AIDS And You Chapter 5

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AIDS And You Contents

1. Whose fault is it?

I want now to look at sex and AIDS, and some ways people think about them. Everyone seems to want to point the finger when comes to AIDS. They begin arguing perhaps about where AIDS first came from. The true answer is no one knows, although we are sure that HIV around in several parts of the world in the 1960s similar to common viruses in animals and has probably been around in some shape or form for centuries. Because many scientists think it could originally have come from animals in Africa, people immediately think Africa is in some way to blame This is stupid. Whatever the facts show in the future the disease had to start somewhere and it is no fault where it first came from.

'They should have known better'

The other big area where people seem to point fingers is where particular groups or individuals are infected Some people say it is their own fault. Depending on how far they take it, you get the impression that some actually believe that anyone who has a certain lifestyle deserves an automatic death sentence.

Some people say those infected should have known better, but they forget that many of those dying now, especially in the poorest nations, were infected before many people had even heard of AIDS, let alone understood how it was spread.

Some people say that anyone, say, with a gay lifestyle or a drug habit should realise that these are wrong and should expect the consequences. This can make those infected feel even more guilty and blame themselves too. They also can often feel very guilty about people they may have infected without realising.

Pointing the finger is the easy way out

Many illnesses are caused by lifestyles that some would question: should we have any sympathy for a man who has smoked fifty cigarettes a day for the last, forty years and now has terrible branchless or lung cancer? What about a young girl who falls and breaks her leg at a party because she has had too much to drink?

At the end of the day it is easier to blame people and have nothing to do with them. It is a neat and

tidy way of making it someone else's problem. You don't have to feel guilty about not getting involved because in your own mind you have made someone else guilty. It is the same mentality as the man says you should not help the starving because it is all their own fault for having such large families (even though this is rubbish because has world has the capacity to produce more than enough food for several billion more people).

Harsh churches

Because I have been a church leader as well as having looked after many people with AIDS, people often ask what I think about AIDS as a Christian.People say different things. Some people say AIDS is the judgement of God on all homosexuals and on heterosexuals with multiple partners.Others have a different view. Some leaders have even said that Christian people should have nothing to do AIDS while others are saying that every Christian should make some sort of response. A lot of opinions but what should we think about it all?

A personal view

AIDS is not the wrath of God on it never was. If it was the judgment of God on people with multiple sex partners, why is it that homosexuals and heterosexuals are affected while lesbians never do so? Lesbians (homosexual women) are the only group in our society, other than monks or nuns, in whom AIDS is almost unknown. It is very hard indeed for a lesbian to pass on the infection to another her woman she has sex with. God's judgement is remarkably selective if we are to take such a judgmental position. This would mean that God hates sex between two men, next he hates sex between a man and a woman outside marriage , but he doesn't really mind sex between two women. This is clearly absurd. As a friend of mine said recently, if this is a blast God's anger about homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles from God's shotgun, he has a pretty poor aim! What about tens of thousands of young children infected in Africa as a result of medical treatments? God's wrath on those who a ill and need medical care?

Nothing new

People get very excited over AIDS. They think that AIDS is something quite new, and as strange as a thunderbolt from heaven. They need to talk to some older people with longer memories and read the history books. As we have seen, AIDS is just another in a long series of diseases which can be spread by sex. These things have been around for centuries, and AIDS may well have been around in some shape or form for hundreds of years.

Was syphilis the wrath of God? It spread as a plague starting several hundred years ago. There was no cure. It made people sterile and caused them to have all kinds of strange illnesses over many years. It attacked the heart, blood vessels, kidneys, liver, and finally rotted the brain. We used to call the final stages 'paralysis of the insane'. Not a nice way to die.

When penicillin was discovered, did God suddenly decide that he didn't mind and was going to allowthe plague to stop? If AIDS is the judgement of God then syphilis is too.

The Bible says we can enjoy most things, but too much can be bad for us. That is why getting drunk is described as a bad thing to do. So then, is the plague of people dying from too much drink, from liver failure, just another disease or the wrath of God on them.

As a doctor I know that AIDS is just a disease. It is caused by a virus common in animals, which has been around almost certainly for a long time. Sex is an easy way for a lazy germ to travel and a great number of germs find it convenient to get around this way. When we have a cure for AIDS, there will doubtless be a whole string of new germs that appear on the scene being spread by sex.

So AIDS certainly is not a "gay" plague, and I do not think it was sent by an angel as a thunderbolt from God to shake us all up.

