understanding history, understanding humans
It has been the feminine role through the centuries to strengthen the man, build him up, and hold him to his commitment. Families, mother, father and children have been the NORM for centuries and it is really good. Even if we WERE animals, it makes a lot of natural sense.
More recently, people don’t even seem to be able to accept what sex they were born with! Society is hurtling itself to its own self-destruction, can’t you see?
I believe, and I don’t care what your religion actually is, I believe that society (under attack and active seduction by Satan), is being led to reject God.
(Hearttoheartwithjesus)
You only need to scrape the surface of right-wing Christian pro-life movement to reveal the deep levels of ignorance that allow them to accept a one-dimensional picture of the history of human societies. Their point of reference is almost exclusively English-speaking North America or Europe; their historical framework extends back no more than two generations; and their lens is wonky, to say the least.
Let’s examine the claims above.
I must agree that it’s been the feminine role in previous centuries to tend towards an unavoidable state of pregnancy and lactation until an early death. This is the animal role we had little say in – until the development of reliable birth control options. But that doesn’t make it a desirable state for every woman, any more than other natural features of our animal bodies: such as hair that grows to the ground if we don’t cut it or injuries that get infected if we don’t treat them.
If Christians who made these arguments shunned all forms of human progress to live their natural roles in caves and hand-made huts, I would have more sympathy for the integrity of their argument. But to suggest that women should ‘naturally’ support men and dedicate their lives to having children, while they type on their computer, drive cars and don’t even grow their own food, shows a complete disconnect from what makes natural sense. Embrace disease and let it kill you if you want to live your perceived ‘god’s plan’ on this kind of non-interventionist level.
And let’s not imagine for one minute that mere ‘male companion’ was the unavoidable role of all women before the advent of modern birth control options. You only need to look at lives such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great or Marie Curie to see what was achieved with or without children. For Christians, early leaders like Junia or Pheobe let us know what role those most connected with Jesus envisaged for all people – and these were not allocated based on genitals.
But it’s this overwhelmingly short-sighted sense of hurtling to self-destruction that has been a feature of religious panic throughout history. In reality, human societies have housed much the same cross-section of human expression and living arrangements since records began. This laughable idea that humans have been living in monogamous, rigidly heterosexual relationships with fixed forms of gender expression until recently could only be accepted by the most ignorant among us, who can’t see beyond our own idealised society and the last century.
We’re not hurtling to self-destruction, but coming to a point where many of us are willing to listen to other people who don’t conform to the majority stereotype, many of us are willing to learn about the breadth of natural human expression with open minds, and many of us are determined to change society so that we finally recognise equal rights for all people. Kind of what it says in some parts of the Bible.
Where I do agree with the blogger above, where I hope she is right, is where she concludes that human society is finally rejecting gods. Although we differ on perceived conduit: while she imagines an invisible evil entity corrupting a perfect plan for female servitude, I can clearly see that the growth of human knowledge and education has finally helped us reach the point where we don’t need to rely on primitive superstitions to understand our place in the universe, or the roles we might take on in life.
I have a hard enough time living up to my own moral code, and trying to tell other people that they must live up to a code I don’t follow myself is less than charitable! To be honest, I am the biggest hypocrite I know. In other words, I have more than enough to deal with trying to change myself and trying to change others is a waste of time.
At the end of our lives, however long that may be, I hope that we both might be able to say “I am happy with the life I chose and the path I took to get there.” What more is there than that?
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I know what you mean. But there’s something about the whole ‘when good people do nothing’ that nags most of us. And the problem with that is that we all often think we’re on the side of ‘good’ – which obviously isn’t possible. It’s useful to have conversations with others to test just how much of what we believe is assumed understanding that comes from cultural programming, and how much is based on our best understanding of actual facts.
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“Their point of reference is almost exclusively English-speaking North America or Europe; their historical framework extends back no more than two generations”
Amen, though I’d say this describes about 95% of Americans of all political and religious backgrounds.
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Yes, and you’re one of them. A couple of years in religious institution in Italy doesn’t count as exposure to or understanding of the outside world, dp. 😛
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Of itself, no, of course not.
I suspect you are just teasing but I hope you do not normally dismiss people who disagree with you as being somehow defective in their experience or education.
That would be… narrow.
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Great post, violetwisp! I especially agree with the final paragraph – this reliance on invisible entities and the baggage carried because of said entities must end; it’s our only hope for a progressive society. People like yourself must keep writing! 🙂
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Don’t encourage her too much! She might start thinking The Gingers are equal citizens 😀
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You do realize I’m a ginger too, don’t you Mr. M? 🙂
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Ooooooooh noooooooooooooooooooooooo! I knew it! You’re trying to take over the world. Let me tweet Trump to warn him 😀
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Why would you tweet him? He’s half Scottish – a ginger carrier.
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Yay, ginger power!
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Atheists and other varieties of leftists love to invoke science though they despise it.
And these same people insist on rewriting history because they find the truth so abhorrent.
The justification for the Great Genocide of the Unborn is that the poor, powerless, defenseless victim doesn’t look like the leftist, doesn’t think like the leftist, doesn’t have the same awareness as the leftist.
Such reasoning is behind all the great genocides of history.
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Which looks more like you, SOM? The Syrian refugee, or the twelve week foetus?
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Clare,
Does the unborn child deserve to die because I look more like a Syrian refugee?
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Does the Syrian refugee deserve to die because she has learned to talk?
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Clare,
Violet thinks so.
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And here comes SOM to prove my point.
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Violet,
I am simply citing your own reasoning.
That means you argued with yourself and lost.
And that you disprove your own point.
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Your ‘reasoning’ is that a potential human being is of greater importance than a fully developed human being. Your ‘reasoning’ is that women don’t understand their own bodies or basic scientific facts. Your ‘reasoning’ is that an invisible superbeing magically beams awareness into a developing organism that we know for a fact cannot think or feel, and is only growing because two people had sex at a random point in time. Your ‘reasoning’ isn’t actually reasoning SOM but the mindless ramblings best kept silent.
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I believe SoM’s assertions are referred to as ‘alternate facts’.
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Or just SOM’s games.
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Exellent post. My favourite topic and my main headache.
To be honest, most people have a very narrow understanding of history. It however seems the types most attracted to right wing black and white assortment of the world around them, are often the most ill educated about history. I mean look at them, the pro-lifer, the misogynist, the neo-nazi, the racist, the Islamist terrorist, or the dude who believes in capitalism as some sort of beneficial force and is unable to see it is just a nother name for greed. They all share a poor, biased and frankly rather silly view on history and surprice, surprice, almost all the same core values, without even being able to recognize as much. Why?
I think the poor understanding of history is one of the main reasons that lead them there. However, the other problem wich seems to put them in the spot is their lack of using critical thinking. Even intelligent people who lack these two are prone to all sorts of misconceptions, like fascism, religiosity, or a combination of those. Such misconceptions are not a hindrance in the financial world and in politics they even prove to be a benefit, because so many others percieve the world in equally narrow scope.
So, the question is, how could we educate any of these people, when they have internalized these harmfull values as part of their identiteis and refuse to learn any critical thinking skills, so they could actually evalate their values themselves?
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In our education systems, we generally learn history as a series of disconnected facts that are used to gauge how intelligent we are. Wouldn’t it be much more sensible to help children understand the history of human development, how we got where we are?
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