Posts Tagged ‘christianity’
are monogamy and the nuclear family natural or conventional? Conundrums…
The human species is monogamous – isn’t it? Isn’t the bonding of a male and a female to produce a large or small brood the typical mode of human being? And yet our closest living relatives aren’t monogamous, and as to our more recent ancestors and their relatives – who knows?
A couple of years ago I read Joseph Henrich’s fascinating book The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous – a serious ethnographic work in spite of the title. So, ‘WEIRD’ stands for the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic regions of the world, so just think about whether your region fits the pattern. I have to admit, my region does, though the ‘particularly prosperous’ bit makes me feel like a bit of a failure.
But it’s the ‘psychologically peculiar’ stuff that most interests me. On page 156 of his book Henrich presents data from ‘the Ethnographic Atlas, an anthropological database of over 1200 societies (ethnolinguistic groups) that captures life prior to industrialisation.’ He doesn’t date ‘industrialisation’, but let’s say prior to the eighteenth century. He describes five kinship traits typical of WEIRD societies, and the degree to which these traits existed in earlier times.
- Bilateral descent – relatedness is traced (roughly) equally through both parents – 28%
- Little or no marriage to cousins or other relatives – 25%
- Monogamous marriage – people are permitted to have only one spouse at a time – 15%
- Nuclear families – domestic life is organised around married couples and their children – 8%
- Neolocal residence – newly married couples set up a separate household – 5%
It’s important to take these findings in, as we tend to consider current norms as more or less eternal. And it would be impossible for me to summarise Henrich’s analysis in his 500+ page book, but one factor that forcibly struck me was the impact of the Church (as the Catholic Church was known since its inception in the fourth century CE until the Reformation in the sixteenth century) in laying the foundations of Western European WEIRDness, and that of its colonies in the Americas and here in Australia. Here’s how Henrich puts it:
… between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intensive kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church – hereinafter the Western Church or just the Church. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs [aka friendships] rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations.
So, monogamous male-female relations and nuclear families were pushed by the Church quite relentlessly for centuries, and this has had a massive impact, which most people, including myself, have had little awareness of. Henrich and his team (I’m assuming he had a whole team working on this massive project) produced a summary of the changes that have occurred from the fourth century onwards, mostly at the behest of the Church. He calls it the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). I’m going to copy the whole thing out here, if only for my own sake, because it’s quite mind-bending, and some of the most fascinating historical material I’ve ever read: They are ‘prohibitions and declarations on marriage from the Church and secular rulers’, with the years given in bold:
305-6 – Synod of Elvira (Granada, Spain) decrees that any man who takes the sister of his dead wife as his new wife (sororate marriage) should abstain from Communion for five years. Those marrying their daughters-in-law should abstain from Communion until near death.
315 – Synod of Neocaesarea (Turkey) forbids marrying the wife of one’s brother (levirate marriage) and possible sororate marriage.
325 – Council of Nicaea (Turkey) prohibits marrying the sister of one’s dead wife as well as Jews, pagans and heretics.
339 – The Roman Emperor Constantius prohibits uncle-niece marriages, in accordance with Christian sentiments, and imposes the death penalty on violators.
384/7 – The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius reaffirms prohibitions against sororate and levirate marriages and bans first cousin marriage. In 409, the Western emperor Honorius softens the law by allowing dispensations. It is not clear how long this persisted in the West. The dissolving Western Empire makes continued enforcement unlikely.
396 – The Eastern Roman Emperor Arcadius (a Christian) again prohibits first cousin marriage, but without the harsh penalties. In 400 or 404, however, he changes his mind, making cousin marriage legal in the Eastern Empire.
506 – Synod of Agde (France, Visigoth Kingdom) prohibits first and second cousin marriage, and marriage to a brother’s widow, wife’s sister, stepmother, uncle’s widow, uncle’s daughter, or any kinswoman. These are defined as incest.
517 – Synod of Epaone (France or Switzerland, Burgundian Kingdom) decrees that unions with first and second cousins are incestuous and henceforth forbidden, although existing unions are not dissolved. The synod also forbids marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law, and aunts by marriage. Many subsequent synods in the area of what would become the Carolingian Empire refer to this synod for incest regulations.
527/31 – Second synod of Toledo (Spain) prescribes excommunication for all engaged in incestuous marriages. The number of years of excommunication should equal the number of years of the marriage. This is affirmed by synods in 535, 692 and 743.
538 – First documented letter between a Frankish king and the pope is about incest (marriage to the wife of a deceased brother). The pope disapproves, but he leaves decisions about Penance to the bishops.
589 – Reccared I, the Visigothic King (Spain), decrees the dissolution of incestuous marriages, punishing offenders with exile, and the transfer of their property to their children.
596 – The Frankish King Childebert II decrees the death penalty for marriage to one’s stepmother but leaves the punishment of other incest violations to the bishops. If the convicted resists the Church’s punishment, his property will be seized and redistributed to his relatives (creating incentives to report violators).
627 – Synod of Clichy implements the same punishment and enforcement procedures as those decreed by King Childebert II in 596. A systematic collection of incest legislation is compiled around this time and becomes part of the Collectio vetus Gallica, the collection of canons from Gaul.
643 – Lombard laws of Rothari forbid marriage to one’s stepmother, stepdaughter and sister-in-law.
*692 – At the synod of Trullo (Turkey), the Eastern Church finally forbids marriage to one’s first cousins and corresponding affinal kin. This prohibits a father and a son marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters, and two brothers marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters.
721 – Roman Synod (Italy) prohibits marriage to one’s brother’s wife, niece, grandchild, stepmother, stepdaughter, cousin, godmother, and all kinfolk, including anyone ever married to any blood relative. In 726, Pope Gregory II specifies that for missionary purposes the prohibitions are up to first cousins, but for others the prohibitions extend to all known relatives. His successor, Gregory III, clarifies this prohibition such that marriages of third cousins are allowed but marriages to all affinal kin with the prohibited degree are not. These decisions are widely disseminated.
*741 – Under the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the prohibitions in the Eastern Church are increased to include marriage of second cousins and, slightly later, second cousins once removed. The penalty for cousin marriage becomes whipping.
743 – Roman synod under Pope Zacharias orders Christians to refrain from marrying cousins, nieces, and other kinfolk. Such incest is punishable by excommunication and, if necessary, anathema [cursed by God].
755 – The Synod of Verneuil (France), convened under the Frankish King Pepin, commands that marriages be performed publicly.
756 – Synod of Verbier (France) prohibits the marriage of third cousins and closer and decrees existing marriages between second cousins are to be ended. Those married to third cousins need only do Penance.
757 – Synod of Compiegne (France) rules that existing marriages of second cousins or closer must be nullified. The Frankish King, Pepin, threatens secular punishments for any who disagree.