2. Cause and effect

Common sense

You get out of life what you put into it, or as Jesus said, 'you reap what you sow.' This is a personal view as a Christian who takes what the Bible says seriously. I don't ask you to agree with it or like what I say, but it is, I think, a common-sense view.

Any doctor knows that the majority ofillnesses he sees could probably be avoided or reduced if people lived differently. Heart disease is becoming less common in some countries now, because people are more health conscious. They watch their weight and take exercise. Smoking is also on the decline in many nations, just as well since nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known to science. You get a shot of nicotine every time a cigarette burns and you inhale the greasy smoke. Smoking kills around 120,000 people a year in the UK alone.

The whole of health education is showing people cause and effect: if you smoke you damage your lungs. If you drive when you are stoned out of your brains you are likely to drive off the road and kill someone. If you get drunk you have a hangover. If you inject using a bloody needle you can get hepatitis or develop AIDS.

Cause and effect is the most important lesson we have to learn as children. My daughter shut her fingers in a door recently and had to be taken to hospital. Her thumb was a mess, but it is perfectly healed now. I hope she has learnt that you must not put your fingers in the cracks of doors because the door can close and you can get badly hurt. If she doesn't learn she will be a real danger to herself.

Because I love my daughter I will try to save her the pain of having to learn the hard way. If she jumps on top of her sister's top bunk I tell her off, because I am afraid that one day she will lose her balance and fall. She probably won't do it again after falling, but I would rather she didn't fall in the first place. When, you were young your parents probably told you a hundred times a day to come away from something, or to put something down. Most of the time your own safety was the issue. Your mother probably then explained to you, for example, that an oven is extremely hot and if you touch it with your fingers you will burn yourself badly.

None of us is very good at listening at first. Usually there are one or two near disasters: 'I told you so. That was naughty. Now when I tell you next time, you do exactly what I say.' And then we learn.

Strange ideas

People have really strange ideas about God sometimes. They think of him as some great tyrant or bully or some distant figure they can't relate to at all. The Bible says that God is a loving Father, a million times better than your human dad. Because he loves us, he looks on us as his children. He cares about each person as if that person is the only person in the whole world.

Because he cares for us that much he wants to help us and to protect us from our own mistakes. But he respects you as a person and he will never dominate your life. He is always there ready and waiting to help you, but you must ask. He will never impose himself. Nor will he ever go away. You can turn your back on him for years, but he is always there ready and waiting with open arms. There is nothing that you can do that can put you outside his love for you, although you can remain distanced from him with consequences both here and in the next life.

I often think about the story Jesus told about the Prodigal Son. He fell out with his dad and wanted to go off to town and do his own thing. He found living on his own was terrible. He had a really hard time. He spent all his money on trying to live it up and then found himself having to work for a pittance in order to get food.He kept wondering if his dad would accept him again.

After a while he was so fed up he reckoned even if his dad wouldn't accept him back as a member of the family he would prefer to go home on any terms - even as a servant. When he was almost home he got nervous but his dad saw him coming from a distance rushed out to meet him. The son felt ashamed and wouldn't even look up, but his father flung his arms around him and swept him into the house, cancelled all his arrangements and threw a great coming home party, much to the disgust of a certain other members of the family. Jesus told the story to show us that God's love never goes cold or goes away, just because we go too far away from God.

The Bible contains for me a brilliant guide to healthy living. We often see it as full of negative commands - don't do this and don't do that. My children can also see me as very negative if they don't realise that what I say is actually for their benefit and happiness. It would be a strange dad who constantly let his children put their lives at risk without doing something about it. And it would be a strange God who made a world full of people and just let them get on with it, without giving them some help and advice when they were looking for it.

How to wreck your life

God wants you to know how to avoid the pain of your mistakes, and how to live a happy, full and satisfying life. The Bible is full of examples of cause and effect fact you could say it is one of the main teachings of the Bible.

The Bible basically says that if you want to wreck your life then a really good way to do it is to wreck your relationships with people - not just any people, but the people you are close to, your closest friends, your partner, or your family.

And if you want to mess up your close relationships and family completely, then a good way to do it is to have sex with a person or people you are not married to.

If a father wants to guarantee that he has no relationship with his daughter, so much so that maybe she isn't willing to even call him dad any more then the quickest way to do it is to seduce her and have sex with her, preferably at a young age over a number of years

How to be lonely and alone in later life

Tens of thousands of thirty-five to forty-five year olds are having a terrible shock. They grew up deciding it was better just to live together. After three or four relationships they have found themselves on their own yet again. Perhaps with children scattered all over the place that they rarely see.

