[Mrs. Don-o]

As regards your comparison of sacred objects, and sex: yes Christian relics are considered sacred, and yes, they are displayed. They are placed in precious setting, and displayed with ceremony and outward signs of reverence.. The same can be said of humans sexual love: it has its proper setting, it has its whispered words, its ceremonies. That is true of everything that is consecrated or hallowed.

This "sacredness" thing may not strike us immediately, because we (Westerners) have jettisoned any sense of the sacramentality of created things. Even our churches are threadbare and feeble when it comes to beauty, ceremony, awe.

Maybe there are pagans who understand this better. Say you were from a tribe that honored a special Sacred Drum. You wouldn't let your dog pee on it or your kids bang on it; you wouldn't use it off-season as a table or a door-stop; when the Day of the Drum came up, you might beat that drum with enthusiasm and even a divine wildness and abandon, but under no circumstances would you let the unpurified touch it or even hear it.

I'm not promoting the High Church of Drummery here, I'm just using this as an example for something that is universal about how humans express sacredness. When you use something sacred, you use it after having been discipled, instructed, and purified. Otherwise, you almost instinctively avert your eyes or draw back your hands. You respect it. You don't mess it with it.

You use it sacredly, or you leave it alone.

[antiRepublicrat]

Even our churches are threadbare and feeble when it comes to beauty, ceremony, awe.

Not the German churches, and I've been in a lot of them.

You use it sacredly, or you leave it alone.

Yet Germans do not see breasts on a billboard as non-sacred.