We can go back to the Old Testament and we can see prescriptions for physical pain as discipline for building strong moral character. Proverbs 23:13-14 “Withhold not correction for the child, beat him with a rod and he shall not die.  Beat him with a rod and you shall save his soul from hell”.  Anyone who was brought up in the Western Judeo Christian religious tradition knows that pain, suffering, deprivation are morale virtues and a path to salvation. And the opposite is also true, that body pleasure, and predictably sexual pleasure is evil, immoral, sinful, and will lead to damnation.

Another dimension to this problem that has been a major concern to me is the relationship of these neuro-biological and neuro-psychological events and the moral value systems of our culture and society. What I think I have provided in my theory is a bridge between the basic sciences of developmental neural biology and neural psychology with morale philosophy and morale theology.  And I don’t know of anyone else who’s been able to accomplish this.  But I think I’ve been able to do that and that bridge happens to be the sensory modalities or systems of pain and pleasure, and morale philosophy and morale theology has a lot to say about pain and pleasure. 

We can go back to the Old Testament and we can see prescriptions for physical pain as discipline for building strong morale character.  We have Proverbs 23:13-14 “Withhold not correction for the child, beat him with a rod and he shall not die.  Beat him with a rod and you shall save his soul from hell”.  Anyone who was brought up in the Western Judeo Christian religious tradition knows that history, that pain, suffering, deprivation or morale virtues is a path to salvation.  And the opposite is also true, that body pleasure, and predictably sexual pleasure is evil, immoral, sinful, and will lead to damnation.  So here we have, in the cultures of Western civilization, in fact it’s any human culture that holds to that kind of belief system, that kind of dualism between “body and soul” in which the body is held as evil, source of wickedness and the soul, disembodied soul, the spirit is good, leads to inevitable war against the body because the body is a source of sin and evil and wickedness.  That means body pleasure. 

It’s extraordinary what I call pathological metaphysical dualism that has split us in two.  The ancient Greek Philosophers are responsible for this gift to us which in fact are the seeds of our own violence and destruction.  It carries with it also an animosity toward women because women has been equated essentially with the principle of the body or matter and the male with spirit or goodness or God like.  That came from Pathogens.  So, he set it up by definition so that women have always been unequal to men, have always been inferior, and morally so. 

In Ecclesiastic 25, 24 “From women came the beginning of sin and through her we all die”.  And we know this throughout literature, not just the biblical literature but also all of our other literature.  Woman is the source of sin and wickedness, and particularly sexual sin.  So this has alienated man from woman and her body and her sexuality and her sensuality.  And that of course deprives us of the real union between male and female. 

Trying to explain the ultimate significance of gender and equality and the sexuality and why men have created what we call the patriarchal-theistic cultures.  They’re designed to control the sexual body of women.  But the question is why is that?  The reason in my view is that sexual affectional pleasure and bonding that really occurs between a man and woman neutralizes power in that relationship.  And so the issue in all of this is power.  Men do not want to give up their power in society, in particularly power over women and her body and her children.  And so that means you have to control and deny and repress sexual affection and pleasure because in the cross cultural studies it became so very clear that the cultures that permit premarital sex and even extramarital sex are non-violent cultures. 

There are Egalitarian cultures, women are equal to men.  You don’t find slavery being practiced.  You don’t find bride prices being present.  So what we have at issue here then is essentially the equality of women with men, and men do not want that.  That is the patriarchal theistic men who want to maintain their power and control.