Sex and Religion

[Mr Cheese]

Perhaps, but I would include in this sort of education an instilling the idea of condom use. Also, I know of no faith group that currently educates women or girls on the fact that, for them, sexual relations with women have a much lower level of health danger than sexual relations with men would.

Dianic Wiccans perhaps :ignore:

Dianic Wicca - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[bassplayerswife]

I apologize for the rather off the topic post. I'm having trouble with this page for some reason and not getting all the replies and what everyone is saying.
I'm curious about sexually transmitted diseases during the dawn of Christianity, and perhaps that's why priests, and spriritual leaders sought to condemn sexual practices outside of marriage. Perhaps it was not only a method of control but preservation as well, especially if diseases were becoming more and more prevalent in certain communities. I always thought the "POX" people were stricken with was really syphillis.

 

[Mr Cheese]

I apologize for the rather off the topic post. I'm having trouble with this page for some reason and not getting all the replies and what everyone is saying.
I'm curious about sexually transmitted diseases during the dawn of Christianity, and perhaps that's why priests, and spriritual leaders sought to condemn sexual practices outside of marriage. Perhaps it was not only a method of control but preservation as well, especially if diseases were becoming more and more prevalent in certain communities. I always thought the "POX" people were stricken with was really syphillis.

Actually there were less prohibitions amongst Jewish groups...
much of the sexual prohibitions existed due to the middle ages...

At teh dawn of christianity there were MANY competing groups....
Some were even polyamorous....

The whole sex before marriage, to a large extent is really a much later invention.

 

[Carico]

I don't speak for every Christian, I speak for God since i believe every word He gave us. 2 Corinthians 5:20, "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us."

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

I don't speak for every Christian, I speak for God since i believe every word He gave us. 2 Corinthians 5:20, "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us."

But what about the times before God's word? We are talking about people that existed before the Bible was written. Do you have any comments on the subject at hand or are you just trolling?

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Actually yes, it is a point of fact. I, kind of studied this in my sociology of gender and pre-history anthropology classes. There are no purely matriarchal societies as yet identified.


In the Middle East population pressure was high: very few areas are actually livable, meaning that there is a high degree of demand for land area; as such wars were inevitable. In point of fact "skirmishes" between tribes dominates thousands of years of history in the region. Note the War focus. And while it is true that the area has a kind of harshness to its climate, Pastoralism leaves quite a bit of time for "thinking" (you are not bound up in every day search for food or survival). As such institutions tended to specialize quickly (the more time you spend every day thinking about mere survival the less time you have to spend thinking up ways to tell your neighbor that they are inferior to you).


In the Nordic areas population pressure was fairly low; lots of wide open space that the hearty northerners could expand into. War was no where near as common as such. The economics of the tribal Nordics waxed between hunting & gathering (hunting and fishing were quite common) and advanced horticulture (intensive agriculture wasn't really needed for the region). With such an economy coupled with the northern climes (cold and stormy) which required nearly constant attention in case the weather would turn for the worse, the peoples did not have anywhere near as much time to spend "thinking." They were too busy just wanting to survive and could ill-afford the loss of a few number of people, including and sometimes especially women-folk.



The major factor which seems to determine patriarchy (or the institutional discrimination against women) is the prevalence of war. In hunting and gathering societies war did not exist (period). Fights happened, but never war (population pressure was too low and humanity's global population count was far too low to support that level of loss of life). In Mongolian, Nordic, and Celtic societies (which although "war-like" did not actually war anywhere near as often as the Middle Eastern tribes did. The "northerners" (referring to all of the above) prized strength, heartiness, and prowess in battle/prowess at hunting (these were all good survival traits); being concerned with survival on a day-to-day basis leaves less room for "war-like" thoughts. Whereas in the Middle East they have been attempting to exterminate each other's tribes for thousands upon thousands of years. The presence of War was felt on a day-to-day basis. The prized traits of faith, fidelity, and ownership (which even lead to slavery being thought of as a kind of "good:" Notice in Exodus slaves are told to obey their masters) are all bespeak a world where living to the next day is not a function of battling mother nature, but where life's uncertainty comes from being killed by war or murdered by feud. "Knowing" what is going to happen (after life); knowing that your "line" is secure; and knowing that your family is well-taken care of (lots of property) allows people to take more "risks" in battle.


