This is a rather long excerpt from my Question and Answer page entitled: "About Jesus & Mary Magdalene-Jesus, sexuality, & the bible"  This was written in response to an e-mail that challenged the statement that I made in my column Christ Consciousness that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were mates.  I include this part of that page here because it deals with sexuality and the shame around sexuality that is part of Western Civilization.  This shame - and the gross imbalance in regard to sexuality that was caused by the flesh is weak and sinful beliefs promulgated by corrupt and hypocritical church leaders - has had a profoundly adverse effect upon Romantic Relationships in Western culture.

From About Jesus & Mary Magdalene page:

"Here is an excerpt from my book about the bible.

"The teachings of all the Master Teachers, of all the world's religions, contain some Truth along with a lot of distortions and lies.  Discerning Truth is often like recovering treasure from shipwrecks that have been sitting on the ocean floor for hundreds of years - the grains of Truth, the nuggets of gold, have become encrusted with garbage over the years.

As one example of this, I am going to discuss the Bible for a moment, because it has been such a powerful force in shaping the attitudes of Western Civilization.

The Bible contains Truth, much of it symbolic or in parable form because most of the audience at the time it was written had very little sophistication or imagination.  They did not have the tools and the knowledge we have access to now.

So the Bible does contain Truth it also contains a lot of distortion.  The Bible was translated many times.  It was translated by male Codependents.

I am going to share with you a short excerpt from a recently published book.  I have not read this book and cannot tell you much about it.  I have read a review of this book which appeared in California magazine in November of 1990.  What I am sharing here is from that review.

I offer this to you:  Not to say that this new translation of the Bible is right and the old one is wrong it is for you to decide which one feels more like Truth to you.  I offer this as I offer everything else that I am sharing here as an alternate perspective for you to consider.

This book is called The Book of J.  It was written by two men - one of whom is a former head of the Jewish Publication Society, the other is a professor of humanities at Yale University.  What they have done in this book is to extract what they believe is one voice from the Old Testament.  The Old Testament is a compilation of writings by many different writers.  That is why there are two conflicting versions of the Creation in Genesis because it was written by two different people.

They have taken the voice of one of those writers, gone back as far as they could to the original language, and translated it from a different perspective.

Here is a short excerpt from the Old Testament as an example of the difference between their translation and the traditional version.  The traditional version is taken from the King James Bible, Genesis 3:16.  It says:  "And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

Sounds like the normal patriarchal, sexist tone in which we have always accepted that the Bible was written.

Here is the new translation of the exact same phrase:  "To your man's body your belly will rise, for he shall be eager above you."

Now to me, rule over you and eager above you mean two very different things - it actually seems pretty close to being a 180 degree swing in perspective.  This new translation sounds as if there is nothing shameful about sex.  As if maybe it is not bad to have a normal human sex drive, maybe it is not True that the flesh is weak and the spirit exists somewhere way out there.

The reviewer (Greil Marcus, California magazine, November 1990, Vol. 15, No.11), without ever quite perceiving the shame connection, says that this book "...is an act of violence...to what we think we know."  He says that, "...it's a great change, in the way one sees the human condition."  He also states that, "The differences...are many and profound...and include .. the replacement of man became a living soul with man becomes a creature of flesh  without the distinction between soul and flesh, Christianity, or, as Michael Ventura calls it, Christianism, dissolves.

This retranslation shows that basic misconception and misunderstanding may be at the heart, at the foundation of Western Civilization, or to quote the reviewer, in other words, the argument is that within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic civilization, certainly within Western Civilization, at its heart or at its foundation - is a ruin.

What he could not quite put his finger on as the act of violence against the very core of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic civilization is that what this book seems to do is to take the shame out of being human - of being creatures of flesh.  There is no shame in being human.  We are not being punished by God.  It just feels like it sometimes.