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Bible’s purpose

Do you believe that the Bible was, in part, written to exert control over women?

PaganMomma 4 Feb 25
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31 comments (26 - 31)

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Good basic scrips for some very bad movies... little else.

Tomas Level 7 Feb 25, 2018
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The bible was written for to control people's minds, there is alot of quote spooky language in there..., I find it more interesting that large parts were omitted from it

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I have come to think of the bible as a guide to overall success in society.

I can't deny a misogynistic bent (what I KNOW of the bible, having read snippets but not the whole text). We could discuss the history of that movement and I think we'd run into quite a few surprises. I don't know, I haven't studied it, I can only conjecture.

That said, I like to ask specific questions of 'the book' or of religion and ponder why?

Example: why Kosher? I know, Judaism but the roots of christianity are in judaism as it was the precedent religion.

Imagine you live in a small village of 20-30 families and you are among the religious leaders of the community. You witness 5 families that regularly eat pork. Of those families, 3 habitually have deaths, 2 do not. Goat and beef do not have this problem and are plentiful in your village. Which is easier? Teaching the preparation practices of the 2 families that are not suffering (and you aren't even sure WHAT they are doing right) or just saying "god has spoken and decided thou shalt not eat pork, it is not kosher!" You'd do the latter as it is easier. As your knowledge is refined you come up with the idea of 2 spaces for preparing foods, so, "kosher cooking" is born, etc.

So, WHY would the bible be misogynistic? I can't answer that. I like to think that far enough back, with the exception of just before and after birth and likely for the first year of life, women were just as much hunter and gatherer as men were. Ie: i can see where a man might excel at gathering and not be interested in hunting and a similar mix up for a woman in such a society. However, we can't get passed her getting pregnant. Trust me, if I could've done so for my wife and I, I would've!

Ok, seriously, that is one function that we can't get around. Further, we can't get around the first 6 months to a year of a persons life needing critical attention, especially in a nomadic hunter/gatherer existence. To whit: did women hunt with their men? Odds on yes (they are finding graves that suggest women were warriors too and we have other historical evidence of this).

Did men rear children in the early months of life? Odds on no way in hell. Why? It's not that none of the men wouldn't gladly have done so, nor that any of the women wouldn't have been better suited to going out and hunting, it's that men can't breast feed and there weren't corner markets with formula until rather recently. Could they have communalised the caring? Yeah, some of the women could've been dedicated wet nurses and taken care of most, if not all, of the youngest. Odds on this was done too.

Why go there? Back to the bible, it would reflect the desires of the men writing it to tell it like they saw it. It would've acknowledged that men just can't do certain things that women can. To put a nice bent on this, they would've tried to make it seem like it was ok to be that way. Odds on they realized that not all of what they wrote was 'gospel' or even true, but they were aiming for a more successful community to protect them from other hostile communities. Much like the idea of food being 'kosher' so that more of their people survive and thrive than in the neighboring, hostile, communities. And a strong community protects the priests from the hostile neighbors by dint of said priests hiding in amongst the women and children (I know, some priests were warrior priests but my reading suggests they were the minority).

Just my attempt at a take on this.

Does this make misogyny in the bible right? No way! It's just an attempt to understand the thinking and the times that this was written.

To me the real question is: why haven't we updated the bible with a wee touch of reality? Go ahead and keep the part about the myths, god and what not, but get rid of the stupid baggage that we have enough real data to say 'sorry, no way' to. Such as the misogyny. Did it happen back then? Sure, but it doesn't need to be propagated today!

0

Definitely. And establish a broader hierarchy.

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No need to question... just look at the results and come up with a conclusion.

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Of course it was. In the King James version, every reference to "woman as prophet" was changed to "woman as servant". ALL religion is inherently misogynistic. The bible is better used as a doorstop.

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