Greta Christina at Skepticon 3

A few months back, Kendra and I both attended Skepticon 3, a Springfield, MO convention dedicated to skepticism. I think that Kendra and I both agree that one of the best things about the convention itself (excluding anything that may have happened in hotel rooms in between speakers and platforms) was Greta Christina‘s talk, Atheism and Sexuality. Christina, as a sex educator and writer, is special to nearly everyone I know, and that’s true for me as well; she just happens to share three of my favorite interests: sex, atheism and erotic comics.

I’m excited to note that a video of Christina’s talk is on YouTube, now. I’d like to note that it’s worth watching her speech even if you’re not an atheist. While she is unabashed about her atheism and it plays a major role in the talk, the primary concern that she’s speaking about is how we build a sexual morality without religion. It’s no secret that organized religion, especially in American culture, has played a huge hand in creating the sad state of affairs we currently face when it comes to sexuality, sex education, and sexual expression. Christina discusses the nuances of approaching sexuality morality without religious morality, and how we can approach sexual ethics as just that: ethics:

“We don’t have to base our sexual ethics on what somebody else wrote down thousands of years ago about what God supposedly told them about how he does and doesn’t want us to do the nasty. Human beings seem to have some core ethical values, hard wired into our brains from millions of years of evolution as a social species. And then we hammer out the specifics and the finer points of those core values based on the standards that our particular society teaches us, and on our own experiences and observations about what hurts and helps people, what’s fair and unfair, and what keeps society running more-or-less smoothly, and that’s what we can base our sexual ethics on. WE don’t have to worry about questions like ‘Does God think anal sex is gross?’ Instead, we can focus on questions like consent, honesty, fairness, harm.”

Also, on a totally unrelated—and self-promoting—note, I was a guest on Dr. Dick’s Erotic Mind podcast this week. You can download the first half at his website if you’re interested in hearing me talk about writing, erotica, comics, masturbation, and Sex Positive St. Louis.