796 – Synod of Friuli (Italy) directs attention to prenuptual investigations into potentially incestuous marriages and prohibits clandestine unions. The synod prescribes a waiting time before marriage during which neighbours and elders can examine whether a blood relationship exists that would prohibit marriage. The decree also stipulates that although infidelity by the wife is a legitimate reason for divorce, remarriage is impossible as long as both spouses live. Charlemagne puts his secular authority behind these rulings in 802.
802 – Charlemagne’s capitulary insists that nobody should attempt to marry until the bishops and priests, together with the elders, have investigated the blood relations of the prospective spouses.
874 – Synod of Douci (France) urges subjects to refrain from marrying third cousins. To strengthen the ruling, the synod makes the children of incestuous unions ineligible for succession to an estate.
909 – Synod of Trosle (France) clarifies and affirms the Synod of Douci, deeming that children born in an incestuous marriage are ineligible to inherit property or titles.
948 – Synod of Ingelheim (Germany) prohibits marriage with all kin as far back as memory goes.
1003 – At the Synod of Deidenhofen (Germany), Emperor Heinrich II (St Henry the Exuberant) substantially widens the incest ban to include sixth cousins. He may have done this to weaken his political rivals.
1023 – Synod of Seligenstadt (Germany) likewise forbids cousin marriage to sixth cousins. Bishop Burchard of Worms’s Decretum also extends the definition of incestuous marriages to include sixth cousins.
1059 – At the Synod of Rome, Pope Nicholas II forbids marriage to sixth cousins or as far back as relatives can be traced. His successor, Pope Alexander II, likewise decrees that marriages to sixth cousins or closer relatives are forbidden. The Kingdom of Dalmatia gets a temporary dispensation, forbidding marriages only out to fourth cousins.
1063 – Synod of Rome forbids marriages up to sixth cousins.
1072 – Synod of Rouen (France) forbids non-Christian marriages and decrees a priestly inquiry into all those about to wed.
1075 – Synod of London (England) forbids marriages up to sixth cousins, including affinal kin.
1101 – In Ireland, the Synod of Cashel introduces the incest prohibitions of the Catholic Church.
1102 – Synod of London nullifies existing marriages between sixth cousins (and closer) and decrees that third parties who knew of marriages between relatives are implicated in the crime of incest.
1123 – The First Lateran Council (Italy) condemns unions between blood relatives (without specifying the relatedness) and declares that those who contracted an incestuous marriage will be deprived of hereditary rights.
1140 – Decretum of Gratian: marriages of up to sixth cousins are forbidden.
*1166 – Synod of Constantinople (Turkey) reinforces the earlier Eastern Church’s prohibitions on cousin marriages (second cousins once removed and closer), and tightens enforcement.
1176 – The Bishop of Paris, Odo, helps introduce ‘the bans of marriage’ – that is, the public notice of impending marriages in front of the congregation.
1200 – Synod of London requires publication of the ‘bans of marriage’, and decrees that marriages be conducted publicly. Kin marriages are forbidden, though the degree of kinship is not specified.
1215 – Fourth Lateran Council (Italy) reduces marriage prohibitions to third-degree cousins and all closer blood relatives and affines. All prior rulings are also formalised and integrated into a constitution of canons. This brings prenuptual investigations and marriage bans into a formal legislative and legal framework.
1917 – Pope Benedict XV loosens restrictions further, prohibiting only marriage to second cousins and all closer blood and affinal relatives.
1983 – Pope John Paul II further loosens incest restrictions, allowing second cousins and more distant relatives to marry.
All this is presented in just under four pages of Henrich’s book, and in the book’s Appendix a more expansive 6.5 page version is given. Of course it can never be known how strictly these provisions and restrictions were adhered to, but their very existence, and the many Synods devoted to them, testify to the ambition and power of the Church in Europe for over a thousand years. Its influence impacts upon our attitude to love, marriage and sexual relationships even today. Thankfully, bonobos were spared, obviously due to their complete non-existence in the Christian mind throughout this era. But for European humans these restrictions became more stringent, and more enforceable, as the power of the Church grew. It’s worth noting that the term ‘in-law’ comes from Church canon law. Your brother-in-law is like your brother – treat him nicely, but definitely no hanky-panky.
So, were the restrictions effectively policed? Actually, the Church had something of a business going in granting dispensations – for a price. It goes along with their granting of ‘indulgences’ of course. In the early days – the days of tribalism – enforcement must have been difficult, but over time the uniformity of religious belief strengthened the Church’s power. Henrich presents this fascinating case:
… though popes and bishops strategically picked their battles, these policies were sometimes imposed on kings, nobles and other aristocrats. In the 11th century, for example, when the Duke of Normandy married a distant cousin from Flanders, the pope promptly excommunicated them both. To get their excommunications lifted, or risk anathema, each constructed a beautiful abbey for the Church. The pope’s power is impressive here, since this duke was no delicate flower; he would later become William the Conqueror.
So, this was the Church’s Marriage and Family Programme (MFP) and it impacted heavily on kin terminology throughout Europe, an impact that slowly radiated outward from the Church’s main power bases (northern Scotland – where I was born – being one of the last cards to fall).
It’s worth reflecting on how accidental all this was. Had the Emperor Constantine not been converted to Christianity by his Greek mother, Helena (or so the story goes), or had the Emperor Julian, who was quite the intellectual, not been murdered while in the process of ditching the new religion and re-establishing the old gods only a generation or so after Constantine, the whole of European society, the whole of the current WEIRD world, might have turned out differently. Imagine no Catholic Church, no Dark Ages, and an intellectual flowering almost a thousand years before our 15th century ‘renaissance’. The Romans were no slouches in the field of scientific enquiry after all, though there had certainly been a decline since the days of Epicurus and Lucretius.
So the big unanswerable question here is just how European society would have been structured, on the family and kinship level, and in countless other ways, had Christianity not supervened in such a super-dramatic way. Only the Shadow knows…
And, frankly, I haven’t even begun to unravel the history of monogamy itself – why one person would couple with another to raise children. Our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, don’t raise children that way – yet they do raise children, quite successfully. Something to explore in future posts.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Random House 2003 [first published 1776-1789]
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
On Dostoyevsky’s moralistic god
So I’ve just managed to get through Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov, for the first time, it seems, though I swear I’ve read it twice before. Life’s funny that way. But I’m not going to write here about the novel’s merits or otherwise, I want to focus on a meme, if that’s the right word, which I first noticed being spoken by a minor character, an intelligent boy named Kolya – “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted”. At other moments in the novel it’s associated with Ivan Karamazov, amongst others. It became a famous expression, firmly associated with Dostoyevsky’s philosophy – so much so that it came up in a very very different book I’ve been reading at the same time, – Determined, a book which presents a detailed argument against the philosophical concept of free will, by a Stanford University professor of neurophysiology, Robert Sapolsky:
Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipresent Someone doling out the consequences? As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
R Sapolsky, Determined, pp 251-2
Sapolsky then goes on to cite anthropological evidence that moralising gods are a very recent phenomenon in human history. In fact I would argue that the first moralising god was also the first successful monotheistic one, created in the land of Canaan about 2600 years ago, the ‘Abrahamic’ god, essentially an amalgam of Yahweh and Elohim, the two most favoured gods of the region at that time. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere. Here’s more of what Sapolsky has to say:
Hunter-gathers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99% of human history, do not invent moralising gods. Sure, they might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other.
