Sexual preferences develop, evolve and change over a lifetime. [...] Without opportunities for sexual exploration and discovery, how is a 19 to 20-year-old to learn what he or she likes and how his or her body reacts?

Wherever sexually restrictive religions invade, they bring the tools of repression with them - fear of punishment, shame if caught, guilt that the deity watches and terror of punishment. Islam, Christianity and Judaism, with their patriarchal, asexual god, have systemically overcome local sexual ideas throughout the world and infected cultures with sex-negative practices.

All major religions put most of the responsibility for sexual morality on women. Religions teach that women should remain chaste and should control and hide their sexuality so men will not be tempted.

Religious training and indoctrination creates internal states that are in conflict with natural urges and drives.

When Islam swept out of the Arabian Peninsula, it became an invasive species to both the pagan and Christian areas it conquered. With it came the sexual practices of a very patriarchal, polygamist culture. While the religions it displaced were not particularly sex positive, Islamic sexual practices, on the whole, were uniformly sex negative.

There are many afterlife ideas and little agreement on what it may be.

With the concept of an afterlife, religion creates a portal to infect people by means of terror and fear of death. If one has no concept of an afterlife, then fear of eternal punishment becomes an effective way to convince people of the need to perform specific rituals and live a certain way.

As conscious beings, we are capable of understanding that we will die some day. We also have the ability to imagine a world after we die. Religion hijacks this ability and injects fear of eternal torture and abandonment as well as the promise of eternal bliss. A perfect carrot and stick approach. The ability to imagine what is beyond the horizon of death is what allows religion to take control and make us do unnatural things.

Living a religious sexual lifestyle is tantamount to living a lie.Religion distorts our sexuality when the majority of religious people live one life for the public and another in private. It can be as simple as living as a "happily married" couple when you are both miserable with your sex life.