There's a lot of rubbish been talked...

• At some time in the past, presumably when the bible was unavailable to the masses, the word "Onanism" was coined to describe (male) masturbation. Problem is, while what Onan did "displeased the Lord" (Genesis 38:10), it wasn't masturbation at all but coitus interuptii, and God wasn't displeased with the act so much as by Onan's disobedience of the law, rebellion against God's announced plan and treating his sister-in-law as a harlot (he could after all have just refused to go to bed at all). I can see God's point - but it's got nothing to do with the topic.

  Verdict and summary: Deliberate lie, arrogantly devised and spread by people who knew it wasn't true.
  
  

• Next I think we come to "you'll go blind" for boys and "you'll be paralysed" for girls. The male orgasm does affect visual accuity briefly (actually it improves it!) and I guess the female story was a believable lie too, but increased availability of medical fact scotched these too.

  Verdict and summary: Deliberate and untrue fiction, devised and spread by people some of whom may even have believed it (!) but who knew or should have known that there was never any evidence to support it.
  
  

• So third time lucky, we began to be told that we'd get better satisfaction in marriage if we were good beforehand... Unluckily, Kinsey found a very weak correlation the other way around, not enough to establish a connection but plenty to make the contrary seem most unlikely.

  Verdict and summary: Untrue fiction, devised and spread by people who honestly believed it (!) but who knew or should have known that there was never any evidence to support it.
  
  

• So round four, printed in many current Christian books: "Don't feel too guilty about it". This is probably very good advice, but it presupposes that it's right to feel at least a little bit guilty, which is the main question. If this question is not addressed (and it very rarely is) then I think this approach is at least as dishonest as the three above.

  Verdict and summary: Often articulate and persuasive, but in fact an illogical and cowardly avoidance of the issues.
  
  

Overall verdict and summary: Consistently fictitious propaganda, quite obviously designed to further a cause for which no logical justification could be found.

Now this is only very weak evidence that masturbation is all right, and needs to be balanced against other evidence. All we have established is that valid arguments that it's not all right are hard to come by, because these rather transparent lies are the best that some highly motivated and articulate writers have managed.

Let's not be too hard on the tellers of these lies. They were and are generally not malicious. I just think they made a mistake (most of us do from time to time), and that it's in urgent need of correction.

And, let's not fall into the same trap of wishful thinking. It is natural to react to this attempt to deceive by assuming the opposite position, and start looking for ways to justify masturbation. This is part of the damage done by the rubbish. It makes it all the more difficult to come to a logical viewpoint, and as I've said above, if nothing alse we have certainly proved that attaining this precious perspective is going to be a real challenge.

But perhaps the main damage done by these untruths over the years has been to disastrously erode the authority of everything else the church has to say...

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