(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!
