Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1740

1740. We have already pointed out that the sexual force in the human being expresses itself as a hunger that must be satiated. Of course, sexual hunger is admittedly not a hunger that can lead to death if it is not satiated or satisfied, such as is the case with the ordinary hunger for nutrition, but this does not of course mean that the being's attitude to this hunger is completely unimportant. We must therefore study this surplus sexual force. This force makes its presence felt particularly in the advanced, cultivated or intellectual human being. The further back we go in evolution, the further we go down into the animal kingdom, the smaller this surplus force is, and ultimately it actually constitutes no more than exactly the amount of force needed to guarantee reproduction. Here there is thus no surplus force to consider or to have to struggle with as something "sinful" or "ungodly". Only in the terrestrial human being has sexuality become an extraordinarily great problem enveloped in fog and mystery. That this fog and mystery or ignorance about the sexual organic structure in the being has caused countless very different moral perceptions is a matter of course. It has thus caused the harem principle or polygamy and polyandry to become a legal way for certain peoples to satisfy their over-proportioned sexual need. It thus became the moral standard. As for the Christian communities, this method was regarded as simply the ultimate form of immorality. Indeed, within Christianity one has in certain situations even gone as far as to demand celibacy or complete sexual abstinence from priests or preachers and practitioners of religion. Among the rest of the population the blessing of the church in the form of a church wedding between man and woman was demanded before the sexual act could be carried out. And even within this limitation there were cases where it was even regarded as downright sinful if a married couple had sexual intercourse for pleasure alone, without the intention of bringing about fertilisation. This thus means that in the worst case such a married couple can risk being allowed to have sexual satisfaction only once a year. That young, sexually mature people outside marriage give one another sexual satisfaction or pleasure is of course prohibited as the very culmination of ungodliness and the direct road to damnation. And what is worse is if one's surplus sexual force is expressed in the form of a desire to caress not merely a being of the opposite sex but also a being of one's own sex – a sympathy which in its purest form is in reality nearest to the fulfilment of the law of neighbourly love – one will even in certain countries be simply punished and thereby regarded as a "criminal". This thus means that the more sympathetic feelings one shows for beings of one's own sex and the more caresses one gives them, the more one is regarded as a "sexual offender". How can a religion whose absolutely fundamental law and principal foundation is "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" be anything other than a failure when its sacred dogmas and doctrines invoke the death penalty for any kind of love that is beyond male- and female-orientated love, and regards every culmination of sympathetic feelings between beings of the same sex, or rather, regardless of sex, as the road to outer darkness, and furthermore persecutes these beings as outcasts, as "criminals", as "abnormal" or "sick" beings?