On the Question of Freedom_Epictetus' Enchiridion Expanded_§1.

There are just going to be days when we feel, or perhaps we have the absolute certitude, that we have no control over our lives. Days that are chock full of the ‘Oh, sh—t!’ moments that the world hands off to us from time to time, and far too often for most of our tastes. However, the very fact that we at least realize that we are being clocked by life is a very good thing indeed, philosophically speaking, because it shows that we are observant about how life in this world actually works!

            (NB—I appreciate that this line of conversation sounds a little like the tired old joke about how good the Irishman feels after he stops whacking his head against a brick wall, but we need to do this just a little bit longer.)

As a matter of fact we do not have control over every single thing in our lives, but we do, always, have the ability to control some things in our lives. The trick is to learn what kinds of things we can control, and to go for it, and what kinds of things we cannot control, and to walk away from them! This is a lesson well learned by a former slave, Epictetus, whose thinking encourages us to imagine that, in the midst of a world full of confusion and chaos, there are still some things about our lives that we can control.

            Despite this hectic, compulsion-driven world that seems to think we are some kind of Raggedy Ann or Raggedy Andy to be tossed about on the winds of fate, this once-upon-a-time slave still thinks that it is possible to make meaningful choices in our lives relevant to how best to live out our days.

Here is E’s first Stoic recipe, amplified for our thinking pleasure, for a life of freedom from oppression — both from within and from without:

Epictetus, On Things Within Our Control: “There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control.”

            OK… one has to admit, this is a promising if rather uneventful beginning.

“Types of things we can control are our own (re)actions, such as thoughtless assumptions, impulsiveness, cravings, and allowing ourselves to be led by our inclinations –in a word, those types of (re)action that come from ourselves.”

            We can control our own actions-reactions, says E, because after all we own them—they are the works of our own flesh, as the Apostle Paul might have said; the fruits of our loins, as it were, which no one has pushed on us from the outside; the first-born children of our own personal imaginings.

            First, on this non-exhaustive list of personal (re)actions that we can absolutely control, are thoughtless or hasty assumptions, which include unformed and uninformed opinions, a suspicious mind or knee-jerk reactions, rejoinders and comebacks (smart, snotty, and other), and any manifestation of the will to mis-take or to mis-understand someone or some situation. The rather straightforward way to break out of the prison we create for ourself by the thoughtless assumption is to take a little time to educate ourself concerning ‘stuff’ happening around us. The old adage, attributed to 18^th-century English poet Alexander Pope, has it that “a little learning is a dangerous thing”; but the will-to-ignorance is ultimately lethal: its asphyxiating effects on the mind are no different than wrapping chains around the slave’s body.

            Next, on Epictetus’ shopping list of ‘stuff’ that we own all by ourself and that we can therefore control, comes impulsiveness, which is all about us rushing about like a lunatic; being in a hurry; being emotionally hasty because we are too lazy to be emotionally thoughtful; and, in general, being way-too-eager about wanting what we want.

            Then come the cravings, a concept reminiscent of the old biblical notion of coveting. But beyond not coveting ‘your neighbor’s wife’ (which is the obvious biblical no-no), Epictetus reminds us that craving after anything, that longing or yearning for anything (aside from the occasional Ben & Jerry’s, of course), is an attitude that chains the craver to the cravee—and that we effectively sell ourselves into slavery, we become ‘owned’ by the cravee (e.g., by the Ben & Jerry’s) until our craving is sated. We become the perpetual unsatisfied… the eternal malcontent, and as the otherwise permanent inhabitant of our own private winter of discontent, we begin slowly freezing to death.

            By way of closing out his list of controllable attitudes and emotional strategies—finally, says Epictetus, we ‘go to jail’ without a get-out-of-jail-free card when we allow ourselves to follow our inclinations, both intellectually and bodily; because this means that we ‘tend’ to or ‘incline’ to exclude things based on feelings or on predispositions instead of thinking about them, which means that, very often, we may tend to reject things (good, bad, and indifferent) out of hand, or we may refuse to try new things. Is it possible that Immanuel Kant borrowed his thinking on practical reason, esp. in terms of inclinations, from this slave of yore?

           

Each of these attitudes or mindsets is manageable, says our freed slave-turned-teacher-of-the-good-life, and it is important that we should govern them, because they tend to come to us like Christmas presents: all wrapped up in decision-making strategies that are personally oppressive and enslaving, and which contribute to the construction of the walls fortifying our own personal mental prisons. At this point Epictetus lets drop the other shoe—because it is not enough just to know that self-control is possible and what it is that we can control about ourself; we must also become aware of things over which we have no control, and of the best way to handle such ‘monsters in the night’ when they inevitably come pounding on our door.

Epictetus, On Things Beyond Our Control: “Types of things we cannot control, on the other hand, are our body, possessions, our reputation, legal or political power that others have over us, and in a word, types of (re)actions that do not come from ourselves.”

            Alright, says Epictetus, we have seen some types of things, mostly our own personal (re)actions, over which we can exercise some control. So la vie est belle, right? Well, almost; and not always—because there are also things in and of this world that seem, whether we will or no, to be able to move us around like the proverbial winds of fate, helter-skelter and higgledy-piggledy, like so many Raggedy Anns and Andys.

            First of all there is our body itself, which, it would seem, has its own mysterious ways about it, and is not always the most agreeable or good-natured partner in the mind-body duo. Damage control in this area is going to be pretty much a full-time job, says E. Have you ever tried to master some skill, like playing the piano or ballroom dancing or doing some sport or playing darts, only to discover that your body has its own ideas about performing the necessary tasks at hand? And what about all this aging business? ‘Nuff said.

            Then, of course, there are all those pesky, ego-satisfying possessions we have to think about. Why is it that we spend so much time and money on getting lots of toys, lots of stuff, property, and acquisitions of all sorts, only to discover after we ‘own’ all the stuff that, in an ultimate and tremendously unfunny irony, it is really the stuff that owns us? A simple case in point: we take out student loans to get a college education; we consume the education we choose, whose diploma is out of date even before we have finished chewing, swallowing, and taking a drink of our beverage; and then we pay off the student loans for the next 20-30 years. Where is the ‘ownership’ in this scenario, and who has it? Who is slave and who is free, who possessing and who possessed?