MTF

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

Actually yes, it is a point of fact.

No, it is actually a point of debate. There is not enough evidence to state as a fact that no Matriarchal societies ever existed. And why would a sociology class be creditials for the answer to an anthropological question?

From StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Matriarchy

Archaeological hypotheses

Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time before historical records is unknown, and opinions about this remain controversial.

The controversy began in reaction to the book by Johann Jakob Bachofen Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World in 1861. Several generations of ethnologists were inspired by his pseudo-evolutionary theory of archaic matriarchy. Following him and Jane Ellen Harrison, several generations of scholars, usually arguing from known myths or oral traditions and examination of Neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies might have been matriarchal, or even, that there existed a wide-ranging matriarchal society prior to the ancient cultures of which we are aware. The Swiss Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), is most often connected with his theory of matriarchy, or Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book This presented a radically new view of the role of women in a broad range of ancient societies. ... Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 5, 1928) was a ground-breaking English classical scholar and feminist. ...

This was reinforced further by the publication of The White Goddess by Robert Graves and his later analysis of classical Greek mythology and the vestiges of earlier myths that had been rewritten after a profound change in the religion of Greek civilization that occurred within very early historical times. The author and poet Robert Graves study of the nature of poetic myth-making, The White Goddess, first published in 1948, and revised, amended and enlarged in 1966, represents a tangential approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly idiosyncratic perspective. ... Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, scholar, and novelist. ...

From the 1950s, Marija Gimbutas developed a theory of an Old European culture in neolithic Europe which had matriarchal traits, replaced by the patriarchal system of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the spread of Indo-European languages beginning in the Bronze Age. Marija Gimbutas by Kerbstone 52, at the back of Newgrange, Co. ... Some archaeologists and ethnographers use the term Old Europe to characterize the autochthonous (aboriginal) peoples who were living in Neolithic southeastern Europe before the immigration of Indo-European peoples (for this reason also called Pre-Indo-European). ... Map showing the Neolithic expansions from the 7th to the 5th millennium BC Europe in ca. ... The Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, a prehistoric people of the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. ... For other uses, see Indo-European. ... The Bronze Age is a period in a civilizations development when the most advanced metalworking has developed the techniques of smelting copper from natural outcroppings and alloys it to cast bronze.

Matriarchy: the Myth of the Myth of Matriarchy

And one in your favor.
Matriliny is not matriarchy, repeat after me: interdisciplinary conversation III « A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

 

[trixiesingalong]

I agree with the folks who have been connecting this (control, taboos) with inheritance and property. But to assume that things were better before the patriarchies were established is naive at best. Since a lot of matrilineal cultures were either pre-written language, or had most of their writings destroyed in the process of conquering, we don't know for sure what the sexual taboos were of the time. But I am guessing there was something. To live in an area, you must have some way of controlling the population so that the community as a whole can survive. Living now, in an industrialized culture, we don't have the same life as even the city-dwellers of ancient times. So these taboos and controls seem silly to us now. But they are based on survival needs - quickly turned to power struggles once we moved beyond survival, yes. But rooted in population control for survival nonetheless.

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

rooted in population control for survival

Interesting. I can see where population control came about as a survival trait. The leaders of any tribal group had to exert control or dominance over the other members of the tribe. As the tribe grew different classes came to exist. I wonder when the religious class came about? Surely it was related to age, the oldest becoming the holder of wisdom. This may have been a survival trick as well. Keep the old alive because they carried the wisdom of the tribe where in animals the old are left to die. So the birth of religion could have been as simple as I'm old but I don't want to die so I'll become a priest. Very interesting.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

You can't ever "prove" a negative. I'm not trying to. We don't have credible evidence that at any point in history a truly matriarchal society has existed. Period. My sociology classes on gender (which examined the role of the gender institution from its formation to present) and pre-history and early history anthropology classes all confirmed this. I still have the books if it really comes down to it.


Speculation on pre-historical matriarchal societies is just that: speculation... The whole "cult of the great goddess" boils down to magical thinking on the part of pseduo-scholars like Karen Armstrong. There are similarities in depiction and early institutions for early humans, but parsimony would dictate that I reject "world-spanning" culture when a more simple explanation exists.

