Christianity certainly has rejected many expressions of sexuality. Early traditions suggest that Jesus was unmarried and indifferent to issues of procreation, held a sharply negative view of divorce and urged people to give up everything especially money, property and family for the sake of the coming "Kingdom of God." Paul, too, expressed mainly negative views of marriage (odd, for a student of rabbis) and sexuality and the kind of hostility toward the "immorality" of homosexual activity, intercourse between unmarried people, abortion and prostitution, that we see among other religious Jews toward practices widespread and often accepted (and legal) in the GrecoRoman world.
When I began to realize how pervasive these attitudes actually were in the early Christian movement, I was amazed, and wondered, How could a movement this ascetic become so popular? (I spent a long time on that question, and wrote a book called Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.)
But are Hinduism and Buddhism "accepting of sexuality"? Certainly not always maybe not even often. Tantric Buddhism, of course, sees sexual activity as a "vehicle for spiritual transcendence," but it often requires withholding ejaculation, to take only one example of a rather reined-in approach to sexuality!
Personally, I like Blake's wild and embracing vision but, then, he was a heretic (I have often been accused, and often rightly, of liking heresy). |
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