            Do you care what people think about you? Big mistake, says Epictetus; because reputations always hang in the balance and on a whim. How can movie or stage or pop stars ever hope to have everyone like or at least appreciate their work? It is true that they can hire P.R. guys to work on public opinion, image, et al, but at the end of the day the opinion others have of us is all their own. “Our” reputation is ultimately just “their” opinion. And because we have no real way to control “their” opinion, Epictetus advises us just to walk away from it. Sometimes “their” opinion will be fair, sometimes not; but always the opinion will be theirs, although the reputation will be ours!

            Finally, the world being what it is –full of bean counters and all, Epictetus reminds us that there will always be those who have legal or political power over us. E calls these folks simply magistrates [aÓrcai], but we have the post-historical luxury of being able to fill in the blank with our favorite words for those, both well-intentioned and a---holes, who administer our daily life, such as judges, bureaucrats and administrators, bankers, lawyers, politicians, and other ‘seech vermin’, to borrow on yesteryear’s hillbilly tones from Walter Brennen.

            Perhaps one way to amplify Epictetus’ thinking on the inequality in the power relationship between those who have been given bureaucratic authority and those who are called to submit to bureaucratic authority, is to consider the issue in the light of the timely topic of gay marriage. Here is the scenario: the U.S. Supreme Court just recently (June 26, 2015) legalized gay marriage and the recognition of gay marriage in all 50 of America’s states. This means that, for better and for worse and whether the individual want it or not, nine American magistrates have decided, and have imposed their ‘decision of nine’ on all 318.9 million (2014) Americans, that gay marriage is now the ‘law of the land’ in the United States. And yet, one might ask, how should the individual think about this and what might he eventually do, given that a panel of nine is compelling all Americans to accept something that, perhaps, many individual Americans might not privately wish to accept?

            Well, it seems pretty clear at least how one group of Americans, Christian Americans, are called to act in this scenario. In Romans 13:1-7 the Apostle Paul, who is by the way, Epictetus’ almost exact contemporary, lays out a perfectly clear course of conduct to be followed by the Roman Christian community in moments when it is actually important to recognize the inequality of power between those who have legal or political power over us, what Paul will call “governing authority,” and the rest of us who do not have that authority. First, says Paul, the overarching principle for the Christian to respect is that “The authorities that exist have been established by God,” and that Christians therefore should bend the knee before the governing authorities as though to God Himself. This is actually the meaningful end and conclusion of Paul’s argument at this point, because it obviously means by application, in the context of our gay marriage scenario, for instance, that the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are “God’s servants,” and that the will of God Himself is favorable to the idea that equal standing before the law should govern marriage of any sort in the United States, hetero- as well as homo-sexual. Following Paul’s reasoning, God is obviously pro-gay marriage in his contemporary dealings with the United States.

From Dreamstime.com

            On the other hand, would Epictetus have us think and act any differently in this situation of gay marriage in the United States? Well, yes and no. Paul advises the Roman Christians to cultivate both submission and right attitude in such situations, which are beyond our personal control, calling them not only to accept but also to respect the Supreme Court’s decision as a ‘good’ because it is a ruling that derives from “servants of God” acting at the behest of the Big Guy Himself.  So, like the Apostle Paul, Epictetus also recognizes that there are going to be things beyond our control. However, unlike Paul, E does not encourage us to participate in any sort of trans-psycho-babble-ation whereby we forcibly translate such things either into something ‘good’ (because, for example, it is said to correspond to the unveiled will of God) or into something ‘evil’. Rather, E encourages us to be indifferent to all things that are beyond our control: “We must,” he says, “consider things beyond our control as of lesser importance, as enslaving, as restricting us, as alien to us because they come from others.” So what is important to Epictetus is not whether we like or dislike the specific things those in authority over us do that concern us, but rather to acknowledge whatever real control we have had in and over the situation, and to make the occurrence of such situations a background issue of being alive in the world, rather than a foreground issue of high drama and high blood pressure.

Full translation (Aiken 2015) of the first precept of E’s Enchiridion:

            Says Epictetus About Things Within Our Control: There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control. Types of things we can control are our own (re)actions, such as thoughtless assumptions, impulsiveness, cravings, and allowing ourselves to be led by our inclinations –in a word, those types of (re)action that come from ourselves. Types of things we cannot control, on the other hand, are our body, possessions, our reputation, legal or political power that others may over us, and in a word, types of (re)actions that do not come from ourselves.

            Now, naturally, the types of things we can control are easily accessible to each one of us, they are without coercive force, and they do not restrict us. On the other hand, we must consider things beyond our control as of lesser importance [aÓsqenh = unimportant, irrelevant, feeble], as enslaving [douvla = slavish, unquestioning, unoriginal, mindless; submissive-subservient, servile], as restricting us, as alien to us because they come from others.

[Here is the Greek text for you hellenophiles. Notice the efficiency of language, which is pretty predictable give the aphoristic structure of this handbook for good thinking and conduct.]

            Tw◊n o¡ntwn ta» me÷n e˙stin e˙f’ hJmi√n, ta» de« oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n. e˙f’ hJmi√n me«n uJpo/lhyiß, oJrmh/, o¡rexiß, e¶kklisiß kai« e˚ni« lo/gwˆ o¢sa hJme÷tera e¶rga: oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n de« to\ sw◊ma, hJ kthvsiß, do/xai, aÓrcai« kai« e˚ni« lo/gwˆ o¢sa oujc hJme÷tera e¶rga. kai« ta» me«n e˙f’ hJmi√n e˙sti fu/sei e˙leu/qera, aÓkw¿luta, aÓparapo/dista, ta» de« oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n aÓsqenhv, douvla, kwluta¿, aÓllo/tria. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, .1.1.1.1, etc.)]

A brief background of The Enchiridion of Epictetus.

            The Enchiridion or The Manual of Epictetus is an aphoristically short guidebook of Stoic ethical advice, of practical precepts for living the good life, which was collected and assembled by Arrian of Nicomedia (c.87 - after 145), Greek historian and senator of the Roman Empire, in the 2^nd century C.E.

            According to Wiki sources: “For many centuries, the Enchiridion maintained its authority both with Christians and Pagans. Two Christian writers – Nilus and an anonymous contemporary – wrote paraphrases of it in the early 5th century and Simplicius of Cilicia wrote a commentary upon it in the 6th. The work was first published in Latin translation by Poliziano in Rome in 1493; Beroaldus published another edition in Bologna in 1496. The original Greek was first published in Venice with the Simplicius's commentary in 1528 and an English translation appeared as early as 1567. The book was a common school text in Scotland during the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith had a 1670 edition in his library, acquired as a schoolboy.”

