Sunday, January 21, 2018

Hate Mail

Marilynne Robinson's essay runs about twenty-eight pages, I'm only giving you a few of those, even as the other sections of it are more than worth reading.   As to the horrible oppression that modern people whine about feeling from The Law,  she covered that quite succinctly after going through the claims of several other authors after the part I'm excerpting.

It really is interesting to discover how oppressed one can feel by law with which one seem to have no meaningful acquaintance.   If anyone could document that the obligation is deeply felt among us to forgive our debtors, then the case for the patriarchal dominance of Moses would be more persuasive.  The fact is that the hardest of the laws, those comprehended in the phrase "open wide thy hand" are never even noticed to be resented.    

I have a theory that the relatively few sexual restrictions in the "holiness code" have been fixed on exactly for the reason that people who can do so want to deflect attention from the radical economic egalitarianism of The Law, not to mention The Prophets and The Gospels and Epistles. 

Since you bring up the fact that I'm gay, it's pretty clear that the authors of the Scriptures didn't have any idea of a faithful, committed, loving relationship that included respectful, non-damaging sexual affection.   A lot has been written about that in the past forty years making a persuasive case that those kinds of lesbian and gay relationships aren't what those talked about.  I think that's especially true in some of the mentions of them in other parts of Scripture which clearly are talking about pagan temple prostitution, which would have been acts of apostacy as well as injustice against the women and children held in sex slavery by those pagan religious institutions.   I do, though, think for those who take the traditional view that they are a flat ban on any sexual relationship between men or between women, it's interesting that THOSE PEOPLE don't seem to take the far more extensive commandments in The Law that Ms. Robinson pointed out in that passage at all seriously and something on which they seem to feel God must have changed his mind. 

I doubt one in a hundred of the college credentialed whiners about how much of a hurt old Moses puts on them have ever read any of it, getting their information from people who misrepresent it hoping to get on Fresh Air or some other talk show.  If not some total boob in the atheist celebrity circuit or some even stupider stand up comic.   Make that I doubt more than one in a thousand of the college credentialed whiners.

1 comment:

  1. Funny, too, how the laws of Moses (as they are presumed) are always surgically removed from Judaism (they were used for centuries to denigrate the Jews, a foul practice I cannot defend, even though it was often done in the name of Christianity) so as to demand respect for Jews and defend any cries of "antisemitism" one wishes to make, and then just as carefully re-attached to Christians to tar them all with the same brush.

    The Jews lose their scriptures twice this way: once by Christian history, once again by modern ignorance. And no effort to understand these scriptures is ever made; only caricatures of them, born of ignorance and bred in stupidity, are allowed. As pointed out, the bulk of the law, as affirmed by the prophets (the reason for the Exile was faithlessness to the law by mistreating the poor, the widow, the orphan, the alien), is about what we today would call "social justice." But it's also about a radical economic structure that makes socialism seem almost palatable to the most committed Friedmanites by comparison.

    I just discard the lot of them. Why should I explain to them what they are so determined not to understand?

    ReplyDelete