is eminently important in an era when the learned demonstrate little difference from the illiterate or uneducated in their attitudes and actions toward the downtrodden, the disinherited, and the deprived of our communities.
BENEVOLENT DESPOTS
There is an old Sephardic saying: the Devil keeps a clean house. Among the great oppressors of mankind, past and present, there were quite a few whose windows are well-dressed. Louis XIV of France, who bragged that not a single year of his reign passed without bloodshed, swaggered over the corpses of the villagers of France with royal indolence—yet he assembled at his stupendous palace artists, scholars and literati whose presence is supposed to balance his historical account. Catherine, Czarina of all the Russias, debaucher of peasant boys, and destroyer of whatever trace of freedom Czar Peter left the Russian workers and artisans—the lady conqueror and hangman was a woman of letters and corresponded with the “liberals” of her time. Napoleon sponsored a code of law named after him; Hitler supported youth organizations named after him; Alexander founded cities named after him; Stalin did the same. Mao replaced the Analects of Confucius with his personal quotations; Caesar became his own war correspondent (guess who is the hero?). All of these butchers were responsible for the massacre of millions of children and women. There seems to be an ancient code that men in uniform have the right to kill. All these and other despots have done some “good” here and there. Some built roads—for easier defense; others built schools to train administrative clerks or military experts. Many went to church—exchange visits I suppose to the high clergy for their blessings of the troops.
Let not the gracious left hand fool you; the right behind the back is bloody from the last massacre.
BEST SELLERS
Some books sell in quantity; others in depth. The New Testament is the all-time best seller. Look at the world and see for yourself what little effect it had on mankind. Marx’s Das Kapital was distributed by the millions over the last hundred years.
Christians and Communists read the books, but they acted upon the orders of their organizational masters. By their deeds you shall recognize them, not by the literature they read.
BIOGRAPHY
There are too many books about persons that in reality divulge more of the biographer than the biographed.
BLESSINGS
Blessings of the Church have often in history of the western world been solemnly bestowed on very prosaic, even distasteful occasions. In 1939 there were poised in Germany dominated by Hitler’s unholy spirit three armies, one on the east, one on the west, and one in the capital of the Third Reich. Before the armies there stood ten thousand men of the cloth, men who ate the bread of the Christian churches. Each of these clergymen had at his hip a makeshift altar with a shiny cross on top, a reminder of the eternal Jew as hangman and executioner of God’s Son.
The clergyman stood there to bless the armies of Hitler, poised to fall upon their neighbors to the east and their neighbors to the west and equally, if not more important, upon the kinfolk of Jesus—men, women and children, all unarmed, unaware of their impending doom, spread throughout the towns and villages of Europe, a Europe that traditionally and by religious training [The Jew is a Son of the Devil and does his father’s lust—John VIII.44] would never, but never, stand by a member of that race. They worshipped Jesus, adored His mother, but hated their Holy Family’s relatives.
These ten thousand clergymen looked up to the Heavenly Father and in somber, prayerful voices invoked success upon the weapons of Nazism, cannon, bullets and poison gas. It seems the Lord hearkened to their prayers because the Nazi armies defeated not only the west and the east but also gassed all the Jews of Europe. If I had faith in the power of prayer like an evangelist, I would consider the good Lord a silly old soul swayed by ten thousand German churchmen of the Christian religion. But I don’t reckon that God was persuaded by any priests or ministers or even bishops to tip the balance in any warfare. The Nazis won for a while, then they lost against both the east and the west.
But against the Jews, they won. Excepting some of the Jewish partisans who managed to escape, all of Europe’s Jews, women, children and old men, were choked to death with noxious gasses. To give it a special degree of brutality, the Germans placed the children in the execution chambers together with their mothers so they might watch the slow death of their offspring.
It is possible for Russian Christians and French Christians who came out of this holocaust hurt and diminished, yet alive, to continue the hereditary belief in divine providence. For the Jews of Europe, divine providence was a mere chimera, the nightmare of a corpse. The Jew of Europe was not a sick man, not a suffering man—the Jew of Europe was dead. Dead men have no religious convictions.
For the Jew on other continents, with the death of Europe’s Jews, God also died. The God of righteousness, of justice and protection had failed. The God of the Christian priests and ministers who blessed Hitler’s hordes with the sign of the cross remained an acceptable symbol of celestial providence, a bit jaded perhaps, but Christian Europe was alive. Only the Jews were dead, obliterated.
