Create Your Own Religion by Daniele Bolelli Page B

to prevail throughout much of Christian history.
    Following Paul's lead, many early Christians turned self-repression into a path toward sainthood. Extreme physical deprivation, and the occasional act of self-torture, often characterized the lives of Christian hermits who turned to the desert to escape the temptations of the flesh while they waited for Judgment Day to come. Perhaps in an effort to repel the Devil by grossing him out, early hermits ate the most foul substances, and competed with each other for who could do the weirdest, most disturbing things to their own bodies. For example, the Church Father Origen castrated himself; Ammonius burned his skin with red-hot irons for the sake of keeping sensual temptations at bay. 122 Approaching these holy men downwind was risky business even for demons, since stinking beyond belief and never bathing were regarded as badges of spiritual progress. Why? Because paying too much attention to the body was seen as immodest and downright sinful. Viewing cleanliness as the doorway to hell didn't exactly do wonders for hygienic conditions, and this attitude indirectly contributed to the spreading of diseases.
    Thanks to Paul's influence, from its inception Christianity declared war on the human body and its instincts. The battle between the material and the spiritual raged on throughout the West evenmore viciously than it did among the body-hating, world-denying traditions of East Asia. But even though Christianity takes the gold medal in this contest, many are the religions that dismiss the concrete, physical, biological dimension of existence as a primitive condition that we need to transcend. In their eyes, our nature is something to be improved upon thanks to intellectual and/or spiritual detachment from the material world. The goal of these religions is to repress natural instincts in favor of what they consider civilized behavior. Ultimately, what they want is to domesticate human beings.
    In case it's not clear, I am not a big fan of this way of thinking. By approaching the body with awkward discomfort, instilling shame about sexuality, promoting horror for everything that is natural, and rejecting the senses as distractions, these religions are against life. Condemnation and scorn for the flowering of physical energies are the symptoms of a mindset that sees life as a sin to be amended.
    Their ideology is so odd, masochist, and counterintuitive as to make us wonder, why the hatred for nature? What's so bad about the human body? Why repress our instincts and distance ourselves from the physical world? There are several possible answers, but one stands out in my mind as the most likely candidate. The fear of the body comes from the refusal to recognize our animal nature. And the obsessive desire to view ourselves as something other than animals stems from the biggest fear of all: the fear of death. It is no mystery that any physical body that breathes and lives is destined to die and decompose. Clearly, the annihilation of our bodies—one of the defining characteristics making us who we are—doesn't sit well with most people. So, what to do . . .
    Here we go: problem solved. As long as we believe that, unlike other animals, we are more than our bodies, then we can hold on to the notion that death will not be able to strike us down. It maydismantle our bodies, but it won't reach our essence because our disembodied souls will go on living. Diminishing the importance of the body and emphasizing the belief in a pure, immaterial spirit is a way to deny the power death has in our lives. As we are about to see, however, this choice of not enjoying fully the physical nature of our world comes with many very unpleasant side effects.
When the Body Goes Missing in Action Part I: From Descartes to Academic Learning
    To be fair, religion is not the only pursuit that has promoted alienation from the body. Even though usually it casts the body in a less negative light, science has sometimes