Sacred sex honors the body because it is sacred by nature.

It is not that we make the body sacred by honoring it, or otherwise inflate the body's status by some misplaced 'worship'. The human body is sacred by its own nature, regardless of whether we honor it as such or not. This is fully explained in the Sacred Body Forum.

Honoring the body is therefore perfectly natural and expresses the truth of who we are as human beings.

As such, the ways of honoring the body are as natural as the reverence shown to anything else in creation. They may be formal traditions practiced throughout society, or informal spontaneous acts -- as varied and unique to each individual as life itself.

Honoring the body is natural whether you are religious or not. Even in secular humanist terms, the human body is a marvel of creation, the pinnacle of natural evolution. If anything in creation is worthy of honor, it is the human body and its life processes.

For the religious-minded, the creation of mankind in human form is God's crowning act. It is through that form that God conceived of a being capable of serving and dignifying creation, and reflecting His Will. Indeed, God created man in His own Image as a divine reflection on earth. Nothing can be more worthy of honor than that.

Unfortunately, despite the theological grounds for honoring the body, Western religion typically has a less than honorable attitude toward it. That view ranges from weak and unclean to shameful and dirty, to outright evil and sinful.

But this view fails to recognize that spirituality is wholeness. Religious life means living spirit IN the body. To deny or demonize the home for spirit not only makes no sense, but also inhibits our capacity to live that wholeness. For how can body house and radiate spirit when we view it as sinful?

However, the main question religious condemnation of the body raises is this: if man is made in the image of God, how can the human form be sinful?

Some religionists try to sidestep this dilemma by asserting that the human form is not sinful per se, but only so by how we use it. According to them, among the sinful uses of the body is deriving sexual pleasure from it.

In that case, they must answer to this: why does the female form (also created by God) include a clitoris, the only organ known to science whose sole function is to bring sexual pleasure? For that matter, why does the male organ include nerve endings designed to bring pleasure?

Some shuffle further, arguing that this is only to promote procreation. If so, then why does religion sometimes even condemn pleasure derived from that? If God has made sex pleasureful to encourage it, why does religion exhort us to deny that pleasure and regard the source of it - the human body - as sin?

These religious perversions make no sense unless we assume a sadistic God who creates beings designed for pleasure only to test their will to deny that pleasure.

While sacred sex honors our divine form by calling it a 'bodytemple', Western religion instead condemns its veneration as blasphemy. But which is blasphemy -- honoring the crowning work of God's creation or disparaging it?

SEX AS WORSHIP