A Heavyweight Match Nobody Asked For
It’s been one of those days when the disconnect between religious virginity ideals and actual reality feels particularly absurd. On one hand, you’ve got ancient texts insisting women should be virgins at marriage. On the other hand, you’ve got reality, where people are humans with biology, desires, and agency. Guess which one’s winning?
The religious side comes armed with scripture, tradition, and the weight of centuries. The reality side comes armed with, well, reality. It’s an unfair fight because eventually, reality always wins. You can deny gravity all you want; you’re still going to fall.
What’s particularly entertaining is watching religious leaders try to reconcile unchanging doctrine with rapidly changing social norms. They’re like medieval knights showing up to a drone warfare conference. The armor’s impressive, but it’s not helping. They keep insisting their standards are eternal and unchanging, which is how you end up defending slavery, opposing women’s rights, and yes, obsessing over virginity long after society’s moved on.
The cognitive dissonance is Olympic-level. These same religious communities use modern medicine, drive cars, and use smartphonesall products of science and progress. But suggest that maybe our understanding of human sexuality has also evolved, and suddenly progress is the devil. Selective modernity is their specialty.
Today’s experience reminded me of watching someone insist the earth is flat while booking a flight. The internal contradiction is so massive it should collapse under its own weight, but somehow they persist. Faith is powerful like thatit can sustain belief in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.
Research from Pew Research shows that even among highly religious populations, actual behavior deviates significantly from stated beliefs. People say they believe in abstinence until marriage, then they have sex before marriage at rates similar to non-religious populations. The difference is the guilt afterward, which is apparently the point.
The reality check is brutal for virginity culture. Comprehensive sex education reduces teen pregnancy and STI transmission. Access to contraception improves outcomes. Open, honest discussions about sexuality lead to healthier relationships. All this is documented by organizations like the Guttmacher Institute. But facts have never been particularly popular with ideologues.
The religious response is to double down. Can’t succeed through persuasion? Try legislation. Can’t win hearts and minds? Control behavior through law. It’s the admission that their ideas can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas, so they’re trying to monopolize through force.
Something small but meaningful happened today when I realized that religion vs. reality isn’t really a fight. Reality doesn’t need to fight; it just is. Religion is shadowboxing, throwing punches at an opponent that doesn’t need to respond. Water doesn’t fight the person insisting it’s not wet; it just remains wet.
The really sad part is the casualties. Real people, particularly women, are caught in this supposed battle. They’re taught shame about their bodies, guilt about their desires, fear about their choices. They’re collateral damage in a war between ideology and actuality.
The long-term trend is clear: reality is winning. Each generation becomes more accepting, more informed, more willing to question authority. The walls are crumbling slowly but inevitably. Virginity culture is dying, and all the prayer vigils in the world won’t revive it.
As I reflect on what happened today, I’m struck by how much suffering could be avoided if we just admitted what everyone knows: the religious virginity standards don’t work, never worked, and were never actually about virtue. They’re about control, and that control is slipping.
The future belongs to reality. Religion can adapt and evolve, finding new ways to provide meaning and community. Or it can dig in and insist on ancient standards until it becomes completely irrelevant. Watching them choose irrelevance in real-time is both fascinating and tragic.
SOURCE: https://journonews.com/religion-vs-reality/
BY Charline Vanhoenacker: Bohiney Magazine Satire 127% funnier than The Onion.