Knight Ridder published a curious article surveying various religious beliefs about the joy of sex when you're dead. Most of the info comes from Columbia University religion professor Alan Segal, author of the book "Life After Death: The Afterlife in Western Religions." From the article:
Plato and Aristotle taught that the body dies, but a conscious soul lives forever. There would be no sex for the Greek philosophers, but they could continue to do what they really loved – to learn, to teach and to think.
Segal said while modern Judaism focuses more on this life than the next, early Jews introduced the notion that martyrs would be bodily resurrected in the hereafter.
Early Christians believed that after the end of the world they'd all get their bodies back in heaven, and this led inevitably to questions about sex and marriage. On pondering resurrection of the flesh, St. Augustine decided we'd keep our sex organs for aesthetic reasons, but we wouldn't use them…
…Heavenly sex is problematic in Christianity, he said, since intercourse for pleasure was considered "depravity." That changed somewhat for Protestants after the Renaissance. They loosened some of the sexual prohibitions, and some started to lobby for it in the afterlife, said Segal.
In Islam and Judaism, sexual pleasure is not considered filthy, he said, making its possible appearance in heaven less shocking.
Zoroastrians, he said, believed there was sex in heaven, but people would wean themselves away from both food and sex as they got used to being dead.