Ibid, p 252
And this brings me to some thoughts I’ve had on the origins of religion. Clearly our development of religious thinking was a product of evolution. Other primates show signs of incipient ‘religious’ thinking. Dogs and cats don’t. With neurological development we began to notice stuff that required explanation. For example, ‘Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed’… Shakespeare’s personification of the sun might be a conceit, but it points to a history, or prehistory, of rather more real personifications. The wind plays gently or blows furiously, the sea provides us with food but sometimes rises up and washes our village away, one baby thrives, the next is stillborn, mild seasons are followed by endless driving snow which covers the land and its food, and so forth. Humans came to recognise that seemingly capricious forces were at work, and they attributed these forces to capricious but powerful entities. How to interact with them, to get them on side? In the same way we might deal with powerful, but unpredictable humans. Pander to them, give them stuff, offer them bribes, and call them sacrifices. Dedicate buildings to them, set aside some of our harvest for them, create dances and chants to honour or mollify them.
This idea of powerful living, quasi-human forces that people had to deal with to ensure their survival was, as I say, an advance of sorts. For we’d acquired enough brainpower to require explanations for seasonal and environmental unpredictabilities. Morality may have played a role of sorts too – these forces were perhaps punishing us for behaving badly, but not likely in an absolute sense. With many forces, or gods, having control of different aspects of the physical and mental realm – fire, water, fertility, war, love, the weather – and perhaps even arguing and fighting over their particular domains, morality would likely have been less of an issue than obeisance to whatever god most mattered to you at the time.
So morality in the more absolute sense – Good and Evil – seems to have been a product of monotheism. But not just monotheism. The first monotheism that we know about was attempted in Egypt by the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, a top-down decision to banish all gods apart from Aten, a god strongly identified with the Sun. As Amenhotep then defined himself as the priest of Aten, Akhenaten, it seems that this was an attempt to combine worldly and heavenly power within his own person (an approach copied by many later autocrats, and it seems likely that Amenhotep wasn’t the first to try it). It didn’t last, of course, but the Jewish attempt to create a monotheistic system about 700 years later was more successful, first because it wasn’t the work of one self-aggrandising individual, and second because it was all written down, together with an origin myth, a chosen people myth, and a set of good-and-evil commandments, amongst other propaganda. And note the very first commandment:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3).
which is built upon later in Exodus:
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14).
The first quote suggests monolateralism (one boss god and a handful of subordinates – other gods must be behind me) – while the second quote suggests monotheism (though for some reason the name Jealous didn’t catch on).
And meanwhile humans continued to evolve, socially, until something like modern science began to develop, and, very very recently in evolutionary terms, religious forces and explanations came to be questioned and, in some places, abandoned. And so it continues…
So, back to Dostoyevsky, and I do mean back. But not everywhere. Sapolsky has it that only 5% of United Staters identify as atheists. The 2021 census here in Australia found that 39% of native-born Australians ‘claim no religion’. That percentage has risen rapidly over the past few censuses. My own birthplace, Scotland, is now the least religious region of the UK. The first census in Australia, in the 1890s, which asked the same question on religion as is asked today, had over 90% of the population identifying as Christian.
Oh, yes, Dostoyevsky, I forgot. His reputation as a great philosophical novelist will fade, I think, as the Abrahamic moralistic god fades, in some places more quickly than others, obviously. It’s a long game. Dostoyevsky’s greatest strength, I think, is in creating characters of complexity – often tortured, suffering, self-harming complexity. He himself suffered from epilepsy, a condition that was stigmatised for centuries, as Sapolsky also relates in Determined. Which brings me to Smerdyakov, the character I feel most sympathy for….
But that’s another story.
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1880
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians, 2006
on religion, secularism, tolerance and women
Over the years, I’ve read, listened to and encountered non-religious people defending religions and the religious in the name of tolerance, decency, human rights and more. A non-religious philosophy tutor once told the discussion group that I was a member of that western morality was based on Christianity. This claim appeared to be made as a criticism of the ‘new atheist’ movement that was prevalent at the time (some 15 or so years ago). I found it to be highly dubious on its face, so I engaged in a ‘deep dive’ into the key texts of Christianity – the so-called gospels, the purported reportage of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus, the son of the Judeao-Christian or Abrahamic god. Did these most basic Christian texts provide a coherent moral system for the western world, or even the barest framework of such a system?
Needless to say, I found no such thing, nor did I find any evidence that the gospel authors had ever even met the central figure in Christianity, Jesus. Whether such a person ever existed is a question with no clear answer. Jesus was a relatively common name at the time, a period which provides no written records of the existence of individuals outside of monarchs, governors and the like. Much research has explored the production and dating of the gospels, which were not contemporaneous with the life of their subject, who was said to have been crucified sometime between 30 and 40 AD (it doesn’t help that our current dating system is based on his conjectured birth). My writings on the subject (about a dozen blog posts, referenced below) were, as with most of my writings, a kind of self-education project. Amongst my gleanings were that the different gospels were inconsistent, both internally and compared to each other, and included interpolations from as late as the third or fourth century AD.
Let me focus briefly on one gospel example, the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ in John 8 (3-11), since it’s all about a topic of interest, the treatment of women. It’s now generally accepted as a later interpolation, but it’s still useful in terms of its lack of context – a problem with most gospel anecdotes. In modern jurisprudence, and modern (WEIRD) morality, context is absolutely essential. This is explored in much detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The weirdest people in the world, in which motive, intention, effect and a host of other factors are included in our judgment and appraisal of others.
So here is the story, from the ‘New Revised Standard Version’ of the Bible:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them,4 they said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
So this is where we need to add, if we can, the context lacking in the story. For example, what does ‘caught in the act of adultery’ mean here? And indeed, what does ‘woman’ mean? It’s well established that, in this region, at this time, females were sold into marriage on a regular basis. Furthermore, these females were often – in fact customarily – children as young as ten, or younger, and once married, they were referred to as ‘women’.
But we hardly need to go into detail to recognise that adultery is here quite undefined, that stoning to death for this or any other crime is disproportionate to say the least, and that it’s highly unlikely that a man would be threatened with the same punishment as the ‘woman’ is in this case.
