This is SO interesting. THe Bible IS full of sex and violence, its true...but I think my sensibility is more offended by the authoritarian way in which this book seems to manage these issues. I dunno.
Religion is supposed to be authoritarian, isn't it? I mean Western, Bible (or Koran) based religion.
It doesn't seem like my way. But then there's probably something wrong with me. In fact I know there is. But I don't see that I could cure it by being more authoritarian.
The grotesque thing is that these new "teen-oriented" articles seem to be written on the level of the usual patronizing "educational" crap that I remember encountering back in junior high. Any kid who isn't a complete idiot recognizes this rubbish immediately and writes it off. To insert such material into the Bible degrades the whole book by association. I'm not even a Christian (of the conventional type, anyway) and I find this highly offensive.
"Having seven daughters myself, I am deeply grieved that parents would encourage their young daughters to read such graphic narratives. I would not give this 'Bible' to my 20-year-old virgin daughter to read – much less a 13-year-old. Why should she have images of oral sex, lesbianism and rape in her mind?"
All this regarding a book that just calmly accepts the two-day gang-rape of Lot by his daughters!
I'm rather ambivalent about the articles, I guess. It seems President Clinton re-arranged America's sexual map by putting oral sex on the congnitive map of our Jr. High-schoolers, and now we deal with the consequences. If my teenage daughter read a brief narrative that made her consider the issue in a moral mode--consider it at a level that she might be unwilling to hear from me at the time--then I suppose it's actually all to the good, even if I'd prefer that she live in a world where she didn't have to ask herself questions about such topics quite yet. I would assume that the parent stay an active conversation-partner to the child and not abdicate all responsibility to the Bible or these introductions, and I think that being willing (and able!) to talk about sexuality in a de-mystified, human, and even entertaining way would go a long way to providing the kind of guidance that augments and authenticates such a piece as this narrative. Well, I guess I'm not so ambivalent after all....
You know, I feel myself to be in agreement with you. Whatever my daughter picked up from CCD was in an entirely different world from the one she would come to in the Bronx High School of Science, or even knew at the Computer School at IS 44. And of course there was no way she could talk about anything important with us.
The comparative innocence in which I grew up was not as bad as we sometimes assume.
(One fellow I knew in college admitted he was so innocent he thought a concubine was some sort of farme machine.)
:-) There you go. I can only hope that sexual language is so casual and familiar that the kids of the next generation with throw themselves into what's still forbidden and taboo: theology!
I do know that there was a girl thing at Bronx Science that they weren't going to get dragged into sexual activity of any sort until they were good and ready, and anybody who didn't like it could go f*ck himself. I get the impression that this was not a majority position, but a pretty substantial subculture, and not particularly religious. The promiscuity that the generation just after mine took for granted is out, and it's not just an AIDS thing. The Austin Powers movies make some jokes on the cultural revolution.
Is theology taboo, or just not there? Catholics in particular have made religion so much an affair of the heart that one just doesn't look to it for enlightenment. And (in my opinion) the homosexualization of the clergy had brought about a certain amount of more or less deliberate obfuscation.
Eh, a bit of both (theology being taboo and 'just not there'), I'd guess. The anti-intellectual general culture of the U.S., combined with a strong affective Protestant heritage gave a ground to a cultural antipathy to theology, I suspect (if I had to guess the causes without any further research). And then, that established, you don't have to worry anymore because it's "just not there" on the cognitive map anymore.
The overarching philosophy of secularism in the U.S. has a big role in this, too, both as cause and in maintaining this intellectual status quo. A very specific constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from establishing a specific national denomination has mutated to become the cultural warrant for editing out "religion" from all facets of national life, even becoming a cultural pressure to make that an illegitimate form of speech in the public sphere. And so, bizarrely, the only way to be "open-minded" about theological matters, the culture informs us, is to be absolutely ignorant of theological discourse: one must not learn to speak precisely on the matter, one must learn not to be able to speak of it at all. That's freedom, baby!
Having been raised so sheltered in a highly right wing religious home, let me tell you, NOT KNOWING is a great, big, HUGE issue compared to knowing about sex. Maybe if I'd know more, I wouldn't have been raped 2x and escaped a third time by the age of, oh, 17.