Reposted Essay_Marriage & the Bible (from May 2013)

Marriage & the Bible. So… it seems that a Big Question on many minds at this moment concerns Marriage.  How often do we hear the term, the “biblical view of marriage,” in the various media? Is Marriage really only for one man and one women? It just seems that among all the variety of interesting social possibilities for Human Coupling, there should be more than just this one single possible biblical marital model that we Moderns might consider.

            Other possible cultural and religious models abound – among which is polygamy or polygyny (multiple wives); polyandry (more than one husband—really! …imagine the dirty socks! This is apparently something of a Buddhist thing, practiced in India, Bhutan, and Tibet, and legally recognized in Thailand until 2010); then there is always bigamy (two distinct marriages at the same time… count them both!); polyamory or group arrangements; endogamy, which might sometimes begin to look like incest, but which some might think of as simply keeping a close-knit family (cf. Egyptian pharaohs) -- this was the conception of marriage, in fact, that frames the Jesus parable (Matthew 22:25ff, Mark 12:20ff, & Luke 20:27-40) concerning the one woman married to the guy who had seven brothers, her husband dies, etc., etc., etc., etc.); and then, finally, there is of course the really hip “open marriage.”

Or, alternatively, there are also social Coupling practices taken from the world of Pure Nature, which we might consider adopting for our Human societies. Consider, for example, the bonobo ape, which, it seems, “is the closest extant relative to humans.” Just think, the Wiki-god suggests that there may actually be some advantages for humans seeking to couple if they would imitate the Coupling Culture of their more remote, native bonobo cousins, for whom “Sex functions in conflict appeasement, affection, social status, excitement, and stress reduction. It occurs in virtually all partner combinations and in a variety of positions.” What is not to like in this model from Nature?

            That said, however, this little reflection is not especially about the bonobo or Left Bank Ape; but I cannot resist one last little thought -- our “extant relatives” in Nature also have been seen to do all the good stuff that humans seem to obsess about sexually, if pornography (for humans) and empirical observation (for bonobos) is any indication; but these latter also use sexuality socially, as a form of greeting, as a “means of forming social bonds, a means of conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconciliation.”

            I personally think sex as a form of social greeting has special comedic promise… but I must not let my imagination stray around loose in Nature’s playground.

Western Society could be simply reeling with the multi-dimensional diversity of possible expressions of Social Coupling and Uncoupling, if, of course, it were not so fixated on what the biblical narrative has to say about Marriage. So… what does the Bible “say” about marriage? Is there any actual biblical “teaching” that is particularly meaningful in contextualizing the question of Human Coupling? And, of course there is the entirely different question: Is there a Christian ideal for marriage for which an argument could be made using the biblical texts?

First, before entering into le vif of our subject, it seems to me that a caveat is in order: To use the Bible to substantiate any type of argument at all, reasonable or other, is not terribly reasonable. If, for example, we in the 21^st century have questions concerning with whom to “join” in the coupling act, and how the ceremonial ritual for that Coupling might possibly be practiced in this modern social context, in what way is it reasonable for us to limit our search for guidance and possible social Coupling models to those that might be found in the Bible; for this Bible only narrates the history of very specific and minor inhabitants of ancient Near Eastern time and space, and does not allow us to open up our search to include any, or all, of the other and diverse Coupling Models peppered around the countless nooks and crannies of this planet of ours?

            Did you notice what just happened? In a very slick logical move regularly used by philosophers and other well-reasoning folks, I simply turned around the slippery slope charge, which is one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” and I counter-charged the zealots with cherry-picking! Because why in the world should we limit our search for possible Coupling Models to a single specific document of antiquity, which is not even culturally relevant to us Westerners? This type of zealotry argument is a nec plus ultra illustration of the fallacy of special pleading at its very best; for why not pick the Sumerian culture for guidance instead, or the Bantu cultural traditions, or even in a moment of complete desperation, heaven forbid, the bonobo ape society?

            All right… maybe not the bonobo ape society. Because despite all the interest and social promise of their sexual-social interactions, it seems obvious that the natural model provided by the bonobos must inevitably fail as a model for their less sociosexually progressed human cousins (that would be Us), because it seems that “Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.”

            It goes without saying, of course, that with our ongoing proclivity for moralizing and religious-ifying our Social Coupling practices, we 21^st century Western humans just will not stand for anything that smacks of non-monogamous Coupling. Which brings us around full circle to our first little caveat in this reflection: that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable.

That first little caveat aside, though, perhaps we should also explain that some biblical arguments might actually be better than others. In general, if the intent is to win arguments instead of alienating every reasoning person on the planet, then it is better to use the Bible with contextual sensitivity, rather than to use it literally. For example, Pastor Guyton, a culturally contextualizing reader of the Bible, recently reflected on another American pastor, a literalist, who wrote a book in which he defended slavery in Civil War America, because the Bible tells him so!

            So goes the literalist argument: “the abolitionist movement was wrong and the Civil War should never have happened, because if Southern slave-owners had been allowed to implement the Bible's teachings on slavery, then a more humane transition would have taken place through ‘gospel gradualism.’” And there you have it, straight [almost] from the literalist’s mouth.

            The point of this little distinction between a culturally contextualized and a literalist reading of the Bible illustrates the problem one has when using the Bible to defend or argue any given position—it is almost always impossible to determine convincingly whether, in its capacity as historical witness, the Bible simply contains illustrations of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether, in its capacity as moral authority, the Bible is actually trying to teach us, in a timeless here and now, also to go and to do likewise.

Do you want the good news first or the bad news? First, there is just a little bit of bad news, which is that the good news about sexuality and Coupling in the Bible is not all that good.

Bestiality & the Bible. Some good news is that the Bible is not very positive toward bestiality. Germany can soon rest easy, because its Agriculture minister is set, soon, to introduce a new ban on bestiality, which will reverse a 1969 decision to legalize zoophilia. I am not quite sure how best to respond to zoophiles, German or other, “who argue that they treat animals as equals and never force them to do anything against their will.” I have also just learned that it is not illegal to rape an animal in Denmark. Really?

            Also noteworthy on the question of animal sex in the Bible is that men and women are treated with absolute equality—everybody and anybody who does it with an animal “must be put to death.” Perhaps it needs to be clarified that the injunctions against animal love are only in the Hebrew Bible; the Christian Testament is silent on this question. At this point, we are left to determine whether the Bible’s attitude toward animal love is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether it is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do likewise. This may not be good news for zoophilic groups in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden—user beware!