Carl Jung's mystical/spiritual bent ended up discrediting him amongst his peers, but his later work delving into "alchemy" and "animism" allowed him to gain (at the very least) a powerful singular insight. Our brains don't work all that differently, the methods by which we learn are the same, our environments share natural similarities, and our bodies share quite a bit of similarity in looks. Commonality of our symbols is explained very easily by the fact that we share so many similarities in our internal workings (our perception, how we build metaphor, poetry, etc) and of our physical form. There is no need to create "super institutions" and I would credit Jung with recognizing that there is something much more interesting about looking into the reasons why human psyches created shared symbols than trying to come up with external institutional reasons...

MTF

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

You can't ever "prove" a negative. I'm not trying to. We don't have credible evidence that at any point in history a truly matriarchal society has existed. Period.

Of course you can prove a negative. We don't have credible evidence that a truly matriarchal society did not exist. You said that a matriarchal society never existed, I pointed out that we don't know that and your saying that the fact there is no evidence of one means you are correct. Your logic is flawed. You can say that you don't believe that there ever was one because there is no evidence of their existance but you can't proclaim that they never existed and call it a point of fact. I'll see your period and raise you a semi-colon.

 

[Autodidact]

I'm finding all the ideas in this thread appealing. Here's another one to throw in: They're ancient "purity" taboos that distinguish our tribe from the neighboring tribe. Don't eat this, don't have sex in that way, don't wear that. The Themites eat that, but we don't, because we're the (righteous, holy, chosen) people of Our God. Because the Themites eat/wear/shtup that, we know they're degenerate, so it's o.k. to kill them, especially since they're trying to conquer us and make us eat/wear/shtup in that evil, pagan, horrible way. That's why God commands us to kill the Themites. We, the Usites, are the chosen people of Our God, and we denote that by talking/eating/dressing/shtupping/praying a certain way. That's why the shtupping codes are right next to the eating and wearing codes in Leviticus.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Of course you can prove a negative. We don't have credible evidence that a truly matriarchal society did not exist. You said that a matriarchal society never existed, I pointed out that we don't know that and your saying that the fact there is no evidence of one means you are correct. Your logic is flawed. You can say that you don't believe that there ever was one because there is no evidence of their existance but you can't proclaim that they never existed and call it a point of fact. I'll see your period and raise you a semi-colon.

Your argumentation is conspicuously duplicitous. Either you are claiming that a truly matriarchal exists or you aren't. Arguing as though one exists when we have no good evidence of this is the same thing as arguing that a giant bowl of spaghetti is responsible for the internal workings of the sun because we can't prove that that isn't the case.

Either you draw your conclusions from the best historical evidence we have or you are engaging in magical thinking.


:magic: Because everyone knows that the reason why the sun sets at night is because the moon dragon chases the sun away...

MTF

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

Your argumentation is conspicuously duplicitous. Either you are claiming that a truly matriarchal exists or you aren't.

Really? Lets look at what I'm claiming.

Not a point of fact. There is evidence that ancient Scottish Celts practiced true Matriachy. But I will agree that such examples will be small groups and few and far between.

Hmmm, this says there is evidence of a Matriachy not that there definitely was one. I also agree that it would not be a large civilization but more along the level of a tribe.

No, it is actually a point of debate. There is not enough evidence to state as a fact that no Matriarchal societies ever existed.

And here I merely point out that the question is open and there is no evidence one way or the other while providing links to both sides of the arguement.

We don't have credible evidence that a truly matriarchal society did not exist. You said that a matriarchal society never existed, I pointed out that we don't know that and your saying that the fact there is no evidence of one means you are correct. Your logic is flawed.

Here I pointed out that it was you who was insisting on a fact that was not in evidence. You are claiming one did not exist and I'm claiming we don't know one way or the other. I have provided sources that show the question is in debate and you have relied on the fact that you took a gender focused sociology class to make your claims.

Now, do you want to claim I said something else I have not said?

 

[trixiesingalong]

Um, I have a book titled "When God Was a Woman". It is written by Merlin Stone. It references many, many instances of archeological evidence for both matrilineal and matriarchal societies. There are specific laws from the times, indicating inheritance and legal contracts. There are business transactions. All from times when transitions were occurring moving from matrilineal and/or matriarchal into patrilineal and patriarchal societies. These are not the author's translations. It is all referenced from multiple, published findings from early 1900s to contemporary discoveries. All from people in good standing in the scientific communities of their times.

