Why is masturbation considered to be a "grave sin"?

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I thought it was funny. It’s not all that different from real scriptures.

In Ezekiel 4:12, God says: “Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement as fuel.” Yum!

Then Ezekiel complains about it and says he’s been good, so God says in verse 15 that they can use cow dung instead.

(We’ve gone from masturbation to poop. My fault; I have trouble staying on topic.)

Do most people think about someone else while masturbating? I just do it because it feels good; I'm not thinking about someone.

I think it depends on the person. Many people do fantasize about a specific individual during self love but, of course, not everyone.

Why does the term "self love" gross me out for some reason? Maybe I'm the only one.

I figured it out. Love can have so many different meanings than just sex. I'm going to take liberties to expand the usage of the term.

I think it's creepy too! I've never heard the term before but it sounds bizarre. I wouldn't call sex "partner love", either.

Masturbation sounds a little clinical.

With a partner, people frequently say "making love." I prefer that term over "sex." Of course, they aren't exactly the same thing. I'm much more into the former than the latter.

I think of various forms of self care as I way of being kind and nurturing to one's self.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 22 Jan 2020, 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm good with any of the slang terms, or with "masturbation". Self-love sounds smarmy.

Then don't use it.

I don't. I'd never even heard it before.

I think I need to go back and read this thread. I've missed a lot of it!

Magna,
I was sure I answered this thread already but perhaps it was via PM?

My thoughts are:

masturbation > orgasm without responsibility (no parenting required) > orgasm for the pleasure of orgasm > lust with no responsibility > possibility of sex outside of marriage (affairs or unwed sex) > children outside of marriage with no financial support or religious guidance > also the spread of communicable disease > dementia and death > downfall of a functional society.

I think the historical onus on marriage and monogamy was to prevent the spread of disease and poverty.

I don't like the term "self love" because masturbation for me is more like self abuse. I think of masturbation being self love in the same sense as me eating Mc.Donald's would be self love. I love the food at Mc.Donald's but it's unhealthy for me & I should eat a wider variety of stuff but I'm way to much of a picky eater to eat healthy. Masturbation has been an OCD addiction for me in the past. I love the feeling but it's unhealthy when you put off things like going to the movies & doing chores in order to stay in your room masturbating. I do think having sex with a partner can be "making love" if you both care about each other & are being affectionate in the process. If your like me & think cuddling naked is one of the best things about sex, chances are your making love to or with each other. There is a huge difference between that & f#cking. F#cking is like what you see in most porn.

Haven't read the entire thread, but it should be clear all religions have the same basis in this regard.

The goal is racial survival, which means that the group must produce as many healthy babies per capita/per year as humanly possible. Any time a man (meaning any male old enough to impregnate a woman) ejaculates under circumstances that don't offer the possibility of a woman getting pregnant, the religion preaches against it. Also most groups understand that children born to siblings etc. have a lower chance of survival, so they also preach against incest.

Actually, I don't know what older religions expressly forbid masturbation. The example concerning Onan is misleading because in that case he was expected to try to impregnate the woman in question but avoided doing so. If this is the best anti-masturbation example in Judaeo-Christian scripture, then I strongly doubt this was a major concern. I can't see how the ancient Israelites would have had much to say about a soldier masturbating in his tent the night before a battle. If the Catholic Church considers it a grave sin, then this must have arisen much later, after the founding of the Church.

Well every sperm is sacred don't you know...

Hmmmm…

So there does not seem to be any actual line of scripture that actually says "pleasuring yourself is a sin".

Its all based either on misinterpretation of the Onan story (Onan was ordered by god to knock up his sister in law, and he used coitus interruptus, and not masturbation, and it was a specific order he defied anyhow- it wasn't meant as a rule for all humans for all time).

Or the notion that masturbation is a sin is derived from other sins that are clearly delineated in scripture. If you lust for someone then you are commiting adultery already ergo when you jerk off you must be thinking lustful thoughts about ..someone (even cartoon characters) ergo you're commiting fornication or adultery "of the heart" ergo by extension all masturbation is adultery or fornication (but what if you're fantasizing about your actual spouse?).

OH!

I forgot.

There IS that one line of scripture. The one everyone always cites from the Bible. "It's better to cast your seed into the belly of whore then to cast it on the ground". The trouble with that line of scripture is..that it is NOTT a line of scripture. It isn't anywhere in the Bible.

So the scriptural basis for making masturbation a sin seems to be only indirect and derivative of other sins.

I'm pretty sure Catholicism teaches that one can lust (sin) after their own spouse. If a woman fantasizes that her husband satisfy her sexual desires solely, with no thought or regard to his sexual needs, in effect looking at him as an object, a tool of her desire to "get her off", that would be lusting after him and would be a sin. Obviously the same scenario could be a man lusting for his wife.

Right on, Magna, and thanks for bringing this up. Sweetleaf--thanks for the Monty Python reference. Personally I thought their Holy Grail was funnier, though.
Max E., speaking from a Catholic perspective I can say that is dead wrong; we're not a racial religion and were founded on diversity by Jesus Christ, who after rejection by the Jewish people (they talked Pilate into crucifying him, for goodness' sakes; and we think our rejection is pretty tough!) Christianity was preached to both Jews and Gentiles alike. And the Gentiles are actually the rest of humanity so we're all in that boat.

Here's how it works, at least how I've seen it. Catholicism doesn't really have a sexual ethic; it has an anthropology of humankind that our seemingly strange sexual codes of ethics follow from.

I think it's kind of cheap to be lusting after someone even if you are married to them but that's just me.

But anyway, this actually goes with why artificial contraception and masturbation are considered wrong. Basically the husband & wife, when making love, are giving themselves entirely to the other and it is considered the fulness of married love. Really, quite beautiful; to me it's sexier than the idea of intercourse but you don't have to tell anyone I told you that.

So contraception takes that complete & total self-gift out of the picture--it's a gift of pleasure, but not a gift of self really, because there's no longer that sporting chance on new life. And back to masturbation, well, that takes the other person out of the picture, and that's an "intrinsically disordered" thing to do in this mindset because that ruins the whole purpose of it and for us, using anything for the wrong purpose is not right. Terry Pratchett wasn't Catholic--in fact he was an atheist and anything but--yet he wrote the most wonderful quote: "Evil begins when you start treating people like things." I love it.

Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn't, but that is how it was intended to work for us. Now the words "intrinsically disordered" don't mean "you are a disgusting pervert; have fun in hell." What they mean by that is basically "out of its proper relation to its end." We're a very teleological people.

Which incidentally is why homosexuality and a number of other things are considered intrinsically disordered in Catholic thought, but disordered people are considered--well, we don't consider them; they're like regular folks to us and we don't mind having them round. They just have a particularly difficult go of it, like the straight man who masturbates a lot, or the scrupulous lady who thinks every action of hers is a sin and loses herself in despair, or like me, who can't tell the difference between my own personality and autism...

I'm "intrinsically disordered" by the rules of the Church. I have been very suicidal in my life. That's disordered. It's despair. An unforgivable sin...to despair is to discard the Holy Spirit and to believe our problems are bigger than God. But the only way to get out of that is to quit despairing--it's easy if you try, like John Lennon's "Imagine" but actually wholesome--and I'm not too worried about this today.

Really that's all--I recommend that anyone really curious about Catholicism's take on it should go read from some of our readily available books found on line for free (don't spend a bunch on Catholic books; we're not the Scientologists)
and if you want to learn what Protestants think then heaven (or alcohol, lots of alcohol) help you because there are a couple thousand churches to dig through and that's a right mess.