God was watching me. And I was watching porn. | Pete Holmes | Big Think

It was the horniness that was the teacher. I thought it was in the way of my teaching. I was like, if I could only stop being horny, I could meditate and I could find God. Fuck that shit. God is in the horniness. The reason the book is called "Comedy Sex God" is because God and sex were so closely linked for me.

When I was a kid, I wasn't tempted to lie or cheat or steal, or certainly not murder anybody. Those were all very easy ordinances from the church to follow because I wasn't tempted to do them. But sex, it's a biological, pulsing, organically occurring, fresh-batch-every-morning temptation that all these 12, 13, 14-year-olds were being told was the thing, the sin, that was keeping God, basically, from loving us. You know what I mean? We were all good to go to heaven, but three, sometimes four times a day, you're very tempted.

Or in my case, I would succumb! succumb! to temptation, and I felt terrible about it because that was my understanding of God. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try and reform that understanding of God as this like, basically a bully, as Nadia Bolz-Weber says, with a killer surveillance system who's watching you and who really hates you. He hates what you are and wishes that Richard Rohr calls it willpower Christianity. It's like we can just push these giant boulders away and lean on them, and be at church and be like, "Hey, brother!"

But really, you're as human as anybody, and that is a cognitive and spiritual dissonance that is a heavy, heavy weight. So I joke that the book is called "Comedy Sex God", but most of the sex is with myself because it was so internalized and it was so shameful and private.

So when I lost my faith because my wife—here's sex again: My wife had an affair. So sex, again, betrayed me. I was trying to be a good boy and I got married almost so that I could have sex, so I was playing by the rules. And then she broke the rules. But even worse, it felt like God, who was almost like the mafia—I paid him a fee to watch my bakery, if that makes sense, and then somebody threw a brick through my bakery window.

And I was like, 'You didn't hold up your end of the bargain.' So I lost my faith, and then I really had to redefine what sexuality was. It was almost like coming out of the closet as straight. I'm not trying to minimize how serious and how difficult it can be to come out of the closet as gay, but I had to announce to myself and to the world: "I like boobies." And that was hard because you were waiting for lightning to strike you down.

So the wonderful thing that I've discovered about the universe—we don't have to call it God because I understand and sympathize that that's a loaded word—but I see a universe that uses these wounds and these traumas and these wrong programs in our favor, ultimately. So I spent all this time, first, repressing my sexuality. Then I lost my faith. Then I went through a period of embracing it as best as I could.

I bought the Playboy that I hid in my bedroom in a chair that used to belong to my grandmother. I cut a slit in the lining of that chair and I hid this Playboy that I had stolen with my friend, Opie. So that was two sins, really. And then when I lost my faith, I bought that Playboy on eBay and put it on my coffee table, because I knew that my psyche needed symbols.

I was trying to outwardly manifest a world where I wasn't ashamed of being a sexual person. So like a swinger or like Burt Reynolds, I just kept—or a barbershop just open air pornography, which was partially healing. And then I tried having anonymous—or casual—anonymous is not true; I knew their names and they knew my name, so it wasn't anonymous.

And I didn't have sex with a group of renegade hackers wearing scary masks. I was just having sex with people that I had no intention of marrying, which, if you can believe it, was a huge undertaking for me. So I thought that was healing myself. But as I talk about in the book, there was a third step, which was I had to learn to irrationally love myself, and that that is the sort of love that, I believe, is comi...