Is It Okay to Masturbate in a Sexless Marriage?

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Lee — 4 Comments

Recently a reader named Average Joe submitted a Spiritual Conundrum to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. His question: Is it okay to continue to masturbate for sexual release considering that he is now married, but in the six years since the wedding there has been no sex at all? He also asked whether he is really married, since the ceremony was not done in a church, but in a courthouse officiated by a Justice of the Peace.

I’ll show his full question in a moment. First, here’s the short answer:

As covered in my earlier articles on the subject, masturbation, if practiced in moderation to release sexual tension, is not wrong or evil, but good and even healthful—though of course, nowhere near as good and healthful as sexual intercourse within a loving, faithful, monogamous marriage.

For the Bible-thumpers out there, the Bible does not say one word about masturbation. The traditional “Christian” prohibition on masturbation is completely unbiblical. See: “What does the Bible Say about Masturbation? Is Masturbation a Sin?”

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace a real marriage? You might be surprised to hear that throughout the Bible, and for the first 1,000 years of Christianity, marriage was a purely civil matter. The church wasn’t involved in it at all, except to forbid adultery. In Bible times there was not even a wedding ceremony, let alone a priest officiating at it. And in the Christian era it wasn’t until after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century that it became mandatory for a priest or minister to officiate at weddings.

Is a marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace valid? From a biblical perspective, it’s just as valid as a marriage performed by a minister or priest. Neither one is required by the Bible.

For more on masturbation in a sexless marriage, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: divorce, marriage, masturbation, sex, sex drive, sexless marriage, sexual intercourse, spiritual marriage, the Bible
Posted in Sex Marriage Relationships

Will We Remember Loved Ones Who Go to Hell?

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Lee — 25 Comments

What if someone we love goes to hell? Will we still remember them? Won’t that kind of suck?

That is the essence of some questions that a reader named Max asked in several recent comment threads here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. And though the answers aren’t what everyone wants to hear, the point of this website is not to be popular, but to give real answers to hard questions.

First, contrary to popular belief, hell is 100% voluntary. No one is forced to go there. During our lifetime on earth we choose whether we want to go to heaven or to hell by deciding what kind of person we want to be. If we decide to be a selfish and greedy S.O.B., we are choosing to go to hell. If that is our choice, in the afterlife neither God nor the Devil will send us to hell. We will go there of our own free will because that’s where we prefer to be. See: Is There Really a Hell? What is it Like?

Second, the afterlife is a continuation of this life. We are still the same person we have always been, but we are the same person we were inwardly. Any outward fakeries or masks that we have put on are stripped away. We become outwardly exactly the person we were within ourselves here on earth. See: What Happens To Us When We Die?

This means that the answers to these questions are human answers, based on who we are and how we function as human beings. And even here on earth, we drift away from, and sometimes consciously choose to cut ourselves off from, people who have taken paths that go in an opposite or very different direction than the path we have chosen. When it comes to people who have chosen hell, we do this not only because their life is incompatible with ours, but also to protect ourselves from the harm they would do to us if we let them keep their hooks in us.

It’s not that we can’t remember them. It’s that we choose to move on with our life, and leave them to their own very different chosen life. And eventually, yes, we forget that we ever knew them. Otherwise, it really would suck, both for us and for them.

For more on loved ones who choose hell, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: abusive relationships, family, friends, heaven, Heaven and Hell, hell, love, memory, the afterlife
Posted in The Afterlife

Furries and Therians and Satyrs, Oh My!

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Lee — 4 Comments

In recent weeks and months, the latest way for young people to annoy their parents has been in the news. Most of the action happens online, but there are in-person gatherings and conventions too. That’s when the older generation really gets worked up.

What terrible, awful thing are the youth doing now?

They’re dressing up as animals and calling themselves “furries“ and “therians.” Shocking!

But don’t call a therian a furry, or a furry a therian. You’ll get an earful about how they’re not at all the same! Here’s how to tell the difference:

A furry is an animal being human.
A therian is a human being an animal.

