Sex in the World's Religions

When I first picked up this purple book called "Sex in the World's Religions" for twenty-five cents at a used book sale, I anticipated four things:1. A long, and vastly incorrect, discourse on how the People of the East are all sexual libertines and how the West, corrupted by Christianity, needs to catch up and return to its pre-Christian fornicating glory.2. A lengthy description of Kabbalic mysticism as an incorrect representation of how most Jews view sexual behavior.3. A petty chapter on Islam that goes into Rumi and little else.4. Silly-looking prurient illustrations of Egyptian gods and goddesses engaged in various copulative acts.What I found was just the opposite: a good, well-researched, complete, and far-from-prurient description of how every major world religion addresses the issue of sex. The descriptions of Hindu and Buddhist sexual ethos are (near as I can tell) completely on-target, there is virtually no Christianity-bashing, and the Kabbalah is relegated to the last four pages of a lengthy and enlightening chapter on Judaism.On the other hand, this little book is far from dull -- not for the reasons you might expect, but because Parrinder writes with a breezy "I'm just writing this" style that makes this very solid work of scholarship into an equally solid example of cheery bedtime reading. Highly recommended.