Incest & the Bible. More semi-good news is that incest of one sort or another is generally frowned upon in the Bible, although it is not always frowned upon. It seems clear, after all, that if things really started from one man and one women, an Adam and Eve type of story, then it could not have taken too long before the sociological situation evolved into “family fun games” (an expression that I borrow from my grandmother).

            So, on the question of incest and the Bible, as the tempus has fugited [tempus fugit = times flies], so have definitions of incest—one man’s incest is another man’s endogamy, and that sort of thing. Abraham, to name perhaps the most famous/notorious example in the Bible (Genesis 12:10-20), marries his half-sister, Sarai/h. So when famine drives Abraham, Sarai, et al into Egypt, and the princes of Pharaoh see the very beautiful Sarai, Abraham had a really nifty built-in excuse when the Egyptians threaten to kill him for the girl: that he is willing to trade Sarai, his sister, to the Pharaoh in return for safe-passage. Pharaoh, though, nobody’s fool, “Upon discovering that Sarai was a married woman, Abram's wife as well as his sister, […] demanded that they and their household leave immediately, along with all their goods.” Does this narrative teach us about incest, or about badly lying about incest?

            In the Deuteronomic texts, there is a rather straightforward list of forbidden relationships, which forbids intercourse between male [implied] members of family, and daughter/sister, father’s wife, and mother-in-law. However there are also some notable exceptions in the Bible to this general rule of thumb, such as, again, Abraham who shares a common father with his wife Sarai, and Jacob, who married Rachel, the younger sister of his first wife, Leah.

            More on Incest & the Bible. (This information is derived from Wiki sources, but has been verified for accuracy.)

·      Noah and his son Ham (Genesis 9:20-27), who was checking out his father’s nakedness. The Babylonian Talmud suggests that the son may have sodomized the father (Sanhedrin 70a).

·      Nahor, Abraham’s brother, marries one of his nieces (Genesis 11:29).

·      Lot’s two daughters (Genesis 19:32-35) got their father intoxicated in order to sleep with him. Both girls conceived sons, who became sons/grandsons, and half-brothers. This is certainly one-up on old Oedipus!

·      There are numerous examples of cousins, 1^st, 2^nd, and so on, marrying in the Bible – Isaac to Rebekah, Esau to Mahalah, Jacob to Leah and Rachel.

·      Reuben, eldest son to Jacob (Genesis 35:22), slept with Bilhah, Jacob’s concubine/mistress.

·      Judah, another of Jacob’s sons, “went into” Tamar (Genesis 38), his daughter-in-law.

·      Amnon, eldest son to King David, raped his half-sister Tamor (II Samuel 3).

            Just a wee bit more on Incest & the Bible. I was comforted to learn from a Christian website that incest in the Bible was not wrong before God issued his command against incest in Leviticus 18:6-18. “Until God commanded against it, it was not incest. It was just marrying a close relative.” Nothing more need be said.

            

 Perhaps it again needs to be clarified that when there are injunctions against incest in the Bible, it is only in the Hebrew Bible, and that the Christian Testament is again silent on the question. And that again we are left with the interpretative question – which is how to determine whether the Bible’s somewhat inconsistent attitude toward incest is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usages, or whether the Bible is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do (and/or not do) likewise.

Polygamy & the Bible. Now the bad news for the Bible debate team on the question of Marriage & the Bible: polygamy is the normative biblical relationship for the period. Besides all the evidence from the Hebrew Bible, which is coming up in the following little section, there is also New Testament evidence (finally) to consider in the form of Paul’s 1^st letter to Timothy. A first comment: the consensus of most modern scholarship is that the Letter to First Timothy is pseudepigraphical, which is to say that most scholars are pretty sure that Paul did not write the letter. Make of this what you wish.

            The text of interest in First Timothy is 3:1-13. The author, “Paul” if you will, is speaking to Timothy of those who would aspire to the offices of church bishop (pastor) and church deacon, both of which the author considers noble callings. For either of these offices, Paul counsels Timothy that the candidate should be the husband of (only) one wife (3:2 & 3:12), and that how the candidate rules his own family is a reflection of how the candidate will rule the flock of faithful. Again a caveat: some translations, such as the NRSV, translate our passage of interest as “married only once.” But the Greek clearly reads for both candidates that they should be a “man of one woman (mia◊ß gunaiko\ß a‡ndra).” Read and weep.

Two conclusions are patent. Primo, the author’s recommendation that the candidates should be men of only one woman extends only to those seeking to fill certain offices in the church, and is not in any way advanced as a general or normative family standard for all men of that day. The author is not trying to start any kind of social revolution in the family. Secondo, the reminder that the candidate should have only One woman (+ attendant children) clearly suggests the following hypothetical situation: that church overseers with the more normative type of polygamous families would have a much harder time keeping “order in the roost”; and it is precisely this quality of orderliness in the roost which the candidate is supposed to be able to demonstrate in order to qualify for the overseeing offices of the church. Therefore only one woman.

            This is clearly one of those “oops” moments in modern and populist biblical interpretation—sic transits the glorious “biblical” argument [sic transit gloria mundi = thus passes the glory of the world], because the “biblical” view of marriage that everyone is talking about, that the Bible teaches a one man, one woman model of marriage, falls in the face of actual textual evidence. The dominant model for Social Coupling in the ancient biblical period, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is one man and many women. 

(Much of the following information comes from www.biblicalpolygamy.com/)

·      Perhaps a first occurrence of an extreme form of alternative Coupling in the Bible is in Genesis 6, where sons of God, commonly thought to be angels, took human wives to themselves. As you read further along in the story, you will see that this did not do much to impress the Deity, and resulted in gigantic offspring, floods and rainbows. It is not quite clear whether this Coupling was in fact polygamous.

·      Abraham, father of the Hebrew nation, had 3 wives.

·      Jacob, father of the twelve patriarchs of the tribes of Israel, had 4 wives.

·      Esau had 3 wives.

·      Moses, of Pentateuch fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Saul, king, had only 2 wives.

·      David, king of Israel and man after God’s own heart, had 18 wives and 10 concubines.

·      Solomon, son of King David, had 1,000 women at his disposal, which included “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart." (1 Kings 11:3) Because Solomon was tolerant in his choice of women, choosing from among Sidontans, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Edomites, it appears that he began to wander from the religion of his Fathers, whence his later problems.

