Sexed Out

Pornography addiction is our newest and most challenging mental health problem and a substantial part of our economy.

The Talmud-Book of Law contends that if a person comes to a fork in the road and one path leads to religion while the other leads to sex–take the road that leads to sex. Sex and religion are both businesses; the Catholic Church is rumored to be to be biggest land holder in the world.

Both religion and sex are based on belief because the experience of sex and revelation is beyond logic; having sex can lead to disease in the same way religion can become a cult–neither faith nor sex requires money yet both makes lots of money. What’s with that?

The Beatles said, Money can’t buy ya love! Sex without love and religion without God costs lots of money since they are inherently false. The Bal Shem Tov once commented that he could not pray in Shul because it was too full of prayers–prayers directed to God raise up into heaven.

Sex without love is a mental-emotional disease, but filling the void of God with money is a disease of the soul. The Cabala refers to sex as Zivugim–Essential Merging but there is no word in all the Torah for religion other than Avoda Zora/Strange Worship.

Cars Restrained

The Department of Transportation announced Thursday that the number of people killed in highway crashes 33,000 deaths last year was the lowest since 1954.

A Rebbe was once quoted as saying, Try everything once but that does not include driving a car–don’t even bother. Perhaps what the Rebbe found so repugnant about the automobile was the rote way required to learn to drive. Driving does not engage the mind, but on the contrary numbs the senses.

Better roads and safer cars undoubtably account for a large part of the reduction in deaths and injuries but the acceptance of rote behavior as a model citizen is alarming. The greatest commodity given to the human being is freedom of choice and driving car is very restrictive because of precise laws and practices comprising the rules of the road.

Rote actions are an offshoot of religion demanding total control over the lives they shepherd to reduce the amount of short term suffering. Accidents can never be completely wiped out since God needs occasional accidents to take us out of the world.

The Torah is more concerned with how we move spiritually than physically; the Cabala gives us the answers to time and space–the ancients were known to have wisdom concerning the pathways in the heavens but the vehicles they rode were not technological.