RELIGION AND IMMORALITY: THE SURRENDER OF THE BODY AND MIND

Warning: This piece is a personal reflection, not an attack on anyone’s faith. I write not as someone outside of faith, but as someone within it. I believe that while religion gives meaning to life, it also leaves room for doubt.

I have always been told that my desires are dangerous. That the body is a trap, that longing is a kind of sin. Religion has always promised us eternity , but always with conditions, always with restraint. It cuts out the very heart of what makes us alive. We are often ordered to starve ourselves of beauty in this world so that we might be fed in another. And I wonder… what kind of eternity is that? An eternity won by killing desire is not life everlasting, it is death disguised as salvation.

They teach us to fold ourselves into the shape of virtue. They tell us to join the crowd, to obey, to repeat the answers we were handed as children. And so the crowd grows but does not know what it is to feel everything. It fears those who are unashamed, the ones who will not wait for heaven to begin living.

Religion often paints the body as “vicious.” It tells us that the body is not to be trusted, that desire is a path leading away from holiness. But if the body were not meant to feel, why was it built to feel so much? What cruelty it would be to give us lungs and forbid us breath, to give us hearts and forbid us love, to give us skin and forbid us touch. Desire pulses like blood; it is not the enemy of the soul.. it is the soul in its most visible form.

Yet the injunctions against the body are only one part of the spell. Less spoken but just as lethal is the command to stop thinking. Religion, in its broadest shape, will often do more than silence the body: it will tell you what to believe, what to fear, which questions are dangerous. It offers answers, and in offering them it asks you to surrender your curiosity. Doubt becomes a vice; inquiry becomes a kind of treason. The mind is taught to obey in the same way the body is taught to fast. Thus, generations learn to parrot rather than wonder.

That is why I turn toward what religion fears most. Immorality.

So often condemned, immorality is simply the refusal to kill desire, and the refusal to let another mind decide what is true for you. It is the choice to honor both the body and the mind. It is stepping outside the rules and tasting the world without filters, to love without apology. To live without suppressing and burying ourselves under shame and rules.

Immorality is not ugly. It is a fierce kind of beauty because it frees us from fear. To want is not to sin. To think is not to stray. To want is to prove that we are alive, that we are not angels or machines but human beings who ache and err and therefore belong here.

And if I imagine immortality, I cannot imagine it without desire or without thought. What is eternity if cleansed of every ache that makes us human?

But immortality with desire, with immorality, with a mind that refuses to be fenced in, is life without end.

They fear such people because they are uncontrollable. They do not fit scripts. They do not accept handed-down truths. They will not trade living for waiting. They think, they feel, they break and then they build.

The body is neither a test nor a trap. The mind is not a vessel to be filled by another’s certainty. To desire is to worship the fact of existence. To doubt is to insist on intimacy with truth. To live fully , to feel and to think freely , is not to defy the divine but to embody it. And if that is immoral, let me be immoral. If that is eternal, let me be eternal.