Even at 10, even sheltered kids wonder. Not knowing makes it a damn big adventure. If sex wasn't sold as such a taboo in the US, we wouldn't have nearly so many problems with it, kid or adult.
Oh, crap--I'm so sorry to hear even that fraction of your story. And sorry that it doesn't surprise me so much, knowing the sheer statistics of what women face.
And I totally agree with you: silence has far less to do with any sort of reverence, and far more to deal with our own personal psychological and cultural fears of dealing with the immense significance of our own sexuality. But the facts of the world really require us to go beyond that discomfort, to learn what we can, and to speak freely about it for the sake of those younger who are about to inherit those burdens. I tried to be that frank with my high school students when we'd have an open theological forum and I'd take (anonymous, written) questions from them. But boy did it hurt to say to the girls (sophomores) that a quarter of them would be sexually assaulted. And to the guys that a quarter (or less, I suppose) of them would be the assaulters.
The biggest weight of, well, any emotion in all of that for me was this overwhelming sense of guilt and of being "unclean," because basically, we were made to understand that
1. If you got raped or assaulted, as a woman, it was because you provoked the man in some way. They didn't necessarily say it that bluntly, but the understanding was, if you got it, you'd asked for it.
2. That I was trash, pure and simple, because I wasn't a virgin anymore. That, coupled with an alternate compulsion to have sex because well, wasn't I already messed up and because, too, it felt good, and there wasn't much else in my life that made me feel good about anything, much less myself. (And I'm not sure that sentence even made sense, heh.)
And that's something that lingers with me, even to this day. I don't necessarily regret anything I have done for philosophical or theological reasons-- why the flying fuck would any sort of God (should S/he exist) take that much of a prurient interest in my sex life? -- but at the same time, all that lifetime of indoctrination is SO hard to fight off, and when I get depressed, it comes tumbling down to the point of me wondering why trash like myself is even allowed to live.
Meh. Victorianism and protestanism as practiced in the US have a lot to answer for, in my book.
If I ever, God forbid, have children, boy howdy will we be having the sex talk a LONG TIME before puberty ever sets in. As soon as they are old enough to start wondering about the sexual images around them, we would be talking about it. There would be no question in my kid's mind as to the "mystery" of sex -- and yes, I would give them access to birth control and condoms...along with an explanation of the responsiblity sex brings (potential parenthood, disease, etc). Not that I would want to encourage them, but believe me, your kids are having sex regardless of whether or not you teach abstinence, and I'd certain rather they KNOW than to end up getting screwed over by what they DON'T know.
why the flying fuck would any sort of God (should S/he exist) take that much of a prurient interest in my sex life?
By all means, get on your soapbox! And yes, your sentences made perfect sense.
Well, if you don't mind me saying so, as a theologian, I'd say that God pays specific attention to it because it's such a huge part of making us whole (or not) as human beings. I mean, you yourself just outlined how both the assaults you endured and the bad cultural baggage both had a profound impact on your personhood, leading to a kind of disintegration that's terribly hard to recover from. (And, by the way, I think that the existence of bad theology is more an argument for the need for good theology, not for the elimination of theology altogether: self-censorship of an entire facet of human existence--arguably the central aspect of our existence--is only going to exacerbate the disease, not cure it.) Rather than God's interest in our sexuality, specifically, being "prurient," I would characterize it as the very sort of posititve, pro-active sort of "parenting" we're trying to imagine. I doubt that I can fault God if most people in our culture (and others!) are so overwhelmed by their sexuality that they find it most easy to speak of it in simple negative or taboo language. God isn't into our sexuality, per se, but I think rather that God is interested in us: whole, healthy, and reflective of the reality of God that is Love: triune, interpersonal, and dynamic. Since we risk so much in our sexuality--since it goes so far down into our personhood--that's an area of especially concern not so much because it's "sexy" as because it's powerful. If we do sex right, we can become so much more human, and if we get it wrong, it can wound our humanity so deeply....