·      Ezra, of Ezra and Nehemiah fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Gideon (Judges 6-8), one of the judges of Israel, "had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten: for he had many wives." Case closed.

Other biblical illustrations of ancient cultural usage. Remember another one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” is that in Genesis God brings “them” together, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The too-convenient-to-forget part of that clever language rhyme is that Marriage was not part of the equation. There was no ritual performed – Adam wakes up from the nap, naked Eve is snoozing right next to him, and the rest is history.

            There is also the biblical illustration from the life of Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. In and of itself, the Book of Hosea can rightly be read as a metaphor, which is certainly plausible; but the story line is, nonetheless, that God commands the prophet Hosea to go out and marry a “working girl,” which, in the metaphor, would represent the world gone whoring after other gods. This is when biblical interpretation, and the to-contextualize or to-literalize question becomes interesting. Because if the biblical literalist is to take his sacred text seriously, then based on Hosea’s story he should go out and marry a working girl, and advise others of their moral imperative to do likewise. If, however, the Hosea story is simply to be contextualized, because it seems clear that the story is not simply a reflection of normative ancient cultural usage, nor is it to be interpreted as some sort of moral imperative, then the story looses all meaning to today’s world. 

Which brings us to the question of Gay Marriage & the Bible. I have written elsewhere in the Nonimprimatur blogspot about homosexuality and the Bible. The biblical texts, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, are explicit, and seconded by a long and consistent interpretative tradition in the Church Fathers. The answer is no. Get over it.

            Fortunately, though, we have once again come full circle to the original caveat of this essay – that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable. The Enlightenment in Europe, which oversaw the birth of a Land whose governing body is an Idea called We the People, and whose governing principle is an Idea called Human Reason, called this People out of Tyranny, both political and religious, and into the public arena of reasoned debate and consensus.  In this New World of ours, the informed opinion is informed precisely by debate and reflection, and not by religion. If this is to remain true about America, then the public conversation about Gay Marriage, and any other type of social change that will occur in the dynamic future of this Land of the Free, may only and ultimately hinge on the question of guaranteeing for all citizens equal standing before the Law. Religious opinions, although freely guaranteed to all men as part of their inalienable rights in this Land, are inadmissible as evidence in the courts of American Public Debate.

July’s Post_The Great Unlearning. Nietzsche’s Prophecy.

The media are having a heyday with the assorted moral and legal challenges that are splitting and coring the traditionally held socio-religious beliefs and practices that permeate our societies. The recent affirmation of gay marriage by the US Supreme Court has effectively guillotined the conventionally held American and Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. And obviously, as has been asserted by some, when traditionally held moral beliefs and religiously held opinions begin dropping like flies on the table, all things then become possible in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. There is no doubt about it: it is mighty slippery on society’s slopes, and the Times They (still) Are A Changing.

            Activist singer Bob Dylan is no doubt surprised to have lived long enough to see the Supreme Court declare de facto, by proclaiming unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act, that race is no longer an issue in America (evidence being, obviously, our Kenyan-born black president); and Republican Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert has lived long enough to predict, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider alternative social forms of marital union, that bigamy and polygamy will also eventually become legal forms of American family-making and breaking. The Future attends us, and we wait breath abated.

            So what if all this social change and all these challenges to traditional morality really do portend the dawning of a new age for America? Is doomsday at hand? Will America, as we know her, cease to exist? Well, yes, and no. Already in the late 19^th century Nietzsche gave prophetic voice to the inevitable advent of profound philosophical changes that would one day come about both in our actions as well as in our moral consciousness – because we have been too long Christianized. It would seem that the bill is finally coming due for 2000 years of Christian influence. So We the People are once again become the pioneers in a New World adventure. This time, though, Manifest Destiny is leading us into a philosophical wilderness beset with novel and diverse pitfalls and traps, and, failing the emergence of a new Natty Bumppo to lead us through the wild highways and byways of this changing landscape, the only reliable Pathfinder we have in this new intellectual and moral world order is Intelligent Reasoning.

My Meditative Philosophical Meandering this month strives to shadow some after-effects of an Idea expressed by Nietzsche perhaps most clearly in The Antichrist, which is the only book completed in what was to have been a four volume series entitled the Will to Power.

            Now for reasons that must make sense to them, philosophers and other Nietzsche interpreters have chosen to translate Nietzsche’s formulation of this Idea, the Umwertung aller Werte, through an unenlightening, immensely unattractive, and scrupulously pompous locution – rendering it as the Transvaluation of Values. Yes, the German expression does mean quite textually: transforming the value of our values; but it is also patently obvious that the English translation is, among many other not-so-nice things, pompous, because it carefully seeks to obscure through hoity-toity and self-important scholarly lingo a rather straightforward philosophical idea – that a time of Great Unlearning is dawning for western Christianized people.

           So while my present meditation is entirely that of a freewheeling libre-penseur, no blame can be traced back to Nietzsche for this. However, the springboard that propels me into this, my philosophical free-fall, yet remains faithful to Nietzsche’s original idea—the idea of the Great Unlearning of western peoples.

For Nietzsche, in a world in which an individual’s existence is the only anchor for any possible truth about Life and living, the foundational experience for an authentic life must take place in the moment of the Great Unlearning. This is in fact the story of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who was himself destined to become the first voice of this Unlearning, who was himself an isolated prophet, much like his antagonistic prototype John the Baptist, crying out in the desert a new message of good news—“make straight the way of Man.” The Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra is important precisely because Zarathustra had himself also to become aware of, and then deliberately unlearn, all the hidden little beliefs, opinions, unarticulated principles, and culturally inherited ethical practices (e.g., dead bodies and their need to be honored) that were imperceptibly, but effectively framing and therefore defining the possibilities of his Thinking. Zarathustra had to unlearn Himself before he could get on with the job of becoming a proto-Jack Kerouac come to lay out before the world of the 19^th century the story of a new “road trip” in which the hero, Man, journeys from Über-Tier (more-than-animal) to nothing-more-than-Tier (Human All too Human § 40).

