72 Virgins as Heavenly Reward

[irishtenor]

The virins are actually camels, hence the excitement.

[NYer]

Reformed Christianity sees the marital bed as an expression/reflection of Christ's love towards the elect.

The same is true for the Catholic Church.

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ARTICLE 7
THE SACRAMENT OF MATRIMONY

1601 "The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament."⁸⁴

I. MARRIAGE IN GOD'S PLAN

Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of "the wedding-feast of the Lamb."⁸⁵ Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its "mystery," its institution and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, the difficulties arising from sin and its renewal "in the Lord" in the New Covenant of Christ and the Church.⁸⁶

Marriage in the order of creation

"The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage."⁸⁷ The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity,⁸⁸ some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. "The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life."⁸⁹

God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love.⁹⁰ Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"⁹¹

Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone."⁹² The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help.⁹³ "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."⁹⁴ The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."⁹⁵

Marriage under the regime of sin

1606 Every man experiences evil around him and within himself. This experience makes itself felt in the relationships between man and woman. Their union has always been threatened by discord, a spirit of domination, infidelity, jealousy, and conflicts that can escalate into hatred and separation. This disorder can manifest itself more or less acutely, and can be more or less overcome according to the circumstances of cultures, eras, and individuals, but it does seem to have a universal character.

According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;⁹⁶ their mutual attraction, the Creator's own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust;⁹⁷ and the beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.⁹⁸

Nevertheless, the order of creation persists, though seriously disturbed. To heal the wounds of sin, man and woman need the help of the grace that God in his infinite mercy never refuses them.⁹⁹ Without his help man and woman cannot achieve the union of their lives for which God created them "in the beginning."

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[BuffaloJack]

The promise of 72 virgins and 28 boys sounds more like something the Archangel Lucifer might offer as an enticement to a dim-witted fool than anything else. And certainly not something associated with God and Heaven.

[joebuck]

"The promise of 72 virgins and 28 boys sounds more like something the Archangel Lucifer might offer as an enticement to a dim-witted fool than anything else."

"The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes." Satan uses our physical appetites (fleshy lusts) to tempt us.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***What do women get when they get to heaven?***

Women don’t. Mohammed said HELL is mostly populated with women.

[dangus]

>> Historically, religions have always looked upon the sex act as being of the Devil, as vile, unholy, unclean, as a necessary evil to be engaged in for the sake of procreation only. <<

Not exactly. Catholicism, for example, regards sexuality as a foretaste of true spiritual reunion: Lesser than spiritual ecstasy, but still revelatory of God. (People rarely shout out, “Oh, government!” when having sex.) Definitely not vile, unholy, or unclean, unless done sacreligiously. And Catholicism STILL gets the rep as the sexually repressed denomination of Christianity.

[dangus]

No, from reading the article, it sounds like it was 72 white grapes in the Christian antecedents of Islam, which were perverted into Islam’s promises of 72 virgins. The author acknowledges he is reading 72 white grapes from Syriac Christianity, and that Koranic scholars are unanimous in insisting that it is 72 virgins. Hence, the spiritual Christianity is corrupted into the carnal Islam, precisely as the original post’s author contends.

But I profoundly disagree that sexuality is considered base in all other religions. Kama Sutra?

[dangus]

72 houris?

Could this be a typo in the original? They get three days in paradise (just enough to know what they are missing?) Sort of the opposite of three days in Hades?

[Campion]

this only krept into the western Christian church

It's not the Christian attitude, either.

St. Augustine admittedly had some issues with sexuality. Keep in mind that he lived a lascivious life as a young man, including "shacking up" with a girl and begetting an illegitimate son with her. He rather understandably reacted too strongly in the opposite direction.

[Continental Soldier]

Virtually everything in your second paragraph is false. And all the rest of your remarks deal with the Christian or post Christian movements, Islam, etc. Doesn’t it strike you as odd or interesting that so many contemporary symbols (Christmas Tree, colored lights, Easter eggs, etc.)harken back to the pre-Christian, pagan times?

[Mr. Silverback]

Thank you for your understanding.

Gladly given. Take care, and thanks for posting on an interesting subject.

[G8 Diplomat]

So at the time of Mohammed Arabic did not have precise rules, and was not used for written communication. Then how did the Koran come to be written?

Arabic--the alphabet and the sounds--is derived from Aramaic, which is still spoken by some Syrian Christians today. Arabic was alive and spoken 200 years before Mohammed was even born. Texts in the Koran have extra diacritical markers that aren't used in everyday writings in modern Arabic, which are used to help with pronounciation, because the formal rules for pronounciation hadn't come along at the time when the Koran was written.

[G8 Diplomat]

because the formal rules for pronounciation hadn't come along at the time when the Koran was written.

To clarify, Arabic was only spoken prior to when the Koran was written, it was not a written language. Thus, extra pronounciation markers were added to what was written in the Koran so people would know how to pronounce the words in writing, and so they could preserve exactly what was supposedly said by Muhammad when he dictated the Koran.