On "Divorce Court" I saw an case where an African-American woman moved to Washington D.C. from Philadelphia after problems with her husband who left the LDS Church (Orthodox Mormonism) for a very strange religious group that seems to be quite authoritarian. They depend on male leaders to interpret the scriptures for the members from the podium, so I'm guessing that they hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible. They sound to me like every other kind of religious fundamentalist group that I have heard of. He has to pay 20% of his money to the Church. The group won't allow women to hold the priesthood due to them being "unclean" when on their periods. They celebrate Passover and Hanukkah which are considered as being " Biblical high holy days". Hanukkah is not mentioned in the Bible and it originally started as a secular Jewish holiday.
The group that this man belongs to believe in men in the church having multiple wives and that he can pleasure his wife on the Sabbath, but she cannot do such perform any sexual acts on him during that time because she is "unclean" and for her to do so would restrict his ability to attend services at his house of worship for one week, I think that is what he said. I think that the man's church considers the every woman that you lust after to be your wife if your a man, possibly if you are a member of that church. The woman said that the church doesn't consider them to be married because they weren't married in the "sight of God" and she says that they were civilly married. The woman said that non-members of the church cannot attend funeral services because they would make the congregation "unclean" or possibly "defile" the members just by being there. I don't know if this group is a Christian denomination or a Jewish denomination or a very odd combination of the two religions.
The woman said that when she and her family get together that they don't read the Bible or anything like that, religion seems to be a topic that they don't discuss when her family get together. She is not happy about her estranged husband's religion and I can understand why. The man and his wife met in the Army, I think. I believe that they had a child together when they were unmarried or perhaps the child was from a previous relationship, I couldn't hear when they were saying too well. The wife believes that what is done between a man and his wife cannot be "unholy". When was what a married couple do in the bedroom ever "holy". I don't think that sex between married couples in any more "holy" or "unholy" than what unmarried couples, same-sex couples or polyamorous couples do with each other sexually. The man is entitled to his beliefs, regardless of how misguided they may be and his wife is entitled to openly disagree with and criticize his religious beliefs and practices as well.
No religious group has the right to control or limit the sexual lives of their adult members in my opinion. No religious group has the right to tell people what to think either in my opinion. What consenting adults do in the bedroom is their own business. A religious group can call whatever romantic and sexual relationships between consenting adults that they want to "sinful", "immoral", "wrong", "unnatural", "abnormal" or "evil" in the eyes of any deity, but it doesn't mean that consenting adults or even teenagers are going to stop engaging in those behaviors or that they won't question the religious group's rules on those behaviors. No religious group has the right to tell you want you can read, what you can watch on television, what film you got to see a theater, what food you eat, who you associate with or whether or not you can drive a car if you are physically capable of doing so. You have the right as a human being to make your own decisions regardless of what other people think or say. Having control over your own life decisions is important and you should never let any group try to take that away from you. Personal responsibility is something that we are all accountable to. It is something that we owe to ourselves.
Without personal responsibility for our actions, how would we ever learn to better ourselves?
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