Otherkin heptagram

In fancier terms, a furry is someone who’s into anthropomorphized animals, whereas a therian is a person who identifies with, or as, a mammalian animal. Therians are part the broader phenomenon of “otherkin,” which is a blanket term for people who identify with various non-human creatures and species.

One classic expression of the “furry” idea is the 1972 novel Watership Down, by Richard Adams. The novel centers on a clan of talking rabbits that are culturally very human. Therians, on the other hand, are more akin to individuals in some indigenous cultures identifying with the spirit of a particular animal.

Though furries and therians are effective at annoying the older generation, they’re really nothing new. Even the Bible has a story about a talking donkey.

And what about those satyrs? We’ll get to that. As it turns out, there is a real connection between humans and animals, not only physically, but spiritually.

For more on furries and therians, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: animals, Emanuel Swedenborg, furries, furry, satyr, the Bible, therian, therians
Posted in Current Events, Popular Culture

Love, Mercy, and Evil

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Lee — Leave a comment

Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? (Genesis 18:23)

In the previous article in our series on the inner life of Jesus, we followed the story of Abraham having a meal with three visitors, who predicted Isaac’s birth. That was the second prediction of the birth, and it was made in person by three angels who were filled with God’s presence. That story, in the first half of Genesis 18, relates to Jesus’ deep sense of connection with the Divine within. The previous article talked about communion: about communing with God. Eating a meal with God is sharing God’s love and feeling a sense of closeness to God in our hearts.

This relates to our human feelings of closeness to God, and to a period in Jesus’ life when he was feeling close to the Divine within. “The Father” is another name for the divine nature within Jesus, or the soul of the Lord from which Jesus came. The story in the first half of Genesis 18 is about a sense of closeness to God. It speaks of our feeling that God is right there present with us, and that everything is good because of God’s presence.

As we head into the second half of Genesis 18—specifically, Genesis 18:16–33, which I invite you to read at the link—we get a rude awakening from that wonderful reverie with God. Right after the deep connection with God comes the story of Sodom, which continues through chapter 19.

For more on love, mercy, and evil, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Abraham, bible, Christianity, compassion, God, healing, Jesus, love, mercy, perfectionism, salvation, Sodom, spirituality, the Bible
Posted in All About God, The Bible Re-Viewed

Flight of the Condor

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lee — 4 Comments

Imagine for a moment that you suffered a catastrophic illness that has kept you hospitalized for such a long time that you forget what it feels like to be out in the world. In the early days of your illness, you were bedbound and barely conscious. A few months later you remain bedbound, but your mind is becoming alert. You see the nurses and doctors moving around you, smell the pervasive disinfectant, hear the hums and beats of medical equipment toiling to keep you alive. From your supine position you are starting to follow the daily rhythms of hospital life. This is your new normal. It is your new world. The old you and your life in the outside world fades from your mind.

And then you are moved to a rehabilitation ward where you are kept busy as you painfully relearn how to operate your body, how to move from one spot to another, how to bring food to your mouth so you can eat. The rehabilitation ward is now your new normal, and memories of your bedbound hospital experience begin to fade. You imbibe the daily rhythms of the rehabilitation ward as you work towards becoming a new you. Your life here is now your complete existence. The outside world doesn’t exist for you. In fact, you rarely dwell on the mundanities of the outside world.

As your body heals and your limbs regain strength, you are informed that it is time for you to return to the outside world. You understand the outside world intellectually, but you have lost your feel for it. Despite previously living in the outside world, you find yourself suddenly uncertain and cautious about rejoining it. You want to, but you are uncertain whether you are able to.

For more on the flight of the condor, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: andean condor, bible, condor, eagle's wings, greed, love, Martin Luther King Jr, race relations, racial politics, racism, rationality, selfishness, spirituality
Posted in Current Events

Is God Free?

