We are all unwittingly participants in our own oppression. It is the easy way out. That’s why it has taken so long for women to break their chains, and so too slaves of other kinds. When 90% of the day light is taken up with toil to survive, thinking about your lot takes a back seat to your activity.
We are all born into an artificial world of ideological relationships. In a world with no feminists, patriarchy is the “natural” norm - or so it appears. It takes an individual of great strength to stand alone at first against the tide of inertia and tradition. Support and help are needed to change things. This is a gradual process.
lev what are you talking about…can you help here
Read carefully. I am responding to the point made by Kris, “if women did not agree with patriarchy, it would not have happened.”.
Let me know anything you don’t understand.
Right. Getting raped is the girl’s fault for wearing that provocative school uniform on a public bus.
But only the last 100 or years have brains been ascendant - sporadically, in select areas, and the blow-back is fearsome - over brawn. Property makes the law… and armed brawn enforces it. When the priests adds that God also hates the unclean, treacherous, manipulative creatures, women become fair game in all arenas of life. After all, it’s in the Good Book.
What was the message? There was a lot of tedious nonsense featuring Jesus’s diapers and miracles. I didn’t get much beyond that.
I am. Okay, it took me until the age of twelve to question it seriously and another year to reject it utterly. But more research, in or out of depth, is unlikely to change my mind.
Psalms are okay, and Ecclesiastes, though neither is such great literature as it’s hyped up to be. Breasts like sheep … c’mon, Sol!
Rape can be the female’s fault. Interesting that you chose a school girl in a uniform as example as it is one that rarely occurs. What made you choose that scenario?
You choose to focus on the horrible in the book and take it out of context, it is quite a normal uneducated reaction. The mind focuses on a bad thing while ignoring the good around it and will in many cases distort the good into bad because it is connected to bad. Until you learn to control emotions you cannot understand. And yes I know you will have an insulting retort for me. But, since I mention that you may strive to make an intellectual reply. I wait.
It’s a notorious fantasy of dirty old men - aka patriarchs. The same type who, if they can con a sect into making them head preacher, take thirteen-year-old brides.
In context, it sounds a lot worse. Getting ‘educated’ about the bible generally consists of listening to a spin-doctor try to turn it into something else. I’ve seen so many of those pathetic under-thumpers whose bibles had passages underlined, which had been ‘explained’ to them.
Bible-defenders always say this. Oddly, however, they don’t offer specific examples of a valuable story or praiseworthy event - while the detractors are never short of examples of brutal actions and un-christian values. In fact, if you exclude the NT, there is very little redeeming content. (Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Psalms - any others?) Or, I suppose you could toss the OT and just keep the skinny book - it would at least be easier to defend on moral grounds. That’s what the RCC did.
Follow-up question: If you were to write a book of spiritual uplift for the masses, would you wrap a thin layer of good advice around great blobs of horrific content, so that the ‘uneducated’ mind would naturally distort the good into bad because it was connected to bad? It that a practical way to package a holy message?
Naw. Whatever is good in there is not unique or exclusive to the bible: the advice to treat one another decently, to respect your parents, to not steal your neighbour’s wife, servants and livestock is in every code of ethics from the beginning of the world. It’s an okay book. It re-tells the [not totally objective] story of one nomadic herding tribe, and how it eventually settled and availed itself of a territory - by the same means and methods that every other nation used at the time. The atrocities are not exclusive or unique, either. The Roman editorial board included some local literature, songs, legends, tall tales and folk-tales - and a whole lot of haranguing by preachers as to how, whatever has turned out well was God’s doing and everything that’s going wrong is because the people aren’t pious enough. The usual. Then they tacked on four versions of the Jesus story - which has a different cultural base from the OT stories: you can trace the influence of Greek and Roman occupations. Why they included Revelation, I don’t quite understand (the sensation value, I’d guess); Paul’s tedious self-important ramblings were necessary to root the thing in contemporary Roman society. That did more harm to Europe than all the OT patriarchs put together, because it carried local authority.
I hope that’s unemotional enough.
When raising a child would you only praise it never warn or tell it about bad , would you let it walk into the world with only praise and ego?
I once was offered a temporary teaching post in a Catholic School to last 3 months.
The year five class (age 9-10 years) had the reputation of being one of the most difficult and unruly classes to have moved through the school. Their teacher having suffered them for 4 months already had been taken sick with tummy problems. This turned out to be stomach cancer. Despite their youth, they were mostly self absorbed, arrogant, spoilt brats.
Don’t get me wrong - l Iove kids, especially that age.
