Monasticism is almost universally earmarked by sacrificing excess. In Christian Monasticism, one of the ‘excesses’ to get the boot is sex. To forego sex is to deny the carnal, in order to gain access to some moral upper hand. It’s an inversion of Faust’s bargain with the devil.
I’m not so much in to the business of defining sin and such, but there are some meaningful correlations that I have drawn in my monastic filtering of society’s extravagances.
Sex is a primal and often urgent, difficult to suppress expression of our biology. We can paint it with virtue and the word, “love,” but like an enameled anvil, it’s an undeniably physical thing, regardless of the pretty color or sentiment. But even more fundamental, elemental in fact, to our existence is the Carbon Cycle. We are made of carbon. We ingest carbon in one form and emit it in high entropy gasses simply to function, and in our industrialized society the excessive expenditure of stable carbon is at a heinous cost to the future life on our planet. Carbon Emission is the sin of our Age.
So, no, I am not taking a vow of celibacy with my monasticism (though I have no expectations here, in solitude), but minimizing my stable carbon footprint is a central tenet of my routine. If faced with a choice, I will expend carbon in the active pool. It’s not possible for me to be “Carbon Celibate,” but I can do a hell of a lot better than most. I urge you to do the same, and then go have lots of sex.