The book is available at my public library, so may be in your areas as well. Chapter 3, specifically.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

There are plenty of matrilineal and matrilocal societies to cite as examples. Matrifocal societies are extremely rare and there IS some debate amongst scholars about the difference between matriarchy and matrifocality. But, with that said a purely matriarchal society has not existed to the best of our knowledge. There are plenty of societies which exhibit certain traits which are necessary for matriarchy, but necessary does not indicate sufficiency.


MTF

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

There are plenty of matrilineal and matrilocal societies to cite as examples. Matrifocal societies are extremely rare and there IS some debate amongst scholars about the difference between matriarchy and matrifocality. But, with that said a purely matriarchal society has not existed to the best of our knowledge. There are plenty of societies which exhibit certain traits which are necessary for matriarchy, but necessary does not indicate sufficiency.


MTF

That was stated much better, thank you.

Now back to the OP, what do you think is the original causes of the religious sexual taboos we see today?

 

[ManTimeForgot]

The ultimate cause is increasing population pressure leading to the institutionalization of war. The proximal cause is specialization of tasks within society (which leads one set of traits or tasks to be more valued than others). Combined those two premises together and the greater strength, greater focus, simply larger, and less needed biologically for perpetuation of the male side was bound to be more valued institutionally.

MTF

 

[Trey of Diamonds]

The ultimate cause is increasing population pressure leading to the institutionalization of war. The proximal cause is specialization of tasks within society (which leads one set of traits or tasks to be more valued than others). Combined those two premises together and the greater strength, greater focus, simply larger, and less needed biologically for perpetuation of the male side was bound to be more valued institutionally.

MTF

Ok, now how does that connect to religion? Did either population pressure or war lead to religion? I doubt it. Also, I imagine the first conflicts of early man were over food as they moved from location to location and was not a population issue. Tribal movement was motivated by following food sources rather than pressure from population.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

I suppose it bears repeating and elaborating a little further from the post of mine a while back where I explained it.


Contemporary sociology places the advent of war a result of the advent of sedentism and increasing population pressures due to a larger total number of human beings (violence when killing people might reduce the total number of humans below the threshold for survival of the species is REALLY DUMB). Once people began to think of an area as "belonging to them" and competition for resources became an actual issue (not all resources were sustainable indefinitely without human effort).

As societies get larger tasks become more and more specialized to increase their efficiency. As societies get larger they compete for more and more resources. As inter-societal competition increases war becomes more and more prevalent. As war becomes more and more important as an institution society preferentially selects those members with the capabilities to engage in it. As such those traits which are often "male" are those most likely to all for successful engagement in war.

Other institutions reflect the institutions of principle importance. As such religion (which in early times functioned as basic education, ethical learning, passed on much of the oral tradition since the medicine man or shaman was the sole or major bastion of learning), economy, family, etc (basically all of the major institutions would come to reflect the importance of war).

And if you were to look those areas where war was of greater importance patriarchy was more strongly prevalent. The economy, religion, and family systems of the Middle East all reflect and/or allow for a war focus. Pastoral economies allow for a lot of time to think (the more time spent thinking the more institutional specialization is allowed to occur) since it does not require constant attention by a large proportion of the population and has long periods of minimal effort investment. And with land area significantly reduced (only so many oases to go around) there is a lot of competition for ownership. Feud/vendetta is incorporated into the family structure and ownership of human property to ensure your family is taken care of is important. And religion all has a war focus and sets males as being more important.

But then if you look at the celtic/nordic/mongolian tribes of the far north they all value strength, prowess (battle and hunting), heartiness/endurance, etc. These are all good survival traits for when nature is your "primary" foe. Wide open spaces decrease the competition for land area. Hunting, fishing, and low grade horticulture (never needed to advance beyond this, and the free range life-style didn't necessitate high intensity agriculture) all require fairly significant time investment on a daily basis. When you are often considering how to eat the next day there is less time spent wondering how your neighbor is inferior to you and should be killed or enslaved.

MTF