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Lee — 6 Comments

In a recent comment here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life, a reader called sran4275 posted two videos by American intellectual Robert Lawrence Kuhn titled “Is God Totally Free?” and “How Free is God?” The videos feature interviews with various thinkers on the issue of God’s freedom. They are heady and fascinating if you’re into that sort of thing. Each video is a little over 25 minutes long. Here they are, if you would like to watch them:

Sran4275 wanted to know what I thought of the videos. You can see the original comment here, and read my original reply here. This post is an edited version of my reply.

Short version: I think the discussion of God’s freedom in the interviews is missing some key elements of God’s nature, and of the nature of freedom. If we truly consider God’s eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence, and take it seriously that God is the source of everything that exists, a different picture emerges about God’s freedom.

For more on God’s freedom, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: divine law, free will, freedom, freedom of choice, God, love, omnipotence, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, time and space
Posted in All About God

Why is God Always Silent?

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Lee — 23 Comments

Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Lincoln:

Dear Lee,

I’ve been a reader of this blog for a few years now and I think it offers a truly beautiful, logical and comforting theology and some great advice for spiritual development and doing good. However, there’s one question that I’m still really struggling with, if God is there, why is He always silent?

Now, I understand all the reasons why God veils Himself and doesn’t appear to all humans at all times, for example, free will.

But what I struggle to understand is why God doesn’t reach out to me personally, as someone who struggles with doubt and does want to hear from Him and be guided by Him? After all, countless people throughout history and in the Bible have heard from God in one capacity or another, so why would He be silent when it comes to me? And is there anything I can do to bridge that gap?

Thanks for the good question, Lincoln. And thanks for your kind words about our blog. I’m glad you’re finding the articles here helpful in your spiritual life!

Honestly, I can’t answer the question of why God is silent when it comes specifically to you. Only God knows that. Only God knows your entire life and your entire self, from inside out and from beginning to end. I don’t have that kind of knowledge. But God does, and God always acts with your eternal happiness in mind.

However, I would suggest that God has not been as silent as you think. It’s natural to want an audible voice from God of the kind that so many people in the Bible and throughout history have heard. That’s how we talk to our family and friends. But an audible voice isn’t the only way God speaks to us.

Yes, there are reasons God doesn’t talk to most people in the ordinary human way. Free will, of course. But also the materialism of our age and our own lack of faith, which make it too easy to doubt and explain away any experience of hearing God’s voice.

But more than that, the path toward hearing God’s voice is not through testing God by requiring God to speak to us in a particular way, but through listening for the ways God is already speaking to us in the Bible, through other people, and through our daily experience, not to mention within our own heart.

For more on God’s voice, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: atheism, bible, Christianity, doubt, faith, free will, God, Jesus, materialism, nature, prayer, talking with God, the Bible, the voice of God, The Word of God
Posted in All About God

The War Between Men and Women?

Posted on August 14, 2025 by Lee — 7 Comments

I grew up in a house full of books. The living room wall was lined with books. From time to time, I would pull one off the shelf and read it. Many of them were serious classics.

Then, there was humorist James Thurber. I flipped through his book Men, Women, and Dogs, originally published in 1943, laughing at the cartoons. But the only ones I remember decades later were a series that, to my young mind, were both funny and weird: “The War Between Men and Women” (the inspiration for the 1972 comedy movie of that name), featuring literal pitched battles between armies of the opposite sexes.

Apparently, that battle has been going on for a long time.

Fortunately, there are not literal physical armies of men fighting armies of women. But we do have the ongoing verbal and sometimes legal battle between feminism and the manosphere. And in general, for a century or more there has been tremendous conflict and chaos about the roles of women and men, and their relationship with each other legally, socially, economically, and interpersonally.

Are men and women destined to be in eternal conflict with one another?

I don’t think so.

But I do think that the current chaos in that realm is a symptom of a major transition in the relationship between man and woman. Specifically, I believe we are making the painful transition from an era lasting thousands of years in which women were secondary to, and even subservient to, men, to a new era in which there will be genuine equality—but not sameness—between men and women.