            The details of this psychological journey, this road trip toward the freedom of the individual mind, are then made explicit in Zarathustra’s First Discourse (“The Three Transformations of the Mind”). The first leg of our cognitive transformation comes about when we realize that the Self is a Beast of Burden (= camel = Beast + Burden), when we become aware that we carry around in our minds, for the duration of our stopover in this twilight zone, the Burden of inherited cultural and intellectual baggage. The second leg of our transformation comes about when we seek, and find, the courage to accept the Self as Hero (= lion), when we realize that we must stand, oh how alone!, in the desert of our minds to fight against the phantasmagoric onslaught of our inherited superstitions and beliefs and values. Finally, the ultimate leg of our transformative journey into freedom, which is to say into the possession of our own minds, comes about when we awaken to the Self as New-born (= child), when we have become The Ultimate Outsider, alone in a world packed full of constructed values, now able to “see” that, like a great symphony, the World is also a composition, which is only heard as, in, and through a perceptual and conceptual paradigm called Kosmos. As the Child, the Outsider to the Kosmos, we are finally now free to follow unconstrained the paths that the World opens up before us.

            In Nietzsche’s vision of the world, for the individual to become free, for him to enter into the possession of himself as a specific distinct Self, there must be a very deliberate Unlearning of those “culturally” incrusted values that mold and frame us in our perceptions and conceptions. We must, each and every one individually in the privacy of our own solitude, shake ourselves loose from society’s “one size fits all” cupcake mold.

            To be sure, Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning was directed principally at any oppressive and anti-human-life moral beliefs that grow up out of the religious mind like great unwieldy weeds; but of course his greatest battle was pitched against the Dragon of the West, which has been too long protecting the deep-rooted weeds sprung up out of Christian death-inducing morality. So the Great Unlearning in the world of the west would be to become aware of the pervasiveness of the weed-bearing root-system of Judeo-Christian morality, then to fetch the weed-whacker of Reason and whack those weeds into individual and thus collective oblivion, and then to start all over again with constructing for ourselves suitable and life-affirming values and principles for action, which would flow out of an essentially pro- and fully- human space. So he writes in the Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, n. 30; 1888)

“The time is coming when we must pay the bill for having been Christian for 2000 years: we have squandered the Center of Gravity [das Schwergewicht] that allows us to live, and for a while we will not know whence we have come or wither we are going. With precisely that same abundance of energy that has generated among men such extreme over-estimations of mankind, we continue unexpectedly to collide with contradictory estimations.”

           

When we are born, we are not simply neutrally popped out into the world at large, and voilà presto, we begin growing as pure, self-defining plants. Rather, we are seeded into a cultural context that, quite independently from our bodies and brains, actually serves, unbidden and automatically, to provide the necessary and invisible cultural “shape” for our personal Self. The answer to the question, Who am I?, is not something physical, nor even a brain function; but this “who” is constructed like a puzzle: carefully, unconsciously at first, and piece by piece, out of all the various and sundry cultural influences that surround us. This is one reason why education is so important, and why the study of feral children so fascinating. The one teaches us about journeys whither—toward visions of what we can become if we choose to go on the various journeys the world has on offer; the other shows us a possible journey whence—from what we were and will likely remain, in maybe a more measured, perhaps softer form, if, by choice or laziness, we disregard the Life-world of journeys through the wasteland.

The philosophical quest prophesized by Nietzsche now stands before us to accomplish—to transvalue our inherited values. What is it that we most value? Justice? Equality? Goodness? Power? Peace? Money? Life? Why is it that we value these ideas, and are these ideas fundamental to the Human Animal in his full glory as both wholly human and profoundly animal?

            On the American journey to We the People we are now come upon a philosophical fork in the road. In one direction the socio-religious life unfolds before us with its gaping maw yawning like the doors of the prison it is, predictable because long familiar. In another direction there is the secular life- the new, the unthought-of, the untested, the unbounded, the free. What is left for us to do as individuals of interest, as We the People approach by fits and starts this fork in the road? To the Magical Man: it is left to you to drop to your knees to appeal to the Outrageous Deity of the “steep heavens,” and thereby to enter into the Great Silence of the impotent skies. For you others, the Thoughtful Ones, put on your thinking caps, become involved in the life of the people—there is much work, much thinking to be done.

            Thinking philosophically is a dangerous and lonely game—and certainly not an attractive or comforting enterprise for the normal clan-animal. Especially when the quest that Nietzsche has put before us is nothing less than to see the world of men with new eyes, to reconsider, and to recast the exposed and crumbling intellectual foundations of the moral self in a world becoming new. The bill has come due.

Marriage & the Bible

Marriage & the Bible. So… it seems that a Big Question on many minds at this moment concerns Marriage.  How often do we hear the term, the “biblical view of marriage,” in the various media? Is Marriage really only for one man and one women? It just seems that among all the variety of interesting social possibilities for Human Coupling, there should be more than just this one single possible biblical marital model that we Moderns might consider.

            Other possible cultural and religious models abound – among which is polygamy or polygyny (multiple wives); polyandry (more than one husband—really! …imagine the dirty socks! This is apparently something of a Buddhist thing, practiced in India, Bhutan, and Tibet, and legally recognized in Thailand until 2010); then there is always bigamy (two distinct marriages at the same time… count them both!); polyamory or group arrangements; endogamy, which might sometimes begin to look like incest, but which some might think of as simply keeping a close-knit family (cf. Egyptian pharaohs) -- this was the conception of marriage, in fact, that frames the Jesus parable (Matthew 22:25ff, Mark 12:20ff, & Luke 20:27-40) concerning the one woman married to the guy who had seven brothers, her husband dies, etc., etc., etc., etc.); and then, finally, there is of course the really hip “open marriage.”

Or, alternatively, there are also social Coupling practices taken from the world of Pure Nature, which we might consider adopting for our Human societies. Consider, for example, the bonobo ape, which, it seems, “is the closest extant relative to humans.” Just think, the Wiki-god suggests that there may actually be some advantages for humans seeking to couple if they would imitate the Coupling Culture of their more remote, native bonobo cousins, for whom “Sex functions in conflict appeasement, affection, social status, excitement, and stress reduction. It occurs in virtually all partner combinations and in a variety of positions.” What is not to like in this model from Nature?

            That said, however, this little reflection is not especially about the bonobo or Left Bank Ape; but I cannot resist one last little thought -- our “extant relatives” in Nature also have been seen to do all the good stuff that humans seem to obsess about sexually, if pornography (for humans) and empirical observation (for bonobos) is any indication; but these latter also use sexuality socially, as a form of greeting, as a “means of forming social bonds, a means of conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconciliation.”

            I personally think sex as a form of social greeting has special comedic promise… but I must not let my imagination stray around loose in Nature’s playground.