This of course isn’t an isolated anecdote – all of the parables, speeches and actions of Jesus, as described, lack the contextual elements we would need to arrive at the kinds of judgments expected of us in the WEIRD world.
Then again, it might be argued that the proscriptions enumerated in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 2-17) are a better starting point for western or WEIRD morality. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that lying, stealing and killing fellow humans would be offensive to an omnipotent god who wants to see his prize creations behaving nicely, it does seem odd that he should be so concerned about his own position in their lives that he must have their love more or less constantly (second commandment). It suggests a degree of insecurity not quite in keeping with omnipotence. The tenth commandment, too, strikes a flat note to a WEIRD individual keen to promote a bonobo humanity, as it speaks against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife along with other property items. It’s a bald reminder, as if one needed it after reading Genesis, etc, that this god is definitively male.
The whole point here is that, if western or WEIRD morality emerged from Christianity or the Bible, which to some extent is true, it needs to also be pointed out that the Bible and its ‘gospels’ are human documents. The Pentateuch was written five or six hundred years before the putative birth of Jesus, and was arguably the first successful creation of an omnipotent, controlling god, designed to unite a tribe or people as ‘special’ and chosen, while seeking to explain the origin of the world in which they lived (though of course its creation myths were derived from earlier versions). The god’s concern, through the commandments – or rather the concern of the Jewish leaders and authors who wrote them, was to unite and separate the Jewish people in the context of a multi-ethnic region with a bewildering array of gods, with ambiguous powers and rankings. Given the context, these commandments are bog-standard – don’t lie to, steal from or kill each other, don’t covet each others’ property (including women), treat your one and only god (creator of all things) with respect, treat marriage as sacred, honour your parents and kin, and follow the proper rituals. Basically, a recipe for the survival and thriving of the group, in what was, then and for a long time before and afterwards, a god-obsessed human world.
The interesting innovation of Christianity, of course, was that it dispensed with the chosen people concept, making it more universalisable, if that’s a word. The concept of Christ dying for our sins, or so that the rest of humanity might be ‘saved’, does seem rather obscure, but it has doubtless provided grounds for thousands of theological theses over the centuries.
I began this piece reflecting on those non-believers who look askance at other non-believers criticising religion and the religious. I understand full well that, had I been born many centuries ago, I too would have believed in the gods of my region. Galileo, the foremost mathematician and astronomer of his day, was a lifelong Catholic. Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death, and the foremost scientist of his generation, was also a thorough if idiosyncratic Christian. Whatever one thinks of free will, we can’t escape the zeitgeist we’re born into. The thing is, today’s zeitgeist is more complex than anything that’s gone before, and will probably become more so, and the tensions between religious beliefs and secular, scientific explorations of every imaginable research field, including religion, its origins, modalities and effects, and why it is losing its grip on WEIRD humanity, will continue long into the foreseeable. I have no idea how it will all end, but I suspect that the feminine side of humanity will be an essential element in bringing about a best-case resolution, if such a resolution ever comes.
References
http://stewartsstruggles.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Bible: Child Marriage in Ancient Israelite times – Paedophilia?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020%3A2-17&version=NIV
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s daughter: a drama of science, faith and love, 1999
23 – bonobo morality superior to Christianity
the Cyrus Cylinder, dated to 539 BCE
In his strange but interesting book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari reveals an obsessive interest in religion. While recognising that the traditional religions such as Christianity, which dominated Europe and its colonies and offshoots for a millennium and a half, no longer provide a template for our political and social organisation, he’s happy to label the isms that he claims are traditional religion’s successors, namely humanism, liberalism, progressivism and scientism, as religions too. And the final section of his book bears the title ‘the data religion’, and is all about our new-found worship of algorithms.
Personally I much prefer a tighter definition of religion, being a belief in gods and god-like entities, or spiritual, or spirit-ish, beings such as sprites, fairies or mischief-making bunyips and such – thingummies that have an effect on our world but are too superior to ever be caught by hand or on camera. Or they belong to another world or dimension or something. Harari dismisses the non-believers’ dismissal of these beings as supernatural, but he offers no better alternative. He seems to have caught the Nietschean affliction of trying to stand outside of everything so he can be disdainful of it.
Traditional religions, however, suffer from the hearsay problem. I first heard about the Judeo-Christian god from a Sunday School teacher who no doubt heard about him from either his parents or rellies, or some other churchy elder, and so on down the generations, with mostly increasing conviction as we go back in time. Another way to describe him, or gods and religions in general, is as memes, thought-bubbles, differing in detail and import as they pass between people, but always presented with a sort of prestigious vagueness. God, for example, is divine, but what does this word mean? How do we collect evidence for divinity? Much easier to collect evidence for the processes involved in the Earth’s origin. Humans are lazy that way.
I don’t want to enter into a philosophical or theological discussion here – god forbid – but I’m concerned about the baleful effect that certain religions, those that still influence large numbers of human apes today, have on morality. Religion, as we know, tends to congeal morality in the time-frame of that religion’s founding, or its high-water mark. And even then it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Take the story of ‘the woman taken in adultery’, in the soi-disant gospel of John, about which there’s much argy-bargy as to authenticity (it may have been a later interpolation), as if any of these writings are particularly authentic. The issue here, for me at least, is about whether the ‘sin’ is really a sin, or more generally what is a sin, though in the religious context of the time, the point of the story is that, since everyone sins, this woman’s sin deserves forgiveness, like everyone else’s sins, as long as she sins ‘no more’. Of course, it’s a pretty piss-poor argument, even if you equate sinning with wrong-doing according to the legalities of the day. Context is everything, and no context is given in the story. Adultery isn’t even clearly defined. It’s well-known, and other biblical texts bear witness to the fact, that women were treated as chattels in this era and region, and very often married off as children to men twice or thrice their age, with no fellow-feeling about it. Bonobos wouldn’t have stood for it. So my advice to this youngster would’ve been ‘go for it lassie, and pay no attention to those arseholes’. Depending on the context, that is.
And yet this sort of context-free drivel is still taken seriously by those who aren’t religious and should know better. I’ve heard a professional philosopher, much younger than myself and by no means religious, argue, or simply claim, that our legal system is based on Christian teaching. That’s total bullshit. Some years ago I did a deep dive on Christian morality as expressed in the five ‘gospels’, including Thomas, and found no clear moral message – again because context is everything, so that general remarks like ‘blessed are the peace-makers’, or indeed the cheese-makers, are essentially meaningless. Bonobos are pretty peaceful, but they’ll fight when they have to, to keep the greater peace. It’s a pretty good general rule, but the particular action and its extent depends on context.