It is difficult, most difficult, to trust in divine providence when your little children choke to death in twelve tortured minutes before your very eyes and then you yourself feel the devil grip your throat and you pass into nothing. Can there be faith in heaven when all its gates are closed and your anguished voice is hurled back at you by a storm trooper’s jeer?
Europe’s Christians—in France, in Hungary, in Poland, in the Ukraine—vied with each other to deliver to the gas chambers of Germany all, and no fewer than all, of the Israelites, women, children and feeble old men.
Some of Europe’s Christians demanded a price: five dollars. That was what they got for Anne Frank. But most of Europe’s Christians did the denouncing and apprehending for nothing, for the mere satisfaction of it. They remembered their gospel lesson: the Jew is the Son of the Devil and does his father’s work. The never-dying-out apologists for Christian calumny have a few names of humane Europeans who saved a few of the doomed. The few prove only that you could be humane, if such was your nature. But the other half-billion Christians lived their lives in the spirit of Saint John’s gospel teaching: the Jews are Sons of the Devil. Der Jude verrecke!
The Vicar of Christ gave a warning to all: We Christians will remain neutral and not create doubts in the hearts of Germany’s faithful fighting men. We Christians will not protest against the killing of Jewish women and children. We are neutral. Thus spake Pius XII, the Pontiff. How prophetic the exclamation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: God is dead! It is not Hitler who killed God, but the churches of Christ, in their blessing of Nazi soldiers, in their gospel hate of Israel, in their refusal to lend a helping hand or even a helping word to a million children, in their turning away from the monstrous choking of a million young throats.
The Vatican gave Wagner festivals to Hitler’s elite in Rome; Protestant bishops placed swastikas beside the altar of Jeshu ben Joseph, the Messiah of Israel. How many of Jeshu’s kinfolk, how many descendants of his apostles died in the holocaust we shall never know. But with the little bodies of Israel’s children, there on the flaming stoves of Europe’s concentration camps died God the Redeemer.
And when the Germans and Ukrainians stopped the hearts of thirty thousand Jewish women and old men at Babi Yar and piled the bodies neatly like logs of wood, there they also buried the testament of Jesus into which the Christian church fathers already had driven one hundred sharp spikes of the ugliest and vilest accusations against Jesus’ own people. The Ukrainians, Hitler’s willing helpers; the Christians of Europe, indolent bystanders of history’s greatest bloodbath—together they made Babi Yar into a garbage heap for the whole pompous Christian theology and liturgy.
What holiness is there in a book of faith that carries within its chapters a hundred malevolent sentences against a people whence God chose his only Son? What holiness is there in a book of faith that teaches its readers from childhood to manhood to disdain the Jews as evil personified? What holiness is there in a book of faith that has Jesus, the Son of Joseph, the Son of David, call his own nation a devil’s brood? Jesus never spoke thus of his father’s people or his mother’s people. The churches that call themselves Christian may have had cynical reason to denigrate the Jew for all time—or was it jealous madness?—but until they expunge from the Christian Bible all malevolent Jew-baiting, it will remain a book of calumny, not a book of holiness.
BOOKS
Books are like apples: some are good, some are hard, and some are just rotten. Heine once complained bitterly about the good Lord’s “carelessness” in making the instrument of Love also a vehicle for expelling impurities of the body. On this note, I should like to register my displeasure to whoever invented the Book, that this greatest of all depositories of wisdom, contemplation, history and science is being abused by pushers of filth, perversion and downright printed boredom.
Books have in certain civilizations been considered depositories for wisdom. Wise or bewildered, their authors filled them lovingly. We unearth them in caves or graves; they speak to us from millennia gone by of their yearnings, their standards, their spiritual guideposts. The books of death, the books of life, they were then mileposts of man’s reaching toward the far horizon.
What are books today? Some are only documentary evidence of a pretentious but generally accepted fraud upon the public, ghostwritten papers put out under the byline of a successful politician, military man or publicity-seeking personality. Some of these nebulous “authors” never even read the books they allegedly wrote. A few self-promoters keep their own writer as a person of wealth would keep a valet or travel companion.
