Andrew Bromage wrote: >

> G’day all.

>

> >Nigel Mitchell wrote:

>

> >>Our legs perform many different functions (standing, running, pushing

> >>bike pedals, kicking).

Actually, I wrote that. The attribution is wrong.

> (St.Athanasius) writes:

>

> >All of which are perfectly normal and acceptable actions for the leg

> >to do, thus being used for the manner intended by God.

>

> >>How do you know that genitals, excluding the

> >>urethra, _never_ have any function other than penetrative sex with the

> >>risk of conception?

Me again.

[snip]

> >7) Masturbation utilizes lustful thoughts about other women, either

> >known or unknown. This causes the masturbator to ‘think’ or ‘desire’

> >that he is doing various sexual acts with a woman he is not married

> >too, or may be married to someone else. This clearly breaks the

> >spiritual law of adultery outlined by Christ.

>

> Again, this raises the question of masturbation within the context of a

> marriage relationship, where the other person being lustfully thought

> about may well be ones spouse.

I would like to pose a totally hypothetical situation.

Let’s say there is a man, coincidentally called Richard (but this is totally hypothetical, OK?), married to a woman, coincidentally called Marianne, (but this is still hypothetical, OK?). They had a night of extremely hot sex, the kind of stuff that fantasies are made of, which coincidentally resulted in the conception of their second child (OK, the hot sex isn’t hypothetical. It was, in fact, awesome. It will be remembered in legend for generations). Four months later Marianne went to Tamworth for a week to visit her sister who, coincidentally is called Rachel and had, coincidentally, just given birth to her first child (I don’t care whether this is hypothetical or not).

During the separation Richard started to feel sexually frustrated (is it cool to admit this? I don’t know. We’d better make this hypothetical just to be on the safe side), and started to think about the exceptionally hot (and definitely not hypothetical) night of sex he and Marianne had just a few months before.

Stimulated by these memories of hot sex in a committed marriage Richard became hornier than a black Rhino in a pit of Spiny Gekkos and… well… masturbated (now this is definitely hypothetical, so hypothetical that it makes Einstein’s thought experiments look like the harbour bridge in comparison).

My question is: did Richard sin (hypothetically speaking, of course)?

Rowland Croucher’s response:

No.

And for my reasons see

http://jmm.org.au/articles/4884.htm

Incidentally: this is the most-visited article on our website – up to 1,000 hits a day just to this article…

>From the feedback I get there are two reasons for that: anyone like to

guess ’em?