Another example of context-free ethics that I’ve heard being extolled is the Ten Commandments, or at least those that still make sense in the modern world – don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet (note the negativity), don’t commit adultery (makes no sense to bonobos, and why and when did human apes start marrying?), and honour your parents (hmmm, shouldn’t parents, and any others, be given the respect they deserve? Not based on titles or positions, but on observed behaviour and effects? Automatic honouring, or respect, strikes me as a bad, even dangerous idea. Political leaders often benefit from this automatic, fawning respect, especially in non-democratic countries, where those leaders are allowed to hang around for a long time, like an ever more fetid odour).
None of these commandments should be considered as absolutes, which is why the nuance of laws based on the complexity of civil society is far superior, and that nuance is displayed in rather more earthly laws of the time, such as those of Solon in Athens. And another near contemporary, Cyrus of Persia, renowned for having emancipated the Jews of Babylon, had rather more humane laws (or really just policies, and possibly short-term) written on a cylinder uncovered more than 2000 years later, and celebrated by some (mostly Persian nationals) as the first versions of human rights.
Laws change, as they should, as we learn more about human flourishing, and that such flourishing depends on a broader, more vital flourishing of that narrow band of life that covers the surface, and a tiny sub-surface, of our planet. From whence we emerged. Only recently, rather shockingly, has the so-called developed world caught up with bonobos in their understanding and acceptance of homosexual behaviour – and that acceptance is very far from universal. Perhaps such intolerance has sprung from the old idea that ‘the world must be peopled’, but these days we’re well aware that it has been peopled enough. Nowadays we don’t want so much to have children to carry on for us, but to carry on ourselves, hale and hearty for 200 years or so. But that’s another story.
References
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Solons-laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder
Face it, same-sex marriage law will affect the religious freedom to discriminate
The former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, has said recently that if you’re for religious freedom and against political correctness, you should vote no to – same-sex marriage, gay marriage, marriage equality, or whatever way you want to frame the issue.
As far as I’m aware, this isn’t Abbott’s argument, because an argument has to be argued for, with something like premisses and a conclusion. It’s simply a statement, or a pronouncement, much like the pronouncement made on the same topic by another former PM, Julia Gillard, that she was opposed to same-sex marriage. She would subsequently say that ‘her position was clear’ on the matter, and such remarks appeared to substitute for an argument.
Now we shouldn’t necessarily expect our political leaders to talk like philosophers, but I do think we should expect something more from them than bald pronouncements. Gillard, when subjected to some minuscule pressure on the issue, did say, as I recall, that marriage had always been recognised as being between a man and a woman, and she saw no reason to change it. Of course, as arguments go, this is rather weak, amounting, as it seems, to an objection to change of any kind. You could say, for example, that houses have always been made of wood, so there’s no need to change to any other building material.
What was more troubling about Gillard’s justification, though, was what was left unsaid. It is true that in Australia, marriage has always been recognised as between a man and a woman, though that situation has changed recently in a number of other countries. It’s also true, though it wasn’t referred to by Gillard, that through almost the entire history of male-female marriage in Australia and elsewhere, homosexuals have been tortured, murdered, executed, imprisoned, vilified, loathed and scorned, and treated as beyond the pale, with a few notable exceptions of place and time. So during this long history, the question of same-sex marriage has hardly been prominent in the minds of homosexuals or their detractors.
So I return to Tony Abbott’s pronouncement. I want to see if I can turn it into something like an argument. A no vote supports religious freedom and strikes against political correctness. I’ll take the last part first. What is political correctness? Other pundits are also, I note, asking that question. All that can be said with certainty is that Abbott considers it a bad thing. It’s, not, therefore (at least in his mind) ‘correctness’, which carries much the same meaning as ‘rightness’, as in a correct answer. Political correctness somehow negates or inverts correctness, but it’s not at all clear how this is so. I can only surmise that he thinks that something that’s correct ‘politically’ is actually incorrect or not correct. So the word ‘political’ must mean ‘not’. So then I’d have to wonder why Abbott ever became a politician. In any case, I’m left wondering how this odd term can apply to the matter at hand, which is whether to allow gay couples the freedom to marry as other couples do. The ‘political correctness’ question is an obscure and rather tedious semantic quibble, while same-sex marriage is a serious issuing affecting many peoples’ lives, so I won’t pursue the ‘political correctness’ gambit any further.
Abbott’s main point, presumably, is that same-sex marriage adversely affects religious freedom. So how, exactly, would the marriage of people who happen to be of the same gender affect religious freedom? The essential argument is that, since the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for example, is opposed to same sex marriage, and homosexuality in general, individuals Catholics who happen to be homosexual, and who wish to marry their loved one and don’t wish to abandon their faith, may seek to use the law to force, or try to force, the Catholic Church to marry them. And of course this isn’t just a problem for Catholicism. The Anglican hierarchy tends to be more liberal, but we know that it isn’t uniformly so, and some segments of it are as arch as the most conservative Catholics. And then there’s Islam (and other religions). Of course it would be rare indeed to find practicing Moslems, here or elsewhere, who are openly gay and wanting to marry, but it’s likely that such people do exist, given humanity’s weird and wonderful diversity.
This is in fact an interesting conundrum. The website for marriage equality in Australia has this to say:
No religious institution can be forced to marry a lesbian or gay couple against their beliefs (in much the same way as certain religious bodies cannot be forced to marry people who are divorced).
This seems an overly confident assumption, since the issue has yet to be tested, and it surely will, as it is apparently being tested in the USA by gay couples.
A weaker point being made by the religious is that they will be persecuted for upholding the traditional view of marriage against the new law. But this might be said for anyone who holds a minority view. Clearly, when same-sex marriage law comes into being, it will be supported by the majority of Australians. Indeed it will become law largely because it’s supported by the majority, and the majority is likely to increase, though this is never guaranteed. People who hold the minority view will have to argue for it, and should expect others to argue against it. This isn’t persecution. I personally don’t think they have any strong arguments for their views, which clearly discriminate against homosexuals. Being called out for that discriminatory view, isn’t persecution IMHO.
Having said this, I agree with the conservative journalist Paul Kelly that same-sex marriage law inevitably pits church against state, and that the various religious groups’ freedom to discriminate against homosexuals is at stake. This is, in the west, a part of our growing secularisation against religions that are largely mired in outmoded social conventions. This clash has been going on for some time and is set to continue. The outcome, I think, is inevitable, but it will be a slow, painstaking process.
nones, rinos and new australians – we’re becoming more secular, but also more religiously complex
So the census data on religion, and everything else, has just come out, and it wasn’t as I’d predicted (in my mind). I expected a rise in the nones but I opted for a more conservative result, partly because of so many wrong predictions (in my mind) in the recent past, but mainly because I didn’t really expect the accelerating rise in recent censuses to continue for too much longer, I expected a few wobbles on the path to heathenism. Not so much two steps forward and one step back, more like a mixture of giant strides and baby steps.