Some books are no more than a wreath of onanistic fantasies held together by a flimsy thread of alleged fiction with four-letter words recurring regularly to give the only semblance of natural cohesion. And venerable literati, lightly bribed and respectfully corrupted, lend their reputation to the noisy approval of this new generation of shock-esque. Juveniles in the underpaid book reviewer’s chair bolster the merits of this genital-romanticism grown fat on porno-commercialism. Guys writing this sort of stuff used to avoid looking you in the face only a generation ago; today their pictures stare at you from the front pages of the gazettes and the bookseller’s display window.
The world has always had bordello writing; there is nothing new or revealing in it. Astonishing only is the circumstance that the pimps and hucksters no longer lurk in the dark alleys, but sit in the front row of school and society.
The great masses of printed volumes are rather an impediment than a help in education. More than a hundred thousand books are yearly published in the western world: novels and tales, biased and ghostwritten political essays, superficial narratives about cities and people of the past, the present, and ah! the future, psychological observations of tests perpetrated on rats and guinea pigs, on fish and insects, from which college graduates gain a little bit of useless data wrapped in another degree.
A hole in the world should be if a book is missing; I don’t think a pinprick of light would show if the very most of them disappeared this instant! Why do so many write so much, especially those who have nothing to say? One man puts together a hundred science fables, another man twice as many detective fictions. And the pens of those doctoral and other academic aspirants. And those politicians who keep a stable of ghosts. Right now the sex analysts and other crotch spelunkers pour out their findings in unending streams. In all this mess, how is a serious student to find the writer who matters and the book that counts? How few, how very few, are the books among the millions of printed pages!
BULLFIGHTING
Bullfighting is a euphemistic expression for the slow torturous killing of a dumb animal cleverly coached for months prior to the event in making direct runs toward a red cloth.
What normal person would permit even a child to stick barbed darts into a calf or cat and then chase the bleeding animal to exhaustion? Bullfighting is no more than such brutal exercise.
This and similar shows, like setting two cocks against each other with razor blades tied to their spurs, are mere throw-backs to the glory that was Rome, when wild animals were set against helpless people. Now wild people are set against helpless beasts.
BYNAMES
European royalty used to delight in affixing to their names an elevating cognomen such as Richard “the Lion-Hearted”; Augustus “the Strong”; Charles “the Great”; Maximilian “the Just.” We find a similar predilection among the American Indians, who endowed their braves with surnames like “the great hunter,” “the quick-tongued,” “the killer of wolves.” We trust that the Indians deserved their sobriquets more than Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, Catherine the Great, or Mary the Pious.
BYWAYS
If you want the truth in philosophy, you have to search for her in byways and side tracks. The grand avenues of philosophical exposition are full of empty sound and thunder. The thinkers of any time speak not freely in their official parade tracts. What they really mean you will uncover if you read their diaries, letters, notes and footnotes.
CAESAR’S PORTION
In the Roman version of the Gospels there is a saying attributed to the gentle Jew Jesus by Roman scribes: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Well, there was nothing that was Caesar’s in Judea; there was nothing that was Caesar’s in Israel.
Caesar, whether Vespasian, Titus or Gaius Julius, all Caesars from Augustus to Nero and thenceforth were demons of destruction who attacked all beauty, wisdom and humanity from the Jordan to Jaffa. There was nothing that was Caesar’s in Jerusalem or Nazareth. Jesus, the noble Jew, would never preach a slave’s sermon of tribute to the savage Roman enemies of God and man. These lines of servitude are put onto the tongue of Jesus, the incorruptible son of Israel, by Constantine’s Roman bishops to sap the spirit of the rebels in the Holy Land. This is not Jesus speaking, but Flavian lackeys.
Render nothing unto Caesar, nothing but the naked sword!
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Capital punishment is not a pretty thought; neither is capital crime. Countless voices were raised in the free world against the hanging of lust-monsters and assassins, yet only a whisper against the executioners of millions of citizens in Russia and China.
Doing butchery to the body of an alleged or real offender is an old custom. In antiquity and even the medieval centuries, long incarcerations were rare except as waiting periods for trial. Punishment was swift, since the authorities did not care to assume the burden of feeding prisoners for any length of time. People in England of Henry VIII’s time were emasculated for treason; in Italy of the dark era, gouging out of eyes was practiced; in Arabic countries, the cutting off of arms; in India, cutting off of noses.