Western Society could be simply reeling with the multi-dimensional diversity of possible expressions of Social Coupling and Uncoupling, if, of course, it were not so fixated on what the biblical narrative has to say about Marriage. So… what does the Bible “say” about marriage? Is there any actual biblical “teaching” that is particularly meaningful in contextualizing the question of Human Coupling? And, of course there is the entirely different question: Is there a Christian ideal for marriage for which an argument could be made using the biblical texts?

First, before entering into le vif of our subject, it seems to me that a caveat is in order: To use the Bible to substantiate any type of argument at all, reasonable or other, is not terribly reasonable. If, for example, we in the 21^st century have questions concerning with whom to “join” in the coupling act, and how the ceremonial ritual for that Coupling might possibly be practiced in this modern social context, in what way is it reasonable for us to limit our search for guidance and possible social Coupling models to those that might be found in the Bible; for this Bible only narrates the history of very specific and minor inhabitants of ancient Near Eastern time and space, and does not allow us to open up our search to include any, or all, of the other and diverse Coupling Models peppered around the countless nooks and crannies of this planet of ours?

            Did you notice what just happened? In a very slick logical move regularly used by philosophers and other well-reasoning folks, I simply turned around the slippery slope charge, which is one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” and I counter-charged the zealots with cherry-picking! Because why in the world should we limit our search for possible Coupling Models to a single specific document of antiquity, which is not even culturally relevant to us Westerners? This type of zealotry argument is a nec plus ultra illustration of the fallacy of special pleading at its very best; for why not pick the Sumerian culture for guidance instead, or the Bantu cultural traditions, or even in a moment of complete desperation, heaven forbid, the bonobo ape society?

            All right… maybe not the bonobo ape society. Because despite all the interest and social promise of their sexual-social interactions, it seems obvious that the natural model provided by the bonobos must inevitably fail as a model for their less sociosexually progressed human cousins (that would be Us), because it seems that “Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.”

            It goes without saying, of course, that with our ongoing proclivity for moralizing and religious-ifying our Social Coupling practices, we 21^st century Western humans just will not stand for anything that smacks of non-monogamous Coupling. Which brings us around full circle to our first little caveat in this reflection: that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable.

That first little caveat aside, though, perhaps we should also explain that some biblical arguments might actually be better than others. In general, if the intent is to win arguments instead of alienating every reasoning person on the planet, then it is better to use the Bible with contextual sensitivity, rather than to use it literally. For example, Pastor Guyton, a culturally contextualizing reader of the Bible, recently reflected on another American pastor, a literalist, who wrote a book in which he defended slavery in Civil War America, because the Bible tells him so!

            So goes the literalist argument: “the abolitionist movement was wrong and the Civil War should never have happened, because if Southern slave-owners had been allowed to implement the Bible's teachings on slavery, then a more humane transition would have taken place through ‘gospel gradualism.’” And there you have it, straight [almost] from the literalist’s mouth.

            The point of this little distinction between a culturally contextualized and a literalist reading of the Bible illustrates the problem one has when using the Bible to defend or argue any given position—it is almost always impossible to determine convincingly whether, in its capacity as historical witness, the Bible simply contains illustrations of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether, in its capacity as moral authority, the Bible is actually trying to teach us, in a timeless here and now, also to go and to do likewise.

Do you want the good news first or the bad news? First, there is just a little bit of bad news, which is that the good news about sexuality and Coupling in the Bible is not all that good.

Bestiality & the Bible. Some good news is that the Bible is not very positive toward bestiality. Germany can soon rest easy, because its Agriculture minister is set, soon, to introduce a new ban on bestiality, which will reverse a 1969 decision to legalize zoophilia. I am not quite sure how best to respond to zoophiles, German or other, “who argue that they treat animals as equals and never force them to do anything against their will.” I have also just learned that it is not illegal to rape an animal in Denmark. Really?

            Also noteworthy on the question of animal sex in the Bible is that men and women are treated with absolute equality—everybody and anybody who does it with an animal “must be put to death.” Perhaps it needs to be clarified that the injunctions against animal love are only in the Hebrew Bible; the Christian Testament is silent on this question. At this point, we are left to determine whether the Bible’s attitude toward animal love is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether it is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do likewise. This may not be good news for zoophilic groups in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden—user beware!

Incest & the Bible. More semi-good news is that incest of one sort or another is generally frowned upon in the Bible, although it is not always frowned upon. It seems clear, after all, that if things really started from one man and one women, an Adam and Eve type of story, then it could not have taken too long before the sociological situation evolved into “family fun games” (an expression that I borrow from my grandmother).

            So, on the question of incest and the Bible, as the tempus has fugited [tempus fugit = times flies], so have definitions of incest—one man’s incest is another man’s endogamy, and that sort of thing. Abraham, to name perhaps the most famous/notorious example in the Bible (Genesis 12:10-20), marries his half-sister, Sarai/h. So when famine drives Abraham, Sarai, et al into Egypt, and the princes of Pharaoh see the very beautiful Sarai, Abraham had a really nifty built-in excuse when the Egyptians threaten to kill him for the girl: that he is willing to trade Sarai, his sister, to the Pharaoh in return for safe-passage. Pharaoh, though, nobody’s fool, “Upon discovering that Sarai was a married woman, Abram's wife as well as his sister, […] demanded that they and their household leave immediately, along with all their goods.” Does this narrative teach us about incest, or about badly lying about incest?

            In the Deuteronomic texts, there is a rather straightforward list of forbidden relationships, which forbids intercourse between male [implied] members of family, and daughter/sister, father’s wife, and mother-in-law. However there are also some notable exceptions in the Bible to this general rule of thumb, such as, again, Abraham who shares a common father with his wife Sarai, and Jacob, who married Rachel, the younger sister of his first wife, Leah.

            More on Incest & the Bible. (This information is derived from Wiki sources, but has been verified for accuracy.)

·      Noah and his son Ham (Genesis 9:20-27), who was checking out his father’s nakedness. The Babylonian Talmud suggests that the son may have sodomized the father (Sanhedrin 70a).

·      Nahor, Abraham’s brother, marries one of his nieces (Genesis 11:29).

·      Lot’s two daughters (Genesis 19:32-35) got their father intoxicated in order to sleep with him. Both girls conceived sons, who became sons/grandsons, and half-brothers. This is certainly one-up on old Oedipus!