So the result is encouraging and more people are taking note and it has clear implications for areas of social and political policies in which religion plays a part, such as funding for religion in schools, marriage equality, abortion rights, euthanasia, tax exemptions for religious organisations, school chaplains and the like.
So let’s take a closer look at the findings. The graph I present at the top of this post is identical to the one I posted about 5 years ago, except that the last bar, representing the 2016 figures, is added. And it’s quite a spectacular finding, showing that the acceleration is continuing. The drop in the assertively Christian sector is way bigger than expected (in my mind), from a little under 60% to just over 50%. That’s really something, and there’s no doubt that figure will be well under 50% by next census. So much for the twilight of atheism – at least in this benighted backwater. The figure for the assertively non-religious has taken a bigger jump than in any previous census – we only started measuring the category in 1971. That was a surprise, as was the size of the drop in Catholics (and the Anglican population continues to diminish). The figure of 30.1% for the nones, up from 22.3% in 2011, should be supplemented by a goodly percentage of the ‘not-stated/inadequately described’ category, which makes up about 10%, barely changed from last census. This would make for a figure of more than a third of our population professing no religion.
The figure for ‘other religions’ continues to rise but it’s still under 10%. It’s hardly cause for concern exactly, but we should always be vigilant about maintaining a thoroughly secular polity and judiciary. It has served us, and other secular countries, very well indeed. Meanwhile the mix of other religions makes for greater complexity and diversity, and hopefully will prevent the dominance of any particular religious perspective. We should encourage dialogue between these groups to prevent religious balkanisation.
These results really do give hope that the overall ‘no religion’ figure, now at around 30%, will overtake the overall Christian figure, at about 51%, in my lifetime. If the trend continues to accelerate, that may well happen by 2026. Meanwhile it’ll be fascinating to see how these results play out in the political and social arena in the near future, and what Christian apologists have to say about them.
Of course, the census hardly provides a fine-grained view of the nation’s religious affiliations. I’ve not said much about the ‘rino’ population before – that’s those who are ‘religious in name only’. In fact I only heard that acronym for the first time two days ago, but I’ve long been aware of the type, and I’ve met a few ‘Catholics’ who fit the bill. It really does gripe me that more of these people don’t come out as non-believers, but of course I can’t get inside their heads. Certainly church attendance has dropped markedly in recent years, but it’s impossible to know whether these nominal believers would follow religious lines on hot-button topics like euthanasia or abortion.
The census results, as always, have been published with accompanying ‘expert’ commentaries, and on the religious question they’ve said that the figures don’t really give comfort to Christians or atheists. It’s cloud cuckoo talk, but it doesn’t surprise me. The results speak volumes and give plenty of comfort to those who want religion to be kept well out of politics, and who never want to see a return to powerful Christian lobbies and their incessant and often ridiculous propaganda. Politicians, please take note.
patriarchy, identity politics and immigration – a few reflections
Germany. Muslim migrants being threatening. Note the female presence.
A conversation between ‘apocalypse man’ Sam Harris and Gad Saad (evolutionary psychologist and producer of a Youtube channel critiquing inter alia various shibboleths of the left), together with some overheard comments at my workplace, as well as other promptings, has led me to consider writing about some major issues confronting our increasingly secular society and it maintenance…
As everyone knows, in Australia as in other western countries, the influx of refugees from such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan, relatively small though it has been, has ignited a response of what has been called ‘Islamophobia’ amongst a certain sector of the public. This is of course connected to a more generalised xenophobia and nationalism. My own response to all this has been a fairly unconcerned dismissiveness, though coloured by a definite distaste for such items as the niqab, and such customs as the strict segregation of males and females, which I’ve long been exposed to as a teacher of English to Arabic-speaking families. Insofar as I gave it thought, I tended to believe that the children of these immigrants would become more drawn to western secularism and everything would be more or less hunky dory. But the more I read, listen and observe, the less sanguine I’ve become about all that. We may need to defend secularism more robustly in the future.
I think it’s true, though dangerous, to say that the greatest threat to secularism today is Islam. Previously, I’m not sure that I’ve been able to admit this, even to myself – even though it’s been articulated clearly enough by concerned thinkers I admire, such as Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. So now it’s time to face the issue more resolutely and to think about solutions.
Here’s an example that illustrates the problem. In my workplace as a TESOL educator, dealing with mostly Chinese students, together with a substantial proportion of Vietnamese and Arabic speakers, I have a colleague who is an Israeli-born Muslim. She doesn’t wear any kind of head-dress or make any outward display to show that she believes in Islam, she is very professional and hard-working, and she’s very well-liked by and supportive of her colleagues. In fact, in the first few months of working there, having heard that she was born in Israel, I assumed naturally enough that she was Jewish. Only later did I learn that her native language was Arabic, and even then I wasn’t sure whether she was a practising Muslim. In fact apostate Muslims are rare, but as a sometime member of atheist and humanist groups I do encounter them, and this has probably skewed my views on the possibility of abandoning Islam for those born into it. In any case, three experiences in recent months have brought home to me the difficulty of dealing with even the most apparently liberal Muslims on issues which, for virtually all secular liberals, are no-brainers. First, during a brief staff-room discussion of the marriage equality plebiscite being mooted here in Australia, she quietly stated that ‘we think homosexuality is wrong’. Second, on a video I watched in which she was assessing a seminar on political violence given by a student, she quietly, and very briefly, stated her doubts about the truth of the holocaust (it’s unlikely that her students had the language skills to comprehend her comment). Third, in another staff room discussion, she stated that ‘we don’t believe in evolution’. So herein lies the problem. It is, and I think plenty of research bears this out, a standard view of even the most liberal Muslims, that homosexuality should not be allowed, that natural selection is false and shouldn’t be taught, and that Jews are liars, or worse, and can’t be trusted.
These views are a part of identity politics, hence the regular use of ‘we’ in their delivery. Intelligent though my colleague is, I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t be able to explain the mechanism of natural selection from random variation that’s the basis of our understanding of life on earth, nor would she be able to give a detailed explanation of how the holocaust ‘myth’ became widespread, or of why homosexuality is so wrong. My guess is that her very being, as part of a rigid collective consciousness, would be threatened if she disavowed these beliefs, and it’s the collective consciousness of Islam that’s my main concern here. Of course this consciousness isn’t absolute, because if it were there would be no apostates and no possibility of apostasy. However, it’s also very powerful and compelling, because if it wasn’t the opprobrium and the violence meted out to apostates wouldn’t be so extreme. So the situation in the Muslim world bears similarities to that of the Christian world in Europe before sceptical individuals such as Cristovao Ferreira, Jean Meslier and Julien de La Mettrie began to proliferate in the eighteenth century – a situation that prevailed for over a thousand years. However, there are important differences between contemporary Muslim collective consciousness and the Christian variety that’s now fast disappearing in Europe. The most important difference, of course, is that European Christendom wasn’t faced with the external pressure of sophisticated societies on its borders, demanding trade deals and seeking to impose universal, largely secular values more or less in exchange. So today there is very much a clash of cultures, though probably not as described in various books on the subject (none of which I’ve read). It’s quite possible, though by no means certain, that this clash, and the greater fluidity of human movement in the 21st century, will speed up the process of change, of a Muslim enlightenment, in coming decades, but there seems little sign of that at present.