Many women find one day that their chances now of ever settling down and having a family are vanishing fast.Their most fertile years are over and the men that would have made the best husbands and fathers were long ago snapped up.

Men can also suddenly find that the long party over the years has come to an end. They are longer as attractive and dynamic as they were. They have lots of memories, but no life-long commitment and no real ideas about how to find one, because most of the women who were into such things settled down with other men long ago.

marriage " class="gcbasicbold">How to wreck your marriage

If a man wants to destroy his marriage completely overnight, then the quickest way to do it is to cheat on his wife by having an affair, say, with her friend. He will probably lose his children and maybe the respect of his other friends at the same time. Those of us who pick up the pieces find it unbelievable that people can't see things which are staring them in the face. They still go on to make stupid decisions that anyone watching with any sense at all can see will end in disaster.

If as a young person you want to make it likely that your future marriage will fall to bits within a few years, then a really effective way is to try to get bed with everyone you can while you can. Patterns don't change because of tenminutes in a registry office or an hour in a church ceremony of commitment.

If you program your brain and your body react in a particular way, then it can be really hard suddenly to become the perfect faithful husband or wife.

Sex before marriage means that your partner in marriage is under a lot of pressure: 'Jacky used to be a lot better in bed. She could really get me going,' or, 'Every time we make love I keep thinking how Bill used to hold me ... he used to do it like this.'

I'm glad that the only person I have ever made love to is my wife - someone who has been my best friend since we were fifteen - and we have been happily married for 24 years. I am glad too that we never made love before we got married. For us it was an expression of total commitment to each other. Right up until the wedding day there was the opportunity to call it off. Many engagements do not result in marriage , and some engagements should never have gone on into what turned out to he very unhappy marriages.

People need to know what makes a happy marriage , and how they can be reasonably sure they are about to marry the right person. Friendship is the best foundation of all, shared interests and shared faith, whilethe support of family and friends is also important because it makes it easier if the relationship goes through a troubled time - all life-long relationships go through many periods of re-adjustment, and rediscovery because we all change and our needs change as we get older.

For my wife and me, our whole language of love has been built up with each other. It is ours alone. It is our secret. It is a private place exclusive to us. No one else can intrude into that special place. It is a sign every time we come together of our exclusive commitment and unity.

The Bible says that when a man and a woman come together they become, in a sense, 'one flesh'. Sex is a mystery, not just a sensation. People with the best sex-lives are usually those who are in exclusive, stable, loving relationships, who spend time together, who invest in the marriage and take themselves seriously as a couple, who really listen to each other and try always to understand things from the other person's point of view.And that includes how to give each other pleasure in physical ways.

3. A good sex life

Sex is more than a physical act. In medicine I am glad that we are at last moving away from looking people like cars or other machines, where you replace or repair bits. People are people. Whole person medicine is where we recognise that you more than a kidney stone or an appendix: you have personal needs, feelings, hopes fears which go to make up what you are and actually far more important than the illness. illness is just a nuisance because it is preventing, from being you.

Glossy magazines have pushed sex as some kind of wonder drug or lifestyle accessory. You get the impression that sex every day keeps the problems or the doctor away. If you are not having sex regularly then they lead you believe you are underdeveloped, frigid, impotent or just plain stupid. But I don't see a high level of degree of satisfaction and fulfilment. Agony columns in the same magazines are full of people who are obsessed by poor sexual performance and lack of enjoyment that they dare not tell anyone about so they write instead.

Sex is not a performance; it is possibly the deepest kind of communication and expression known to human beings. But like any language, if there is nothing to communicate then it is empty and hollow, dissatisfying and ultimately as meaningless as any other passing sensation.

When I was at college I remember vividly a couple who visited my room. They had slept together a couple of times over the previous weeks - the first for both of them - and had really regretted it. They were not Christians and it was nothing to do with their own morality. They had come to realise that real sex is not instant; that it takes a while for two people to build up their own language of love, to discover how to give each other the greatest pleasure, and that they had wandered into this area far too soon.

I am glad that when I make love to my wife I can tell her that I have never made love to anyone else. She owns my body and I belong to her. There is a real strength in that. And if difficult times come and they can come in any relationship, albeit not for long, then the barrier to having sex with another woman is enormously greater than if I were just to fall back to an old pattern of'sleeping around'.

Making sure you are compatible?