·      There are numerous examples of cousins, 1^st, 2^nd, and so on, marrying in the Bible – Isaac to Rebekah, Esau to Mahalah, Jacob to Leah and Rachel.

·      Reuben, eldest son to Jacob (Genesis 35:22), slept with Bilhah, Jacob’s concubine/mistress.

·      Judah, another of Jacob’s sons, “went into” Tamar (Genesis 38), his daughter-in-law.

·      Amnon, eldest son to King David, raped his half-sister Tamor (II Samuel 3).

            Just a wee bit more on Incest & the Bible. I was comforted to learn from a Christian website that incest in the Bible was not wrong before God issued his command against incest in Leviticus 18:6-18. “Until God commanded against it, it was not incest. It was just marrying a close relative.” Nothing more need be said.

            

 Perhaps it again needs to be clarified that when there are injunctions against incest in the Bible, it is only in the Hebrew Bible, and that the Christian Testament is again silent on the question. And that again we are left with the interpretative question – which is how to determine whether the Bible’s somewhat inconsistent attitude toward incest is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usages, or whether the Bible is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do (and/or not do) likewise.

Polygamy & the Bible. Now the bad news for the Bible debate team on the question of Marriage & the Bible: polygamy is the normative biblical relationship for the period. Besides all the evidence from the Hebrew Bible, which is coming up in the following little section, there is also New Testament evidence (finally) to consider in the form of Paul’s 1^st letter to Timothy. A first comment: the consensus of most modern scholarship is that the Letter to First Timothy is pseudepigraphical, which is to say that most scholars are pretty sure that Paul did not write the letter. Make of this what you wish.

            The text of interest in First Timothy is 3:1-13. The author, “Paul” if you will, is speaking to Timothy of those who would aspire to the offices of church bishop (pastor) and church deacon, both of which the author considers noble callings. For either of these offices, Paul counsels Timothy that the candidate should be the husband of (only) one wife (3:2 & 3:12), and that how the candidate rules his own family is a reflection of how the candidate will rule the flock of faithful. Again a caveat: some translations, such as the NRSV, translate our passage of interest as “married only once.” But the Greek clearly reads for both candidates that they should be a “man of one woman (mia◊ß gunaiko\ß a‡ndra).” Read and weep.

Two conclusions are patent. Primo, the author’s recommendation that the candidates should be men of only one woman extends only to those seeking to fill certain offices in the church, and is not in any way advanced as a general or normative family standard for all men of that day. The author is not trying to start any kind of social revolution in the family. Secondo, the reminder that the candidate should have only One woman (+ attendant children) clearly suggests the following hypothetical situation: that church overseers with the more normative type of polygamous families would have a much harder time keeping “order in the roost”; and it is precisely this quality of orderliness in the roost which the candidate is supposed to be able to demonstrate in order to qualify for the overseeing offices of the church. Therefore only one woman.

            This is clearly one of those “oops” moments in modern and populist biblical interpretation—sic transits the glorious “biblical” argument [sic transit gloria mundi = thus passes the glory of the world], because the “biblical” view of marriage that everyone is talking about, that the Bible teaches a one man, one woman model of marriage, falls in the face of actual textual evidence. The dominant model for Social Coupling in the ancient biblical period, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is one man and many women. 

(Much of the following information comes from www.biblicalpolygamy.com/)

·      Perhaps a first occurrence of an extreme form of alternative Coupling in the Bible is in Genesis 6, where sons of God, commonly thought to be angels, took human wives to themselves. As you read further along in the story, you will see that this did not do much to impress the Deity, and resulted in gigantic offspring, floods and rainbows. It is not quite clear whether this Coupling was in fact polygamous.

·      Abraham, father of the Hebrew nation, had 3 wives.

·      Jacob, father of the twelve patriarchs of the tribes of Israel, had 4 wives.

·      Esau had 3 wives.

·      Moses, of Pentateuch fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Saul, king, had only 2 wives.

·      David, king of Israel and man after God’s own heart, had 18 wives and 10 concubines.

·      Solomon, son of King David, had 1,000 women at his disposal, which included “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart." (1 Kings 11:3) Because Solomon was tolerant in his choice of women, choosing from among Sidontans, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Edomites, it appears that he began to wander from the religion of his Fathers, whence his later problems.

·      Ezra, of Ezra and Nehemiah fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Gideon (Judges 6-8), one of the judges of Israel, "had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten: for he had many wives." Case closed.

Other biblical illustrations of ancient cultural usage. Remember another one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” is that in Genesis God brings “them” together, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The too-convenient-to-forget part of that clever language rhyme is that Marriage was not part of the equation. There was no ritual performed – Adam wakes up from the nap, naked Eve is snoozing right next to him, and the rest is history.

            There is also the biblical illustration from the life of Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. In and of itself, the Book of Hosea can rightly be read as a metaphor, which is certainly plausible; but the story line is, nonetheless, that God commands the prophet Hosea to go out and marry a “working girl,” which, in the metaphor, would represent the world gone whoring after other gods. This is when biblical interpretation, and the to-contextualize or to-literalize question becomes interesting. Because if the biblical literalist is to take his sacred text seriously, then based on Hosea’s story he should go out and marry a working girl, and advise others of their moral imperative to do likewise. If, however, the Hosea story is simply to be contextualized, because it seems clear that the story is not simply a reflection of normative ancient cultural usage, nor is it to be interpreted as some sort of moral imperative, then the story looses all meaning to today’s world. 

Which brings us to the question of Gay Marriage & the Bible. I have written elsewhere in the Nonimprimatur blogspot about homosexuality and the Bible. The biblical texts, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, are explicit, and seconded by a long and consistent interpretative tradition in the Church Fathers. The answer is no. Get over it.

            Fortunately, though, we have once again come full circle to the original caveat of this essay – that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable. The Enlightenment in Europe, which oversaw the birth of a Land whose governing body is an Idea called We the People, and whose governing principle is an Idea called Human Reason, called this People out of Tyranny, both political and religious, and into the public arena of reasoned debate and consensus.  In this New World of ours, the informed opinion is informed precisely by debate and reflection, and not by religion. If this is to remain true about America, then the public conversation about Gay Marriage, and any other type of social change that will occur in the dynamic future of this Land of the Free, may only and ultimately hinge on the question of guaranteeing for all citizens equal standing before the Law. Religious opinions, although freely guaranteed to all men as part of their inalienable rights in this Land, are inadmissible as evidence in the courts of American Public Debate.