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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol 1, No. 12 June 22, 1938

Sex and Religion

Sex and Religion

One of the most important tasks facing the incoming Executive is to approach the Professorial Board in an endeavor to persuade them to remove the ban on the discussion of sex and religion. No doubt the Professorial Board were prompted by the highest motives when they placed this ban upon us but we feel, not merely that we are deserving of greater confidence in our intelligence, but that it is definitely wrong to restrict our freedom of speech in this way.

Freedom is a fundamental element of truth, and there are no two aspects of contemporary life which require freedom and truth more urgently than do sex and religion. These two things, which may call forth the highest emotional qualities of which man is capable, are at the root of many of his difficulties; and this because half-a-dozen generations have entertained the notion that sex is indecent and religion embarrassingly personal. These things are personal, vitally so, but it is possible to discuss them openly without in any way infringing their personal rights. The generations that have considered and attacked them surreptitiously in the darkness have merely developed a scale of false values that deeply discolors their personal aspect.

Weighed in this scale of values a man, who is both high principled and intellectually great, may be branded as immoral it, in the purely personal sphere of his sexual experience he has violated an artificial code of convections. Had his shortcomings been avarice, cruelty, conceit and snobbishness he would probably have been a pillar of society, and a much-respected man. It is by intelligent and open discussion that this social mal-adjustment will in time be corrected.

Religion, in the same scale of false values, is not little better than a superstition. The generation that has gone before us is clinging desperately to a belief in which they have lost faith, and they are afraid that it religion is shaken out of the dust that has been obscuring it for centuries there will be nothing left for them to cling to. The idea that intelligent discussion might develop it faith that does not require but give, support in the midst of Twentieth Century chaos, is a factor that they do not appear to have considered; and yet, without intelligent discussion it is difficult to see how religion can hope to win the difficult battle she is fighting to-day against doubt, disillusionment and science.

The reluctance to discuss these matters must be overcome and there is no better place to begin the campaign than in the Universities. In some parts of the world it is already begun, and in just this way. It is time that it was begun at Victoria College.

To say that we are too young to discuss these things is not a reason at all. It is the type of excuse with which parents dismiss to their children things which they do not understand themselves. In the life of the average man religion first exerts its influence in his childhood. Sex when he is a boy, and there is no time when he may discuss them with greater profit than when he is at the University. His intelligence is sufficiently developed for him to him to appreciate the significance of what he is talking about and he is young enough to apply anything he may learn. People have to face problems of sex and religion before they leave secondary school, and it is difficult to see what a man in his dotage has to gain by discussing them.

Nobody at the University wishes to set himself up as an authority on these subjects nor do we wish to discuss them so that we lay down immature canons concerning them. We wish to discuss them because we believe that so long as they are hidden away in a dark cupboard of meaningless conventions men and women will continue to blunder through life making mistakes that knowledge and understanding could rectify.

There seems to be an uneasy feeling among the powers that be that we are seeking for a public platform from which to proclaim that in chastity and atheism would be desirable hall marks of society an idea that is tantamount to accusing us of criminal insanity. Men and women who have lived all their lives believing that sex and religion must be discussed in reticent whispers if they are to be discussed at all seem to find difficulty in understanding that we, who cannot accept this belief wish not blindly to destroy it but think ingly to build something better in its place.

There are those who ask Might not as much or more be achieved through the medium of private discussion? The answer to this is no. We are crusading for a full recognition of these things by the conscious spirit of right. If we achieve nothing better than a half-hearted and begrudged admission of what we believe we shall have failed. We must tear down completely the curtain that is obscuring sex and religion for the world that we would like to live in will be built not with slight improvements but with radical reforms.

—K.M.J.