You do it.
An answer.
I’ll be sorry for paying attention, but hey, I am so never mind.
First, you are not a minority. This crazy idea that religious people have reverted into a minority struggling with missionary efforts to regain traction is an outright lie:
there are eight billion of us and seven point one are religiously affiliated
Then, the main theme, sex:
Chastity is great as long as there is no religious motive behind it.
If you restrain from sex because of religious belief it is an act of sacrifice towards the entity your religion describes as the Creator and supreme being. This kind of sacrifice is a dangerous crack in the psyche of any human being and it has been, and still is the main means of manipulation of large crowds through violated trust caused by the great dam on sexuality preached since the fist Shaman understood the power of story on human illusion of delusion.
Third, you Mallory. You are being judgemental so badly that as a Catholic there is a lot of penitence to buy. Can you afford it? Do you have the moral currency required for this awfulness:
EEEK. no sex = breakup? That’s telling.
What are you doing? Encouraging the chaste by making their existence known and their effort noble? Okay, but why must you do it by shaming everyone else?
Why do religious people, including you Mallory, can’t turn their soul searching inside and stop searching in other’s hearts instead of their own. Jesus was, or whomever tried to remember his words, pretty clear on that:
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
You and those like you, by which I mean people who deeply embrace religion but do not give it the time to mature inside as a religious experience lived personally but rush into it only enjoying the sweetness of the young revelation, blind to the bitter tones of the meaning it reveals, are a blocking factor for the progress of humanity. And really Mallory, the progress of humanity it’s what this all Second Coming is all about. Not,
shifting our culture back onto the right path.
There is no right path and any kind of religious experience eased by any holy or not so holy teacher will show such truth. Look:
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
I don’t know what is it inside the calling to preach and I do get the congratulatory effort you make towards your peers. But You are one other gate keeper with way too long claws scraping at the inner life and individual ascendence of each human by boasting moral opinion on bodily functions.
Mind your abstinence and preach the things that need be preached because that is what makes the missionary: the knowledge of the human soul. Premarital abstinence and its glorification are a shy attempt of self love poisoning those with no filter for it. “It is freedom to do good that truly sets us free from ourselves and makes us available for joy, generosity, and creativity”, not sexual abstinence.