But see, what I'm addressing is the School of Thought in which God is basically sitting up there drooling with the prospect of bopping us over the head with a big stick (no phallic reference intended, there), if we dare to think outside of married-missionary-position-boy-girl-lights-off-only sex box, so to speak.
If it's not hurting ourselves and others, I wouldn't imagine God giving a hoot, other than to be happy for us and be happy that we have such an outlet. It's when it becomes an unhealthy obsession that I would assume he or she would start to care. I would like to think that any sort of Deity would be more concerned about the ways in which we injure ourselves (mentally, especially!), than with just purely the "Act of Sex," as tradition would have us believe.
And when it gets down to it, Self Government is practicable with and without theology. Now, if you mean theology in the sense of having a philosophy of life by which you govern your life and your actions, then I agree with you, theology in that sense is a necessity.
But if you mean theology in the sense of "God, One God, and Organized Religion," then I will have to disagree. Yes, it's helpful, I suppose, en masse to control the population, but the bottom line is that human need and indeed, MUST evolve past the point of "I don't do something because God says it's bad."
This is something I struggled with (and still do to a smaller degree) when I gave up on religion in general. If I am accountable for myself, I need to understand the choices I make, whether they are healthy or not for me or for others around me, and the impact they will have on my life and the world at large. When one steps away from the thought process of "right" and "wrong," one really has to THINK about their choices. If you don't believe that Jesus is going to magically wipe away all past transgressions and make everything bright and shiny, there comes a much larger sense of self-responsibility. (at least, there did for me!)
I can honestly (and proudly) say that I am now a much better person as an agnostic-existentialist-sort-of-pagan than I ever was a Christian.
Now, all of this is not to say that Christianity or any religion has no value - if you can reconcile a belief system with being responsible and open thought, hell, go for it. Unfortunately, most people don't, and therein lies not only the problem with organized religion, but also the reason that religion in general is losing popularity.
Oof. Actually, I'd have to disagree with your main thrust here: if Christianity is true, then the need for careful thinking on that matter--theology--necessarily follows. If it's not true, then the theology really doesn't matter at all: there's no good or evil, right or wrong, other than what we choose to make up for our own purposes and convenience. You have ended up reducing every critique on any subject that you've ever made--here or elsewhere--to nothing more than "I don't like it."
You may have taken a personal step forward in becoming an agnostic than in being a Christian, but if Christianity is actually true, then your only possible true fulfillment will be in a less- or non-deficient form of Christianity. In that case, yes, a step away from your earlier form of faith would be progress of a sort, but only temporarily. The real question is the truth question, first and foremost. And since I have to get to the library, I'll link to this response where I just responded to a film director friend on the very same question, if you're interested, rather than try to re-type it all here.
I know you don't know me from Adam, and I'm not trying to be an ass, but I do think that the anthropological/sociological take you are accepting on the nature of religion is intellectual suicide, and so I feel compelled, in courtesy, to debate your point.
"If Christianity is true, then the need for careful thinking on that matter--theology--necessarily follows. If it's not true, then the theology really doesn't matter at all: there's no good or evil, right or wrong, other than what we choose..."
Oof.
No. I think there are truths that don't depend on the truth of Catholicism. And I think St. Thomas is with me here.
I didn't think that's what I said. I was trying to make a case that theology as a merely social construct has no more value than any other statement of preference. I was trying to say, in fact, that theology is of fundamental importance as a science in the investigation of, and development of, the central truth-claims of Christianity. I hope I'm with Thomas there, too!
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 04:17 pm (UTC)Maybe I don't like it, but maybe as a parent, I'll need it? (as just one of many tools.)
It didn't bug me as much as the Message bible (I think that's the name).
I am constantly re-evalutating what is and isnt ok for kids, because they always throw me for a loop. Mine, at least.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:30 pm (UTC)It doesn't seem like my way. But then there's probably something wrong with me. In fact I know there is. But I don't see that I could cure it by being more authoritarian.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 06:34 pm (UTC)Am I the only that found this creepy-sounding?