So what with Muslim identity politics and no Muslim enlightenment on the horizon, issues arise with respect to immigration, multiculturalism and the like. And I have to say I’m very much torn on this issue. On the one hand I’m disgusted by our former PM Tony Abbott’s portrayal of Syrian refugees as largely economic migrants who need to be turned back if their lives are not in immediate danger, despite the worse than horrendous conditions they suffer under. On the other hand I recognise the difficulty and the danger of accepting people who have been living on a diet of violence and hatred for decades into a peaceful country. The evidence is clear that though the majority of these refugees want nothing more than to find a peaceful place to restart their lives, there will be a certain percentage that bring their grievances with them, and most disturbingly their long-held grievances against western values.
So this is one of the biggest problems facing western society currently. As I’ve said, I’ve tended to minimise the problem in my own mind up till now. After all, Muslims make up only about 2.5% of the Australian population and haven’t caused too many problems as yet (with apologies to the families of Tory Johnson, Katrina Dawson and Curtis Cheng), and my own experience of Muslim residents and students here, which has been quite considerable of late, has been almost entirely positive. However, events in Europe and the USA in recent years give cause for grave concern, as have statistics relating to the growth of Islam worldwide. While projections about the growth of Islam in the the future are never going to be entirely reliable, being based on a host of assumptions, it’s pretty clear that it’s growing faster than Christianity or any other major religion. This has more to do with fertility rates than any other factor, but the fact that it’s generally dangerous to abandon the Muslim faith doesn’t help much.
At the moment, this is not an Australian problem, even though we have a rise in thuggish xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, but it’s clear that if the Muslim population continues to rise, and screening of extremists isn’t adequate, there will be incidents (to use a euphemism), and reactions to incidents, which will adversely affect our civil society. But of course things have changed already in this ‘distant’ western society. When I was growing up (and at 60 I’m no spring chicken) there were no Muslims whatever in our very Anglo working class community – Italian market gardeners were our version of exoticism. Now, in my workplace, we have to provide ‘multi-faith’ (but actually Muslim) prayer rooms and deal with the guardians of (rare in comparison to male) female Arabic students who refuse to shake hands with our course co-ordinator who happens to be female. This is a far more challenging and personally offensive situation than anything I’ve experienced before, as someone brought up on and profoundly influenced by seventies feminism, and part of the challenge is having to counter absurd arguments by members of what has been termed the ‘regressive left’ who have actually suggested, in discussion with me, that western women are coerced into wearing bikinis and short dresses in much the same way as Muslim women are coerced into burqas and niqabs.
Anyway, now that I’ve ‘come out’ on this major issue, I plan to deal with it further in future posts. I want to look at the European situation as an object lesson for Australia, because what I’ve been learning about it is quite alarming. I’m also keen to connect what I’ve been learning about all this – the Saudi guardianship system and the macho jihadist culture – to patriarchy and its obvious deficits. I still think this is the area in which Islam can be most constructively critiqued, with a view to reform.
ten negatory claims about same-sex marriage
percentages of those favouring same-sex marriage (in the US) over twenty-odd years – one of the fastest changes in public opinion in human history
What are the arguments against same-sex marriage? That’s a question I’m asking myself as I hear that conservatives want public money to run a campaign against it if Australia holds a plebiscite – which I’m not particularly in favour of, but at least it makes me reconsider the ‘no’ arguments. Presumably they’d be along the same lines as those of the TFP (tradition, family, property) organisation of the USA, but Australia as a nation is less religiously fixated than the USA, so the weak arguments found on the TFP website would seem even weaker to people over here. But let’s run through their 10 arguments just for fun. You can read them in full on the website if you’ve nothing better to do.
1. It is not marriage.
The claim here is that you can’t just redefine marriage to suit changing situations. ‘Marriage has always been x’, (x usually being identified as a ‘covenant between a man, a woman and god’ or some such thing). The response is, we can and always have done. Marriage is a human invention, and like all inventions we can modify it to suit our needs. A table is a human invention, and it can be a chess table, a bedside table, a coffee table, a dining table or a conference table, and none of these uses threatens the meaning of the word ‘table’. Marriage is ours to define and use as we wish, and historically we’ve done just that, with polygynous marriages, which have been commonplace, polyandrous marriages (much rarer) and other more or less formal arrangements, such as handfasting and morganatic and common-law marriages. Of course, marriage has rarely been recognised between individuals of the same sex, though same-sex unions, some of them highly ritualised and contractualised, have had a long history. But the reason for this is obvious – throughout history, homosexuals have been tortured and executed for their feelings and practices. The history of exclusive male-female marriage coincides with the history of homosexual persecution. The two histories are not unrelated, they’re completely entwined.
2. It violates natural law.
WTF is natural law, you might ask. A TFP fiction apparently. Their website says: Being rooted in human nature, it [natural law] is universal and immutable. But human nature is neither of these things. It’s diverse and evolving, socially as well as genetically. Marriage and child-rearing arrangements vary massively around the globe, with varying results, but it seems clear from voluminous research that children benefit most from close bonding with one or two significant others, together with a wider circle of potential carers and mentors. It’s notable that when this organisation lays down the ‘law’ on matters of marriage, sexuality and families it cites no scientific research of any kind – its only quotes are from the Bible.
3. It always denies children either a father and a mother.
Leaving aside the fact that there are often no children involved, this argument relies on the assumption that a father and a mother are indispensable to the proper rearing of children. Research reported on in Science Daily found that ‘children raised by two same-gender parents do as well on average as children raised by two different-gender parents. This is obviously inconsistent with the widespread claim that children must be raised by a mother and a father to do well’. Melvin Konner in his 2015 book Women after all puts it this way: ‘One of the most impressive discoveries of the last decade in child development research is that when babies of either sex are adopted by lesbian or gay couples – and this has been studied very extensively and carefully – the main way the resulting children differ from controls raised with a father and mother is that they turn out to be less homophobic.’ Of course, this is exactly what organisations like TFP are afraid of, as promotion of homophobia is what they’re all about.
4. It Validates and Promotes the Homosexual Lifestyle
And that’s precisely what it aims to do. Of course TFP argues, or rather states without argument, that this would ‘weaken public morality’. Humanists would argue precisely the opposite, that such validation is long overdue, and would strengthen a morality based on the recognition of the fundamental humanity and value of diverse individuals.
