Heck yeah masturbation is a sin. It's sin-sational! Am I right, folks? I'll be here all night. Try the waiters, tip your veal.
Sorry. I couldn't resist. But, seriously, of all the many, many things that are considered sins, I cannot imagine that God or Buddha or Thor or whoever you pray to would consider self-pleasure an offense punishable by spending eternity burning in the deepest recesses of the underworld.
I mean, how much time does God have on his hands? (No pun intended, Big Guy.) He's really going to smite down every 13-year-old who discovers his dad's old Playboys in the attic or gets the brilliant idea to put the word "boobs" into Google and see what happens? That's a whole lotta smiting (smoting?).
In today's world, even the most strident religions don't consider masturbation a sin. Do Catholics still have a problem with it? I would imagine at this point they have dropped "self-lust" from the list of cardinal sins. But this country does have a weird puritanical streak to it when it comes to self-love. Remember that surgeon general who recommended teaching the value of masturbation? She became kind of a joke, even though everyone forgot that she was encouraging an open discourse on sexuality in order to prevent young people from engaging in risky sexual behavior. (It was the '90s. AIDs awareness was bigger than Urkel.) Even though many studies show that masturbation promotes good circulation and a healthy sex life, it still gets a bad rap.
So don't sweat it. Admittedly it's been a while since I cracked a Bible, but I'm fairly certain the section that is anti-masturbation is sketchy at best. My guess is some repressed Canaanite stuck it in their on a lark to piss off his cousin Heziekiah, the chronic masturbator. When the rapture comes, and we're all judged by 10-foot tall angels with flaming swords and cool flowing robes, whether or not you coveted thine own body is probably not going to matter. And if all that is just fiction, don't you want to have enjoyed your time on this planet?
Finally, the great scholar Woody Allen said it best in Annie Hall: "Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.
A priest friend of mine often said, "If God didn't want us to masturbate he would have made our arms much shorter."
Actually, masturbation was considered a sin, but a venal one, until some monk with a hair up his ass about the subject a few centuries ago got on the topic and basically harrassed everyone into accepting his viewpoint, which they did pretty much solely to shut him up.
Actually, masturbation is a sin. If you read the Bible then you'll see that it says that selfishness is a sin. Masturbation is being selfish: you're giving yourself that pleasure. Masturbation is now often referred to as being "selfish." When you take that pleasure for yourself then you're being selfish and, therefore, you're sinning.
...
Wait, but...SERIOUSLY? Masturbation is considered a sin because it's...selfish?
Therefore we should go have sex with everyone and everything. Be kind. Lose the pants.