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:25 pm (UTC)And I don't mean transvestite.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:51 pm (UTC)Actually I have seen matrimonial ads in India Abroad that mention this as a selling point.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:02 pm (UTC)It's somewhere in Leviticus.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:07 pm (UTC)I'm rather ambivalent about the articles, I guess. It seems President Clinton re-arranged America's sexual map by putting oral sex on the congnitive map of our Jr. High-schoolers, and now we deal with the consequences. If my teenage daughter read a brief narrative that made her consider the issue in a moral mode--consider it at a level that she might be unwilling to hear from me at the time--then I suppose it's actually all to the good, even if I'd prefer that she live in a world where she didn't have to ask herself questions about such topics quite yet. I would assume that the parent stay an active conversation-partner to the child and not abdicate all responsibility to the Bible or these introductions, and I think that being willing (and able!) to talk about sexuality in a de-mystified, human, and even entertaining way would go a long way to providing the kind of guidance that augments and authenticates such a piece as this narrative. Well, I guess I'm not so ambivalent after all....
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:22 pm (UTC)The comparative innocence in which I grew up was not as bad as we sometimes assume.
(One fellow I knew in college admitted he was so innocent he thought a concubine was some sort of farme machine.)
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 08:37 pm (UTC)Is theology taboo, or just not there? Catholics in particular have made religion so much an affair of the heart that one just doesn't look to it for enlightenment. And (in my opinion) the homosexualization of the clergy had brought about a certain amount of more or less deliberate obfuscation.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 08:48 pm (UTC)The overarching philosophy of secularism in the U.S. has a big role in this, too, both as cause and in maintaining this intellectual status quo. A very specific constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from establishing a specific national denomination has mutated to become the cultural warrant for editing out "religion" from all facets of national life, even becoming a cultural pressure to make that an illegitimate form of speech in the public sphere. And so, bizarrely, the only way to be "open-minded" about theological matters, the culture informs us, is to be absolutely ignorant of theological discourse: one must not learn to speak precisely on the matter, one must learn not to be able to speak of it at all. That's freedom, baby!
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 08:19 pm (UTC)Even at 10, even sheltered kids wonder. Not knowing makes it a damn big adventure. If sex wasn't sold as such a taboo in the US, we wouldn't have nearly so many problems with it, kid or adult.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 08:32 pm (UTC)And I totally agree with you: silence has far less to do with any sort of reverence, and far more to deal with our own personal psychological and cultural fears of dealing with the immense significance of our own sexuality. But the facts of the world really require us to go beyond that discomfort, to learn what we can, and to speak freely about it for the sake of those younger who are about to inherit those burdens. I tried to be that frank with my high school students when we'd have an open theological forum and I'd take (anonymous, written) questions from them. But boy did it hurt to say to the girls (sophomores) that a quarter of them would be sexually assaulted. And to the guys that a quarter (or less, I suppose) of them would be the assaulters.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 08:41 pm (UTC)1. If you got raped or assaulted, as a woman, it was because you provoked the man in some way. They didn't necessarily say it that bluntly, but the understanding was, if you got it, you'd asked for it.
2. That I was trash, pure and simple, because I wasn't a virgin anymore. That, coupled with an alternate compulsion to have sex because well, wasn't I already messed up and because, too, it felt good, and there wasn't much else in my life that made me feel good about anything, much less myself. (And I'm not sure that sentence even made sense, heh.)
And that's something that lingers with me, even to this day. I don't necessarily regret anything I have done for philosophical or theological reasons-- why the flying fuck would any sort of God (should S/he exist) take that much of a prurient interest in my sex life? -- but at the same time, all that lifetime of indoctrination is SO hard to fight off, and when I get depressed, it comes tumbling down to the point of me wondering why trash like myself is even allowed to live.
Meh. Victorianism and protestanism as practiced in the US have a lot to answer for, in my book.
If I ever, God forbid, have children, boy howdy will we be having the sex talk a LONG TIME before puberty ever sets in. As soon as they are old enough to start wondering about the sexual images around them, we would be talking about it. There would be no question in my kid's mind as to the "mystery" of sex -- and yes, I would give them access to birth control and condoms...along with an explanation of the responsiblity sex brings (potential parenthood, disease, etc). Not that I would want to encourage them, but believe me, your kids are having sex regardless of whether or not you teach abstinence, and I'd certain rather they KNOW than to end up getting screwed over by what they DON'T know.