People say you should have sex together before you get married to find out whether you are compatible or not. People who say this obviously don't know the first thing about the facts of life! If they did, they would know that there is no such thing as a man too big for a woman or a woman too big for a man!

Unless the man has a penis thicker than a baby's head the woman will be able to accommodate him, after all, where a man goes in a baby has to come out! Boys are often obsessed with the size of their equipment. Too small or too big? When a woman aroused, all the parts inside and outside begin change shape so that even, a man not particular well endowed will have a snug fit. We have been well designed!It's not what you have but what you do with it that counts.

Incredibly rarely a doctor may see a couple who are unable to have sex because of a slight abnormality; for example, a thin layer of skin completely closing off the woman just inside her. Such a woman does not produce blood when she menstruates, so the reason is usually clear and easily dealt with. But apart from rarities like that, incompatibility does not exist. Impotence in a man can be very distressing, and is far commoner than people realise, affecting many men when under pressure, tired or ill. The biggest cause by far is nerves about whether he will perform all right or not, and a man is much more likely to be afraid if he is, on some kind of pre-marriage trial. marriage gives a couple time, space and security in which to relax.

Secret of a good sex life

However, there is no such thing as an instantly compatible couple. Every person is different and every couple is totally unique. Things that one person may find very pleasurable, another may find a complete turn-off. Good love-making takes time, privacy, care, understanding and good communication. Maybe that is why many couples find their love-making gets better and better as they learn more and more about, each other. The most basic requirement, however, is a good warm relationship where, especially for the woman, both partners can really give of themselves in an atmosphere of total security. Only when you are totally secure are you fully free.

When you split sex from the whole-person experience, you are doomed to only part fulfilment. This leads to a steadily worsening spiral, looking always for the ultimate in sexual release. The next person, or this new way of doing it, may yet be better than before.Of course dangerous sex can have an exciting dimension, and that can be the attraction of an affair, but there are plenty of other ways to inject excitement into a stable relationship than being unfaithful, for example making love in what for you both is an unusual location.

How to wreck good sex

Girls usually realise these things long before the men they go out with do. Most girls need no persuading about the advantages of being in a secure loving relationship. In fact one of the main reasons why (against their better judgement) some are willing finally to sleep with boyfriends is the hope that through offering them sex they will be able to attract their boyfriends into a long term relationship.

Unfortunately in my experience it usually works the other way. A girl a man used to respect, almost revere, he now despises as cheap and worthless, like all the rest. One of a woman's greatest assets in winning a man is her mystery, and the moment she has sex with her boyfriend she is in danger of losing it. The Bible says that when a man has slept with a woman, he 'knows' her. There is a sense in which everything has been uncovered.

4. Sex and the church

Confusion in the church

God loves sex:it's the waste of sex outside marriage that causes him grief.

There is confusion in some parts of the church over just about everything at the moment. It seems in some countries you can have a bishop who rejects Jesus as the Son God, rejects the virgin birth, thinks that the resurrection never really happened and that the Bible is not really to he believed. Once you have a group of people who have decided to reject major parts of Bible, along with many of the historic teachings the church, you have major problems. After all, man's opinion is then as valid as anyone else's. You can end up with as many different religions as there are people.

As an atheist friend of mine said recently, if you want to join the club you must reckon to obey the rules. The trouble here is that it seems some people think they can rewrite the basis of the club's existence, and therefore regard rules they don't like as invalid, and ignore them.

You might forgive existing club members of thinking that these 'radicals' are not radical at all. They have just invented a brand new club of their own.

Daring to be honest

IfI am going to be honest and read the Bible care fully to understand what the whole of it says about life, not just a sentence or two, then I am going to have to be very careful. You can easily read bits of phrases here and there and string them out to mean whatever you want them to. The overall meaning is vitally important.

Here is my own conclusion about what the Bible says about sex and sexuality. You need to read the Bible for yourself. I read the entire Bible through three times in as many years, often making detailed notes and using reference books to make sure I really understood what was being said. What I am going to say now is in the light of those readings.

At I see it, the Bible teaches right from the start that God made man and woman in his own image. His intention is that a man should marry a woman, and that sex is to be a wonderful gift, a mystery uniting a man and woman who have committed themselves to each other in this way for life

Out of that kaleidoscope of rich physical love are to come children who grow up in a secure loving family, with grannies and grandpas, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and single people included in family life if they want.