5. It Turns a Moral Wrong into a Civil Right
In its discussion of this reason to oppose same-sex marriage, TFP again refers to its bogus ‘natural law’. Same-sex marriage (always in inverted commas on its website ) is opposed to nature, according to TFP. Again this is stated rather than argued, but as I’ve often pointed out, bonobos, our closest living relatives, engage in homosexual acts on a regular basis. Of course, they don’t marry, because marriage isn’t natural, it’s a human construction, and mostly a quite usefiul one, though not necessary for child-rearing, or for permanent monogamous relationships. Further to this, researchers have observed homosexual acts in between 500 and 1500 non-human species, so it seems to be natural enough.
6. It Does Not Create a Family but a Naturally Sterile Union
Again TFP makes ad nauseum use of the word ‘nature’ to give credit to its views. But the fact that same-sex couples can’t have offspring without outside help isn’t a reason to debar them from a union that serves multiple purposes. Moreover, it’s quite reasonable for homosexual males or females to feel that they would make good parents, and to yearn to be parents, and there is no reason why this should yearning should be opposed, if the opportunity to parent a child arises. Adopted children are often brought up in loving and happy environments, and succeed accordingly.
7. It Defeats the State’s Purpose of Benefiting Marriage.
It’s hardly for the TFP or any other organisation to tell us what the State’s purpose is regarding marriage. Most advanced states provide benefits for children, regardless of the marital status of the mother. This is very important, considering the large number of single-parent (mostly female) families we have today. The state also doesn’t distinguish between marriage and de facto relationships when it dispenses benefits. The TFP is obviously out of date on this one.
8. It Imposes Its Acceptance on All Society
States are legalising same-sex marriage around the western world under public pressure. Here in Australia, where same-sex marriage hasn’t yet been legalised, polls have indicated that same-sex marriage is clearly acceptable to the majority. Where it is up to courts to decide, as occurred recently in the USA, the process is too complex to cover here, but it’s clear that the public’s attitude to same-sex marriage in every advanced or developed nation has undergone a seismic shift in a relatively short period – the last ten years or so.
9. It Is the Cutting Edge of the Sexual Revolution
Vive la révolution. Of course, TFP presents the slippery slope argument – paedophilia, bestiality and the like – so hurtful and offensive to the LGBT community. Again, there’s never any presentation of evidence or research, every proposition is presented as self-evident. It’s a profoundly anti-intellectual document.
10. It Offends God
This is, of course, presented as the main argument. Biblical quotes are given, including one in which their god’s mass immolation of ‘sodomites’ is celebrated. I don’t really see much point in questioning the supposedly offended feelings of a supposedly all-perfect, all-powerful invisible undetectable being. It’s all a fairly nasty fantasy.
There’s nothing more to say, and as an intellectual exercise this was probably a waste of time, as people who believe the above guff aren’t listening much. Any critical responses to their 10 propositions on the TFP website will be promptly deleted. There’s definitely no fun to be had with these guys. Their absolute certainty, and their inability and unwillingness to argue cogently or to examine evidence is a very disturbing sign, and a clear indication that they’re fuelled entirely by emotion. A passionate fear of change and difference. It all tends to reinforce the arguments against holding a plebiscite, in which, in Australia, people of this sort would actually be funded to give voice to their certainties with all the indignation of righteousness. They would be ruthless about their targets, and being patriarchal – because preserving extreme patriarchy is what this is all about at base – they would be violent in their language and tactics. The best way to muzzle them would be to resolve this in parliament as soon as possible.
Good Friday? We object..
profound spirituality lives on
Canto: I’m sitting here thinking I’d like to take a ride to the beach and then breakfast at a seaside caf but I can’t because it’s ‘good Friday’ and every such outlet in this state is shut down.
Jacinta: Right, and so what’s so good about Good Friday? I’ve heard tell it’s good for us to have a complete day off from shopping or having paid servants wait on us – a bit like having a day off from using electricity or motorised transport or – imagine it – a whole day in which smartphones couldn’t be used. We would somehow be better human beings, more appreciative of the first-world splendour we bask in, if we experienced the horrendous suffering of being deprived of it for a day.
Canto: Well I’ve had thoughts of that kind in the past, but I’d rather be up-front and call it first-world-free day or some such, because we both know good friday isn’t about deprivation of our favourite indulgences, or, if it is, that deprivation is supposed to remind us that on a ‘good day’ around 2000 years ago someone was crucified. A horrible death but not so horrible in this case because this particular guy was an immortal being in disguise who is now still alive and all around us and loves us terribly much. So it’s all good.
Jacinta: Yeah…right… sooo…
Canto: Okay the reason they say it’s good is because this immortal being died, or pretended to, or went through enormous suffering, because this allowed us to be saved.
Jacinta: Ahh right… saved… saved… ummm
Canto: Look Jass … I know this seems confusing to you but if you take a thorough-going theology course, and maintain a deeply spiritual lifestyle for the next several years you might be offered a glimmer of the revelation enveloped in this outwardly mysterious form of knowing-as-being.
Jacinta: Ohhh… shit… but all I really wanted was a caffe latte..
Canto: Okay well the reason you won’t get your latte today is because a certain dwindling section of our society believes this story of Jesus on the cross is literally true, or symbolically true or true in some deep sense which is beyond our shallow faithlessness, and this section of our society, though now a shadow of its former all-powerful self, once had complete control of our polity and economy and thus dictated what holidays we should have and why. And since we really like to have holidays and it would be a pain in the national arse to rename or reconfigure them, the ship of state being very difficult to shift from its course and all that, we’re stuck with good friday until the dwindling near-minority dwindles to such a level that it becomes a national embarrassment that we’re still pretending to respect such inconcinnities.
Jacinta: Well I saw on the morning news that the Sydney fish market’s open today.. wherever that is..
Canto: I think it’s in Sydney.
Jacinta: … but nothing’s open in dear old Adelaide, the shitty of churches. I don’t think we should just sit back and accept this. Why aren’t people protesting?
Canto: Okay, yes, let’s protest. What do you suggest?
Jacinta: Well, ummm, we could write to our local MP?
Canto: Yes, that would turn the ship of state around quick smart.
Jacinta: How about a petition?
Canto: Now that’s original. We could put it out over the net through change.org or some such, and sit back and watch the overflow of community outrage…
Jacinta: Well the fact is, as you say, we love our holidays, so many people are prepared to be completely hypocritical about the reason for the season, even to the point of accepting the inconvenience of one complete shut-down day…
Canto: So that’s the end of our protest?
Jacinta: Pretty much. Join me for a nice breakfast out somewhere tomorrow morning?
Canto: You’re on.
