Saturday, November 7, 2009

On The Biblical Doctrine Of The Submission Of Women

(Image courtesy of www.godecookery.com)

There are certain things well known to the conservative Christian male of which the Christian female may not be fully aware.

For example, there is the "Prayer of Thanks of the Christian Male" which, though varying somewhat in exact wording from man to man, basically goes something like this:

I thank Thee, my Heavenly Father and Creator, that Thou hath given me woman, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, to serve as a scapegoat for my manly transgressions, and as a shield to hide behind from Thy divine wrath. Amen.


While the principle that the man should "wear the pants" in and be the head of the home is well known, what is not quite so well known is that this wasn't Plan A. Originally male and female were more or less equals. Plan B only came about when God bestowed upon man the right of superiority after it was discovered that man was no match for the woman's mind.

Now don't take Doug B's humble word for it. Crack open your Bible (if you happen to know where it is), Genesis 3, and read it for yourselves.

Briefly put, man was lonely, so God made a woman for man out of the his rib, put them both in a garden of plenty, and gave them but one simple rule to follow: DON'T eat fruit from the tree of knowledge. Then a serpent - who apparently not only could walk but could talk as well (and not only talk, but talk truth) - came along and persuaded the sharper of the two (the woman) that eating the forbidden fruit wouldn't be such a bad thing, would certainly not result in death for the pair, but would instead open their eyes and give them the knowledge of the gods. The man, no doubt, would have been content to plod along in ignorance, lounging around on his lazy buttocks, eating the fruit that grew wild and that probably was gathered and appetizingly arranged for serving by his companion - and that not as a duty, but out of her sense for finer thing. Knowledge was deemed a finer thing by the woman, so she did eat the forbidden fruit; then she nudged her dozing mate awake and persuaded him to take a bite and wise up a little too.

God saw this and it made him angry. So angry, in fact, that he cursed damn near everything he had just created and pronounced good. I won't take the time to go into every detail of that here, but I do want to pause just a little over the fact that Plan B, mentioned above, came into effect at this point in time.

Because the man was so convincing in passing the buck back on to the woman ("The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," verse 12), God immediately recognized this leadership quality and cursed the woman by making her fertile - and just to keep her straight, now made it hurt when she gave birth - and giving man one of his most (at least until recent times) valuable tools for controlling his woman: the ability to keep her either pregnant and/or busy at home rearing kids.

And one more thing. In verse 16 God tells woman: "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Now every righteous male knows that God was being judicious when he put it this way, so it is rightly paraphrased thusly by the Godly male: "thou shalt obligingly and unceasingly kiss thy husband's hinder part always."

Oh yeah. God "cursed" the man too. Notice the quotation marks, indicating a word used in a special sense? This "curse" was not on man himself, as was the case with the woman, but a cursing of the earth for man's sake. Now it would be necessary for man to go out and earn his living by the sweat of his face (verse 19). Need I point out that this "curse" is what made place for that later innovation know as the "workplace affair," best performed while the wife is back home pregnant or busy raising the kids?

So now it is clear that woman was hoisted by her own petard!

I know, I know, you think I'm just being facetious. I'm really not, and could give many examples where Godly, conservative Christian males have repeatedly spelled all this out for us (I admit, however, I may not have done so as discreetly as they). One quick example must serve here. There was a leader among Christian Fundamentalists last century by the name of Reuben Archer Torrey, a highly educated Bible scholar, evangelist, and first academic dean of BIOLA University. He wrote a tome dedicated to defending the inerrancy of the Bible, Difficulties in the Bible: Alleged Errors and Contradictions, in which he set out to rationalize, among other things, the strange behavior of God in relation to his ordering the genocide of the ancient Canaanite people. In that particular section, regarding the need to exterminate the Canaanite women, he bluntly wrote:

The women were the prime source of contamination (Numbers 31:15–16). Though true women are nobler than true men, depraved women are more dangerous than depraved men.


Plain enough for you?

It hardly seems fair that the bringer of knowledge to the human race should be cursed so and put into subjection to her duller counterpart. But subjection was the only way to keep these uppity know-it-alls in their proper place.

