[Vision2020] submission

[Andreas Schou]

On 6/20/06, Michael <metzler at moscow.com> wrote:
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> ACS writes:
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> The books of the BIble were written over a span of over 1500 years, in
> Hebrew and Aramaic, under radicaly different forms of government, and
> reflect radically different understandings of the nature of God.
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> Asking what the "true" answer to "what does  the Bible say about X?"
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> is, to me, like querying any selection of documents written on one topic
> over 1500 years about what the "true" nature of the topic is.
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> Me:
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> I can understand your hesitancy.  However, Keely and I have been speaking of
> primarily a Pauline view of submission, and we have gone no further than the
> teachings of Jesus and Peter from there.  We have also been focusing in on
> Christian Orthodoxy, which is typically granted in academia as providing a
> singular, broad tradition—a tradition that embraces the teaching of the New
> Testament.  So I still think that we can debate on what the New Testament
> and Christian Tradition's general understanding is on this topic.  And I
> still think that if the kind of submission I'm speaking of (which we haven't
> fully nailed yet) is a priori immoral for you, what you have is a good
> argument against the truth of Christianity.

The truth of Chrisitanity and the applicability of the ethics of
Christianity are different issues. Truth is not beauty is not
goodness.

> Further, the social analysis of the pursuer/pursued construct can be
> discussed independent of the Christian tradition or scripture.  This is even
> worthy of a discussion involving secular anthropology, cognitive science,
> and biology.

This stands the risk of degenerating into a discussion about why I
don't want to get into a discussion, but, on this count: not really.
But I need kind of a long time to describe why:

First of all, there are no matriarchies. There never have been, and,
most likely, never will be. In the 1960s, there was some belief by
feminist anthropologists that maybe there were, but we'd just missed
them, but since then, even the feminists have realized that if they're
looking for their ideal society, they need to start looking to the
future, rather than the past. The reason for this is fairly
complicated.

In the smallest-scale societies, like the !Kung of South Africa,
aboriginal tribes in Australia, and band-scale Inuit, male-female
relationships are generally fairly egalitarian.  The reason for this
is fairly simple: caloric inputs are fixed (i.e., bands don't
cultivate crops) and the society is highly granular. This has two
consequences: the number of children which can be had without
depleting the local environment is fied, and that cooperation is
absolutely necessary. Losing the cooperation of one of your family
members means you might not eat. Everyone in the group has a high
stake in cooperation, and potential veto power over the actions of the
group.

Larger-scale societies -- any society that does cultivate a crop or
herd animal -- have variable caloric inputs and lower granularity. The
easiest way to control more labor, and thus more status and wealth, is
to have more children. This has two effects: makes women dependent for
several months out of their pregnancy and effectively chains them to
their own wombs as the engine of the economy.

In the agricultural economy, human labor was basically fungible: any
human could replace any other human doing basically any job, so long
as that other human wasn't pregnant or otherwise incapacitated.
Producing children was just producing new units of labor, identical to
those that came before.

We are essentially in a post-agrucultural economy, where feeding the
population is no longer a significant portion of our labor. Virtually
every job, and basic citizenship, requires a committment of resources,
and there is now an *inverse* correlation between number of children
and economic output. Plus, we have wide-spread birth control, so the
number of children in a family is a conscious choice, not a happy
accident.

So, the above exists, and it describes the "natural state" for human
cultures, but that description is not prescriptive. Unlike the
Christian model, where nature and ethics were dipped from a common
well, I and most secularists believe that the two have nothing to do
with each other. What is "natural" is not what is "good," and what is
"good" may well be "unnatural."

I can discuss one or the other, but I don't believe one *is* the other.

-- ACS