And I believe that this is a good thing.

For more on man and woman, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: feminism, gender equality, gender issues, gender roles, James Thurber, marriage, marriage equality, MGTOW, partnership, relationships
Posted in Sex Marriage Relationships

Communing with God

Posted on July 21, 2025 by Lee — Leave a comment

“If I have found favor in your eyes, my Lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—for this is why you have come to your servant.” (Genesis 18:3–5)

If you get a sense of déjà vu as you read Genesis 18:1–15, which is the next story in our series on Genesis, it is for a good reason: In chapter 17 of Genesis, covered in the previous article in the series, God had already come to Abram (renaming him Abraham) and predicted that his wife Sarai (renamed Sarah) would have a son in her old age. The first time around it was Abraham who laughed, rather than Sarah, to think that he would have a son at the age of a hundred, and his wife at the age of ninety. And it was from this laughter that their son Isaac got his name: in Hebrew, “Isaac” means “laughter.”

Now, in chapter 18, God appears to Abraham again to deliver the same message, but this time Sarah is listening in.

Some Biblical scholars might say that, similar to the two different Creation stories in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, God appeared to Abraham only once, but two different versions of the event were passed down through oral history, and when it came time to write it down, the ancient scribes preserved both versions in the narrative. Others would say that the narrative describes events as they happened, and that if two stories of God appearing to Abraham are told, it is because God delivered the message twice.

I am quite content to leave that debate to the scholars. Whatever may have happened in southern Palestine four thousand years ago, the stories in the Bible are given, not to tell us about ancient family history, but to tell us about the Lord, and about our own spiritual growth and journey. If we look at these two stories with a spiritual eye, we find that they are not merely repetitious, but that each has its own distinct story to tell—and that one builds upon the other.

For more on communing with God, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: Abraham, baptism, bible, Communion, divine love, divine wisdom, God, Holy Supper, Isaac, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Sarah, the Bible
Posted in All About God, Spiritual Growth

Will We Meet Christ In the Clouds?

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Lee — 26 Comments

Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Olakunle Ilori:

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess. 4:16–18)

Greetings Lee, I’ve believed in the above text all of my Christian life. I even have a YouTube channel on which I share the possible dates on which the Rapture event will most likely occur. I no longer believe this event will ever happen. However, how are we meant to interpret what Paul has written in the above text. I’ve not been able to find anywhere where Swedenborg gave his interpretation of the above text. I would love to know your understanding of it. Maybe you’ve already covered it in one of your articles. Please share the link if indeed you have.

Thank you for all your help.

Olakunle Ilori

Thanks for the good question and conundrum, Olakunle! I’ve added the link you provided to your YouTube channel so that others can see the background if they wish.

This passage certainly has been a mainstay for biblical literalists who believe in a literal future resurrection when our physical bodies will rise from the grave and come back to life again.

Here is another one, from the book of Acts, which takes place after Jesus gives his final words to his followers:

When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:9–11)

That settles it, doesn’t it! Christ is literally going to come in the clouds of heaven!

Wait a minute. Is it the clouds of heaven, or the clouds of the sky? And why are there always clouds? Where did Jesus go, anyway? Is he up there in the sky somewhere? Or is he up in heaven?

The closer we look at these passages, the less sense it makes to take them literally.

Let’s look at them much more closely. Because I guarantee you, despite what the gentleman in the video you posted says, the Rapture is not going to happen September 23–24, 2025, and Jesus is not going to return to Earth as King on September 15, 2032! (But if predictions like this get a few people to turn their lives around, that’s not a bad thing.)

For more on meeting the Lord in the clouds, please click here to read on.

Tagged with: angels, clouds of heaven, Emanuel Swedenborg, end of the world, end times, faith, God, heaven, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Paul, The Ascension, the Bible, the Rapture, the Second Coming
Posted in The Afterlife, The Bible Re-Viewed

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