The New Product—Masturbatory Insanity

All certain tyrants over souls wish for the men they teach is that they should have unsound minds. 

Nature, Spinoza said, abhors a vacuum. This adage is one of those poetic projections that tells us more about the speaker than about the subject. While Nature neither loves nor abhors a vacuum, men assuredly abhor phenomena without explanations, problems without solutions. This is why magic and religion are the true ancestors of rationalism and science.TfFS also why, under the name of rationalism and science, many explanations of problems have been propounded and widely believed that are no less erroneous, and often more harmful, than those held in presdentific times.  

Although a large number of sexual practices are mentioned in the Bible, masturbation is not among them. Nevertheless, the ob- 

Onan s older brother, was wicked and God slew him. Then Judah [their father] said to Onan, Go to your brother s wife, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother. But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his so when he went in to his brother s wife he spilled the semen on the ground, lest he should give ofhpring to his brother. 

This view was adopted, virtually unaltered, first by the Church, and then by Medicine. The result is, that, as Kinsey puts it, the proscriptions of the Talmud are nearly identical with those of our present-day legal codes concerning sexual behavior.  

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