Punishment, even banishment, has its place, but the executioner’s block signifies not law but revenge. A murder in haste, a murder in jealousy, a murder in desperate greed, a murder in alcohol or drug stupor, a murder in sex insanity, a murder in calculation by a depraved mind—they are none of them squared by a murder in court.
CASTLES AND DUNGEONS
When you visit a castle, forget not the dungeon. In the palaces you will note how the nobility of Europe treated itself to all the comforts of life, the delicate pleasures to delight the eye, the ear and all the other senses. In the dungeons you will discover how the nobility treated its opponents, its bread-makers, its artisans, its common people, its serfs and bondsmen. The common people of most of the centuries prior to the great revolutions in America and France lived in stinking huts and shacks. When they rebelled they found themselves in icy dungeons in the company of lice and rats.
When you tour the Colosseum, step down from Caesar’s gallery, way down to the dungeons where conquered people, freedom-loving people, waited their turn to be fed to the African beasts. Stare not in admiration at the glory that was Rome. Rome’s glory was the misery of its defeated neighbors. There are two sides to the coin of civilization. Turn over the laurel-framed profile of the tyrant and from the other side will stare at you the face of desperate misery and deprivation.
When you visit the castles of Europe, spend not all your time in the princely throne room or the gallery of the ancestral statues and paintings; nay, step down to the dungeon, the quarters of the freedom-loving and oppressed, lest the evils of the past overtake the future.
CELIBACY
The demand of celibacy among priests and monks stemmed from sociological rather than sexual considerations. The Old Testament frowned upon celibacy; the Synoptics in the New Testament do not espouse it. Paul, however, encouraged it in expectation of the end of the world, though Peter and all other Apostles may have lived in marital bliss. The Pastoral Epistles required the bishops to be exemplary family heads. At the Council of Nicaea the demand for celibacy was rejected. However, as the centuries passed, it seemed practical to Popes Leo IX (1049–54) and Innocent II (1139) to prohibit priest marriages. But it was only at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) that celibacy was rigidly imposed upon all those taking a monastic vow.
The causes of such measures are apparent, especially relating to the major orders. Monks or nuns dedicating themselves to a devotional existence not only would be personally distracted but would interfere through their families with the insular or monastic life of the cloistered community. Families of monks were found to interfere seriously with the discipline of the orders.
To a lesser degree, this held good for the priesthood. Frequently confessors hesitated to divulge intimacies to family-priests and as early as 343 at the Synod of Gangra, churchgoers were threatened with anathema if they refused to confess to a married priest. Yet another factor in the movement for celibacy was the widespread transfer of church positions from married clergy to their sons (Decretal of 1139, Synod in Rome, Gregory VII).
While these sociological considerations played their part in a thousand-year-long growth of the Catholic Church, somehow in the vestries, in the schools, in the streets and in the homes of the laity, the growing Vatican emphasis on celibacy took the form of derogating sexual intercourse in general. Celibacy, or absence of marriage, became confused with sexual abstinence. Slowly but definitely, Christian Europe, and later the Americas, sank into a morass of biological prejudice, making sexual abstinence a virtue and sexual activity except for the purpose of procreation a sin—in some countries and states, a crime.
Nothing of course could be further from the truth. Sexual activity of adults who are not restricted by marriage vows is a purely personal affair, as are their other preoccupations. Even the breach of a marriage vow is only of concern to the respective couple, no one else. Even if we were to accept Kant’s definition of marriage as a contract for exclusive sexual intercourse, a contract is a private agreement among the individual parties to it. Neither the state nor the community has the authority to interfere unless called upon by one or both of the parties. This holds for marriage like any other contract. The state or community should have no right to arrest or indict a person “caught” in breaking a marriage vow and no right to raid hotels or apartments to ascertain such a breach, as they have no right to raid offices or warehouses, plants or laboratories to find evidence of a person breaking a business agreement. And certainly no authorities should have the privilege of interfering with the sex life of adult participants unwed, unloved or divorced, provided such activities occur in the privacy of a home or hotel.
The concept of priestly celibacy, grossly misunderstood in the form of abstinence as a summum bonum, has even crept into legislation, stamping thousands of innocent persons as offenders. Incidentally, these “criminals” apprehended in occasional raids by zealous police officers in some of the blue-nose states represent only a fraction of the great army of offenders. If our authorities were really willing and capable of arresting all persons who have ever engaged in sexual practice with other than their married spouse, there would be very few left above their teens who might justly escape indictment.