Marriage is the basic foundation stone of society. Therefore it is no surprise to the Christian to find that where marriages break down, where there is violence in the home, where spouses cheat on each other and stop caring, that children often grow up with deep scars, insecure and unsure of themselves. A lot of vandalism, alcohol problems, drug problems and other situations can be traced to unhappy homes of the young people concerned.

The Bible, by encouraging everything that supports a good stable marriage speaks out against anything that undermines marriage as the rock on which society is built. In many Western countries marriage is often regarded as an irrelevance. marriage is not chic. Look at the adverts. How many women of whatever especially in shots of couples, are wearing a wedding ring -or even an engagement ring?

Careers have encouraged women to put off having children for ten years or more. The tragedy is,

when they finally want them they often find the peak of fertility has passed, getting pregnant is

difficult and the risks of having a baby with an abnormality are increased. In medicine, anyone having first child over the age of thirty is regarded as an elderly mum because doctors recognise that the female body was not really designed for such a late first pregnancy.

marriage ">Sex designed for marriage

Because the Bible is for marriage , and against anything that discourages marriage , the Bible is for keeping sexual union as the exclusive activity of those who are marriedBefore the pill some twenty years ago, sex meant a risk that babies would be born, and babies need Mum and Dad permanently. Any family doctor will tell you casual relationships are bad for children and bad for family life. Jesus made it absolutely clear that he agreed with the established teaching, which was that sex outside marriage was wrong. In fact he went further to say that even to have a fantasy about sex outside marriage was also wrong.

I am not asking you to agree with this. All I am you to do is to be honest with yourself and at least

admit that this is what the Bible says. It is the teaching that has always been given by the church although there have always been small numbers of people who have written their own rulebooks, and in the process found themselves outside the church as a result. This teaching is not the teaching of one denomination, but of the whole of the church since the time of Jesus, whether Catholic Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, or whatever. In fact it is one of the few things about which Christians over the centuries have always united.

Stretching the limits

Some people have tried to make out there is a special case for those who have attraction to others of the same sex. The Bible teaches that people can be sex aroused in a great number of different situation. It is very explicit. The Bible describes men having sex with men, adults having sex with children, men having sex with their mothers, people having sex with animals, orgies, prostitution and many other things. Homosexual sex is mentioned directly in a number of places in the Bible-always as something beyond what is allowed.

However, the Bible also describes very close, warm, intense, loving relationships between people of the same sex - Ruth and Naomi or David and Jonathan for example. David and Jonathan could share as much of lives together as they liked, but they could not indulge in same-sex activity.

Fashionable faith

People say it is very unfair. It is also hard for woman who finds that the only man she has ever loved is married to another, or for someone who has decided that if there is no one suitable to marry within the community of followers of Jesus then they will remain single.It is also hard for someone when there seem to be lots of potential partners around but none they could face being married to or would trust as father or mother to their children (a good test).

We think in this sex-dominated age that for a man not to express his sexuality by having sex with

another person is somehow against the laws of nature and is wrong. It is no different than for a woman to do so, except that a younger man's urges are often far stronger than in a younger woman, a situation which is often reversed in middle life.

Christian faith does not change every time fashion changes, and Christian tradition has always given high honour to those who are celibate. Jesus himself is our example and the Apostle Paul. The time of the early Church was also a culture obsessed with sexual fulfilment and immorality and both Jesus and Paul spoke out clearly in favour of temperance, discipline, self-control, celibacy and faithfulness as part of God's purpose for us all. In the next century people will look with some amusement at the first and second generation who grew up with the pill, the obsession with sex, and the domination of sex diseases.Sadly they will also record the devastation of family break up on hundreds of millions of children.

5. Caring is not the same as agreeing

You may not agree. I am not asking you to agree, but only to see what I have written is a view which is as valid as yours, and it is one that reflects the consistent pattern of teaching of the church over two thousand years, whether Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant.

Practical care

Someone once said to me she was shocked that Christians were involved in compassionate, unconditional care for people with AIDS, because she knew that we disapproved of many of the lifestyles that had caused people to become infected.

I told her she had confused agreeing with caring. They have never been the same thing in medicine. If, as a doctor, only looked after people who voted for the same party, who held the same faith, who worshipped in the same kind of church, who never did anything I personally could not approve of, I think I should be struck off the medical register right away. Doctors and nurses are expected to give good compassionate care to all who need it and for all illnesses, regardless of how people come to be ill. The same is true for all those involved in the so-called caring professions.

And the fact is that worldwide the churches are at the very forefront of AIDS care and prevention.

AIDS And You Contents

 

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