It was sports afternoon and I spent a frustrating time trying to get them to participate in a series of ball games, which were won by simple acts of co-operation, such as passing to alternate members in turn. This involved communicating with classmates.
I’d never seen such a fucking shambles before. And in moments the entire class was bickering and shouting at each other. After patient attempts to explain what they needed to do; time and again they failed miserably to co-operate.
I sent them all in early to change and do quiet reading.
I got them all to put down their books, and explained in detail how the had failed all the tasks. I told them how important co-operation was in school and in later life, and that they had “failed” to make any serious efforts.
There were puzzled looks and one or two asked me what I meant when I said they had “failed”. I explained again. But no - it was not that they did not understand what I was saying; it was the case that they did not know the meaning of the word “FAIL”
Seriously I thought they were taking the piss, really. But several of them simply had not heard the word 'fail", and needed to explain how it applied to a task they had been asked to do.
So much for Catholic school! The school had failed them. None has been allowed to fail to such a degree that they had no idea of failure and thought everything they decided to do was right.
This is not unusual. In post-16 classes in Further Ed. it is impossible to fail and exam. The mark kids get is NYP (Not Yet Passed).
Whilst I can understand protecting some children from the stigma of continual failure, there has to be a limit to this cushion.
How does this relate to the bible? God expects to be praised for drowning all the animals and children.
I certainly would not tell them: “The most powerful, wise and loving being in the entire universe, the father of us all, liked to torture people in the olden days, but you shouldn’t do that. He approved of slavery, genocide and rape, but you shouldn’t do those things. He condemns people to eternal torment for uttering his name inappropriately, but hew wants you to forgive whoever’s done you wrong. In fact, you know what kids? Just read everything God did in the Bible, and never behave like that!”
That might confuse them. So what I do is not teach them the bible at all, just good moral conduct.
“For those who don’t listen to me, very, very bad things ARE going to happen.” - OT
“For those who DO listen to me, there is legitimate hope for very good things to happen.” - NT
Is it really all that complicated?
No it isn’t complicated. The Religious texts were written for adult children that had never followed before. Violent, ignorant masses of adult children. You do not say pretty please and act all sweet and cutesy in order to gain control. You scare the hell out of them. The humans of that time were not remotely like us. To look at the words written , you must put these things in to perspective.
And also for those who do listen. Plus innocent bystanders. The people I choose have to go around indiscriminately smiting other people, and their dependents are in constant danger. The people I dislike just get wiped out overnight, with their servants and any wayfarers that happen to be in town. Infant and virgins are collateral damage.
But you have to die to find out. But you’re not allowed to kill yourself to escape a life no matter how bad. And you’d better not enjoy life. So, if you guess wrong about which parts of my contradictory messages you should listen to, you’re either going to hell forever or going nowhere after you wasted a life trying to figure out what I want.
No it’s quite simple: Suckers!!
Nonsense. You’re just making that up.
That is your own BS. You cannot determine innocence nor who listened to what.
Again, your own BS.
Never followed what? Never had laws? Never had kings? Never had priests? Never had sacred texts carved on stones?
Do more research!
Shock and awe. Obviously, nobody would do that in the 21st century.
The humans of that time were not remotely like us
How were they different? What did they do that nobody in the world is doing today? (on a larger scale)
But then, if they were so different, why should \we still consider stories, commandments and admonitions written for those ignorant, immature barbarians to have any relevance for civilized, educated, mature us?
That would be true of Gilgamesh, Rig-Veda, Kokin Watashu and Mein Kampf. And I ask you again: How is that sacred?
Have you guys actually read the holy book?
I can, so, determine that the zebras were not guilty of whatever fornications and ungodlinesses Jehovah was mad at the Mesopotamians for. I can, so, determine that the newborn Egyptian babies had no part in the decree, 30 years earlier, to cull the Jewish ghetto’s baby boys. And I can’t imagine all the children, dogs, chickens, oxen and mules of Sodom were homosexual.
The way I heard it, Job did listen and a whole lot of bad things happened to him. When he asked why, God said, “Because I can.”
All my BS is easily finadable in your book. Yours, not so much.
But, whatever.
You worship what you can identify with.
You don’t seem to be. You aren’t citing any of them, or responding to any of their arguments, or giving them anything to think about.
What exactly did you expect your reaction to accomplish? You seem to be mad about some people you don’t know interpreting a book you’ve never read in a way that you don’t like for unspecified reasons. Can’t you do any better?
I am not angry…I just don’t believe in hocus-pocus…
maybe you could do better …
We’re just asking to see the baby in all that bathwater.