{/sermon} Sorry...got on a soap box there...
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 09:06 pm (UTC)By all means, get on your soapbox! And yes, your sentences made perfect sense.
Well, if you don't mind me saying so, as a theologian, I'd say that God pays specific attention to it because it's such a huge part of making us whole (or not) as human beings. I mean, you yourself just outlined how both the assaults you endured and the bad cultural baggage both had a profound impact on your personhood, leading to a kind of disintegration that's terribly hard to recover from. (And, by the way, I think that the existence of bad theology is more an argument for the need for good theology, not for the elimination of theology altogether: self-censorship of an entire facet of human existence--arguably the central aspect of our existence--is only going to exacerbate the disease, not cure it.) Rather than God's interest in our sexuality, specifically, being "prurient," I would characterize it as the very sort of posititve, pro-active sort of "parenting" we're trying to imagine. I doubt that I can fault God if most people in our culture (and others!) are so overwhelmed by their sexuality that they find it most easy to speak of it in simple negative or taboo language. God isn't into our sexuality, per se, but I think rather that God is interested in us: whole, healthy, and reflective of the reality of God that is Love: triune, interpersonal, and dynamic. Since we risk so much in our sexuality--since it goes so far down into our personhood--that's an area of especially concern not so much because it's "sexy" as because it's powerful. If we do sex right, we can become so much more human, and if we get it wrong, it can wound our humanity so deeply....
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 09:29 pm (UTC)If it's not hurting ourselves and others, I wouldn't imagine God giving a hoot, other than to be happy for us and be happy that we have such an outlet. It's when it becomes an unhealthy obsession that I would assume he or she would start to care. I would like to think that any sort of Deity would be more concerned about the ways in which we injure ourselves (mentally, especially!), than with just purely the "Act of Sex," as tradition would have us believe.
And when it gets down to it, Self Government is practicable with and without theology. Now, if you mean theology in the sense of having a philosophy of life by which you govern your life and your actions, then I agree with you, theology in that sense is a necessity.
But if you mean theology in the sense of "God, One God, and Organized Religion," then I will have to disagree. Yes, it's helpful, I suppose, en masse to control the population, but the bottom line is that human need and indeed, MUST evolve past the point of "I don't do something because God says it's bad."
This is something I struggled with (and still do to a smaller degree) when I gave up on religion in general. If I am accountable for myself, I need to understand the choices I make, whether they are healthy or not for me or for others around me, and the impact they will have on my life and the world at large. When one steps away from the thought process of "right" and "wrong," one really has to THINK about their choices. If you don't believe that Jesus is going to magically wipe away all past transgressions and make everything bright and shiny, there comes a much larger sense of self-responsibility. (at least, there did for me!)
I can honestly (and proudly) say that I am now a much better person as an agnostic-existentialist-sort-of-pagan than I ever was a Christian.
Now, all of this is not to say that Christianity or any religion has no value - if you can reconcile a belief system with being responsible and open thought, hell, go for it. Unfortunately, most people don't, and therein lies not only the problem with organized religion, but also the reason that religion in general is losing popularity.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 10:37 pm (UTC)You may have taken a personal step forward in becoming an agnostic than in being a Christian, but if Christianity is actually true, then your only possible true fulfillment will be in a less- or non-deficient form of Christianity. In that case, yes, a step away from your earlier form of faith would be progress of a sort, but only temporarily. The real question is the truth question, first and foremost. And since I have to get to the library, I'll link to this response where I just responded to a film director friend on the very same question, if you're interested, rather than try to re-type it all here.
I know you don't know me from Adam, and I'm not trying to be an ass, but I do think that the anthropological/sociological take you are accepting on the nature of religion is intellectual suicide, and so I feel compelled, in courtesy, to debate your point.
Mike
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 10:53 pm (UTC)Oof.
No. I think there are truths that don't depend on the truth of Catholicism. And I think St. Thomas is with me here.
Have you been overdosing on Kierkegaard?
no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-22 09:06 pm (UTC)