And when the Apostle Paul, that perverter of Judaism , the true founder of Christianity, established the New Testament Church protocols he continued the tradition that wisdom and knowledge would continue to be drowned out by the testosterone laced blatherings of the egotistical male. And this would be done, again, by subjugation:

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression (1 Timothy 2:11-14).


I rest my case. There it is in black and white. Man didn't transgress; woman did. It is all her fault, and we could have remained blissfully ignorant had she just stopped trying to find out things. No one likes a smart aleck, least of all the Almighty, and woman has proved herself unworthy of leadership by virtue of the fact that she isn't stupid enough to lead.

That's correct. The greatest leaders, down through history, have been ignorant males, dumb enough to realize that force and bloodshed are more decisive and quicker than thoughtful persuasion or skillful negotiation. Furthermore, no one, I suppose, will dispute that the most successful churches and denominations, those that wield the biggest influence and make the loudest racket in our nation today, are those where the woman is denied ordination or disallowed to teach and spread her posion, which would force church members to think and to rationally discuss matters that should be dealt with by simple prooftexting, such as I've demonstrated above.

It is a great and grand scheme, no doubt, but I'm not quite finished yet. Male leadership has so botched things that now he has passed a little of his "curse" on to the women. Now it is necessary in the majority of cases that two must go out to earn bread by the sweat of their brows in order to have enough for the family. But here is the corker: though this is now an accepted procedure, the woman's curse is still in full effect and the additional duties she now bears must be borne IN ADDITION to homemaking (or what males commonly refer to as "woman's work").

Great is our God, and greatly to be praised!

Friday, November 6, 2009

Forgotten God Syndrome

To revisit a theme I wrote about on Wednesday concerning our allegedly heathen nation: there are some people, who believe in simple "one size fits all answers," like the letter writer I referenced, who think that God is on the decline in our nation and that is the reason for the calamities we face as a nation.

In defense of the thesis that "AMERICA'S greatest sin and the real cause of the present depression is forgetting God," a Christian evangelist wrote the following:

By largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation. False cults numbering nearly ten million are sweeping the land with propaganda of denial, deceit and devilish doctrines....Pleasure, newspapers, magazines, business and society have largely taken the pre-eminent place that God and Christian living ought to take. Crime gets the eye, not Christ! Society not salvation, business and not betterment of souls, money and not missions, earth and not Heaven is foremost in thinking. True, there are a few million Christians in America who still adore, worship and serve Him; but they are like salt in a rotting nation.


The thing is, those words were penned over seventy years ago by Joseph T. Larsen and were his thoughts concerning the then present economic depression.

Not a lot has changed. Like a one-note samba played with increasing vibrancy, Christian moralists have urged us to acknowledge and remember Almighty God (the Christian version, of course) as a safeguard against national crisis. As Secretary Of The Treasury Salmon P. Chase wrote way back in 1861, "No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense." His solution: "The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins." That motto is on our currency to this day, as testimony that as a people the U. S. has not forgotten God.

Our presidents and Congress, right from the beginning, have payed lip service to the national mythology of America: God's Country through many of their proclamations, declarations, and addresses to the people. Although the United States was NOT founded as a Christian Nation (though some of our forefathers sought this, but were wisely overruled), with God being absented from our Constitution, there can be no gainsaying that our country has been - from the beginning and continuing right up to this very day - a nation of Christians.

Acknowledgement of the Almighty is indeed the opiate of the people here in the good old USA. And what the more militant of the Christian moralists really mean is that we haven't gone far enough in legislating Christian behavior into law. That is how, they think, we have "forgotten God."

Almost a quarter of a century ago the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote:

...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of "In God We Trust" as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow's apt phrase, as a form a "ceremonial deism," protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly BECAUSE THEY HAVE LOST THROUGH ROTE REPETITION ANY SIGNIFICANT RELIGIOUS CONTENT.
[Emphasis Mine]

Uh, maybe.

