Evil lurked everywhere in 1965 and our 7th Grade Catholic school teacher, Sister Mary Josef, warned her male students in a special assembly that masturbation not only condemned boys to hell, but repeated self-abuse led to hair sprouting from our palms and in the worst case scenario, blindness.
“Idle hands are the tools of the devil. Even the slightest touch can damn your soul. You can never let down your guard.”
“What about when we’re asleep?” a voice asked behind me. Mark Tully was a poor student. He had a problem concentrating on numbers and letters. He was good at getting into trouble and bullied me mercilessly every day.
“Say your prayers before bed and the guardian angels will protect you.” Sister Mary Josef was playing the straight man for Mark’s joker.
“Then why do I get nocturnal emissions?” Mark’s tone of innocence earned a few snickers.
“Nocturnal emissions?” Sister Mary Josef’s blank expression betrayed her ignorance of this male phenomena.
“Wet dreams.” Mark feared no nun. The monsignor was his uncle. He could do no wrong and said to our teacher, “It’s not like we can stop them, can we, sister?”
“You will go blind and then to hell.” Sister Mary Josef ended our impromptu sex education and Mark was ordered to write “Pray at night. Pray in your dreams Pray during the day.” 1000 times.
Sex was a mystery. We thought girls couldn’t masturbate. but we knew from playing with our sisters’ Barbie Dolls that girls had no penis, but something was up there, because the nuns had forbade the girls to polish their shoes to prevent us from seeing the reflection off their shoes. We tried anyway, answering the siren’s lure to our pubescent lust.
Satan was everywhere and nowhere, however none of us mentioned sex in the confessional, since the priests swore Christ had come from a virgin birth. Our parents breached the wall of silence about sex with a brief and sketchy talk about the mysteries of the birds and bees without ever touching on masturbation other than to say that it was evil.
Islam has similar approach and five years ago the grand leader Khameini unforgivingly scolded the faithful how they should not masturbate during Ramadan, otherwise the fast would be considered invalid and Iran’s most influential religious personage was asked on his website, “If somebody masturbates during the month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?”
“If he do not intend masturbation and discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct even though he has done a h’ar’m (forbidden) act. But, if he intends masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this process and semen really comes out, it is a h’aram intentional breaking fasting.” This was the posted reply.
This basically means that masturbation other than during Ramadan, which is certainly more advanced thought than the Catholic Church who consider any sex outside of marriage to be the gateway to Hell.
I checked the Mullah’s English website and discovered the holy men spend a lot of time discerning that which is okay and not okay. Check it out for any Sharia dilemmas.
http://www.leader.ir/langs/EN/index.php
The soul you save might be your own.
As for Ramadan 2015
Enjoy and be in good health.