A FEAR OF WOMEN - Wisdom From The Fulfillment Forum Books & Study Courses

 Sexuality is completely normal and spiritual and the more some fearful fundamental and orthodox radicals condemn lovemaking, except to produce children to labor in the mines, mills and fields of a global market world, the more clearly psychotherapists see their selfish defense mechanisms. Many do indeed protest far too much.

We do say this, however.

Of course we believe that God's ideal is one of commitment and love - reflected by chastity before marriage and monogamy within that permanent relationship.

We, Roberta and Jard who collaborated on LOVERS FOR LIFE, write with values that in our case are distinctly spiritual. And while this isn't a religion course but our marriage enhancing program, there is no way we can deny our faith without compromising our message. Indeed, we cannot ignore our covenant connection with the Creator of the Cosmos. We believe that God is the source of all love and while love obviously existed for women and men many millennia before Jesus' great spiritual revelation, that mission was to most clearly reveal God's love for humans and to demonstrate our human potential for love.

God's love is our own example; we feel that Jesus' sacrificial act was the greatest display of love ever revealed by a single person. In a very special way it opened the door for God's spirit to enter more fully into this world of women and men who carry within their souls, bodies and minds the capacity for becoming lovers for life. In fact, Jard has been instrumental in developing two programs, one for ministers and another for lay persons that applies practical faith, hope and love in one of the world's fastest growing Christian denominations. These two programs have been instrumental in helping lead millions of African, Latino, European and Asian men and women into a covenant relationship with the God of the Cosmos. And God alone knows where this shall go in the next decade. Because moving toward spiritual maturity means so much to us, Jard feels that contribution to faith, hope and love is his most valuable contribution to society.

Having said that, we must also tell you that we are deeply disappointed by the failures of fundamentalist Christianity, Islam and Judaism that enforce sexist neuroticism, cruel traditions and immature religious ideologies on women and then claim their crippling psychopathies are God's will for everyone. God wants no such thing -- but what really angers us about such reactionary pretension is its hypocrisy. As researchers, counselors and teachers, we know all too well that the fundamental power brokers who want to dominate your spirituality have the same sexual yearnings as the rest of us. Need we go beyond T V preachers Jim Bakker who was long seducing his young secretary and James Swaggert who paid prostitutes to let him watch them masturbating. Consider the heavy penalties some Catholic dioceses are paying because neurotic priests, because of the pressures caused by abstinence and the loneliness it causes, seduced trusting boys and girls. Can anyone really believe that their life-long celibacy had nothing to do with the disasters that followed?

We have found in our research that the greatest problems faced by women and men are caused by the fact we are spiritual souls with a great capacity for love and self-sacrifice, woven into a primitive homosapien bodies hobbled with narcissism and capable of great rage, violence and selfishness.

If, as the connectional covenant religions teach, humans are called by God to serve one another in love, a great many of us fail in our selfish attitudes and choices. The strengths and shortcomings of human love is revealed in our attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices. Actually there is much more to each person than these bodies that can bring us such enchanting relationships when joined with a lover. What we do with them is crucial to our happiness. The way our bodies evolved through the long eons is important to us. What we think about them and how we use them is critical and how we express our love is especially vital to our contentment.

Men and women are mirror image souls who need one another for fulfillment -- for intimate caresses through the long nights of winter, for the yin and yang of masculine and feminine strengths, for perpetuating ourselves immortally through our children. Our precious bodies fit together so well that Jesus called lovemaking becoming one flesh -- as indeed it does in many different ways during loving sexual relationships when two otherwise barren persons join to create the miracle of new life.

Of course, perceptive women and men have always been filled with awe by the miracle of conception and birth. The creation of life is indeed almost beyond comprehension to most of us -- so much so that every society and religion has surrounded the birth of children with many myths, traditions and ideologies to explain that which was very un curso de milagros   for them to understand. Virtually every society has, as Sigmund Freud wrote so perceptively, developed a great deal of squeamishness, anxiety and neuroticism about human sexuality. There is something about lovemaking that both fascinates and terrifies a great many persons and leads to major frustrations and perversions that many unfortunate people never overcome. Some of those fearful souls become clergy or theologians who ponder what God wants from us -- and reach answers according to their unconscious needs and conscious justifications.

All primitive, pre-industrial and pre-fossil fuel societies, needed strong young workers so badly that they reached conscious and unconscious decisions about the responsibilities of women to the tribe or clan that are pointless today, even though fundamental religious leaders assume they still are important. Since so many laborers were needed to do the unending labor of survival and many soldiers were needed to protect the workers from raiding tribes, virtually every primitive clergyman and theologian in Christianity, Judaism and Islam developed the belief that God created women to be expendable. At a time when half the children died of starvation and disease before they could be turned out to work, the important people, the decision making men, decided it was better that women remain pregnant for twenty years, even if they died with a fifteenth child, rather than the tribe be endangered by a labor shortage. Since women were expendable, they were obviously second class souls who must be restricted in their education, their influence and in their careers, so they could remain brood mares for the clan. This was seen as their God given role to the society, each of which believed that it had a lock on God. And since the basic role of fundamental religion is to block change in every way possible, to preserve the good old fashion religion forever, every generation from time immemorial; has tried very hard to keep women from breaking free from the old ideologies and theologies with which the primitive priests and theologians justified the abuse of women.