But the battle rages among the secularists (those who, like yours truly, think we would be far better off keeping God and religion out of government, the ceremonial Deists [I think that really should be "ceremonial theists"] (who just feel warm and fuzzy inside with all the God talk and theistic trappings surrounding us, even though they really don't mean a thing), and the militant Christian moralists (who would legislate morality according to their understanding of the Bible).

Forget God? How can we when the militants, like the Energizer bunny, keep pounding on and on and on and on...?

Thursday, November 5, 2009

And Now: The Evening News

I watched the network news yesterday. I got election results plus more ... too much more ... I had it all broken down to me, as if I were a small child, what the results supposedly mean.

The constant mixing of news with analysis annoys the hell out of me. In following political news, I find that the reporter/pundit (God, how I miss old fashioned journalists and their clipped "who, what, when, where" approach to reporting! ) has roughly the accuracy of a 1-900 psychic hotline, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT they are able to shape the news they report.

News reports should not, like soap operas, have story arcs, cliff hangers, and unexpected twists (an example of the latter would be how the "public option" was confidently reported as dead, only to have it unexpectedly resurrected later).

I submit that the majority of the United States citizenry is intellectually lazy. We, as a people, are like lost sheep, in need of direction, I suppose, Otherwise we would rise up and turn off our television newscasts. And the all news channels - with their 15% news content and 85% filler, fluff, and, of course, advertising - would go the way of the dinosaur.

My advice: read a good newspaper instead. You get more straightforward reporting there, the editorials are appropriately placed in a designated area, and you can skip over the ads if you choose.

But it seems we just aren't ready to think for ourselves.

I once heard an old-time radio preacher, the late fundamentalist Lester Roloff, as I recall, scream into the microphone: "THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS WRONG!!!" I won't go quite that far. But there is a very good reason why our founding fathers set up a representative form of government, rather than a basic majority-rule-democracy. Human nature is such that there is a tendency to be led, Pied Piper style, by the stirring of our emotions.

That spell can be broken by the vigorous use of the gray matter within our skulls.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Our Great Heathen Nation?

Killings, beatings, rapings ... why? What is back of these perilous times we live in? And please don't think I'm making light of the gravity of life in our modern, "civilized" nation. I'm not.

Here is what I do find funny. Check out this angry letter-to-the-editor writer who has it all figured out. The simple solution:

"The nation that forgets God shall not prosper."

Are people who think that way for real? Where I and that author live, you can hardly travel a mile in any direction without passing a church. The overwhelming majority of Americans are believers in God. Our leaders? We have had some of the most outspoken of Christians sitting in the White House during the past three decades. Forget God? The Christian God of the Bible? No Way. The nation hasn't forgotten God.

Whatever one may say about the current state of our society, it is what it is in a nation full of Christians and Christian leaders. That evil Supreme Court that allegedly keeps doing its best to boot God out of government is, believe it or not, completely made up of Christians. I'm not aware of any infidels that ever sat on the Supreme Bench.

Again, dear Christian friend, we have all these problems in our God-intoxicated nation.

Perhaps it's time to try another approach. How about more education, less superstition, and a reasoned, less hysterical, effort to understand and deal with the problems we face?

Monday, November 2, 2009

The Problem With Certainty


The cause of so much strife in life is stubborn dogmatism.

A former coworker of mine, a dogmatic skeptic, once boasted to me: "I believe only what I can see, feel, hear, or taste." "Do you not believe in flatulence?", I asked. "Well, or smell," he quickly replied. The five senses, in other words. I told him I still could sneak one by him, and it would be as real as a punch to his nose would be. A silent, non-odiferous flatus would be real, even though beyond my friend's senses (but not mine, of course).

John Lennon is quoted as saying:

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Ah, such is life.

There will be disagreement as long as humans have the freedom to think. Imagination is the mother of art. And art, according to Kahil Gibran, "is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."

Something Stephen Jay Gould wrote on pages 169 and 170 of his book Rocks Of Ages strikes a chord with me:

We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have distinctive ways of knowing, valid in their proper domains. No single way can hold all the answers in our wondrously complex world.

The "defenders of truth" overlook the power of myth, mirthfully oblivious to the fact they are only defending their own mythology. The "defenders" need more humility and more imagination and less arrogance.
 
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