Ahem.  Greetings.

Okay, i think a prefatory word is in order before i go on to the main substance of the post.  That last entry was not intended as part of a "series"... i have two other blogs that are devoted to serial presentations, one an oddball narrative which is soon to take a thrilling and unanticipated turn, and the other a sober issue-oriented forum currently devoted to the philosophy of education.  This here blog is supposed to be more of a "random observations and autobiographical tidbits" sort of thing--in other words, just like everybody else's blog.  However, given the wholly unanticipated firestorm of response that i seem to have generated, i feel i need to add a few observations before moving on to the next random observation or autobiographical tidbit.

Indeed, at least a couple of my readers seem to have formed, based on the last entry, serious concerns about my spiritual health.  Perhaps some further explanation / exploration of the issue can serve to set their hearts at ease.  

The last post was not an attempt to systematically lay out a position statement.  It was simply an interesting story with some commentary attached.  It may reasonably be analyzed on three levels: (1) as a relatively innocent, comical story about a recent incident; (2) as a critique of feminism; and (3) as a critique of women's styles of thought and communication.  Now, i don't think that most of the readers had a problem with the reporting of the incident as such.  It was just an interesting, slice-of-life account.  Conversations among groups of people happen all the time.  And i don't think that most of y'all were upset by my remarks in opposition to feminism; it is my impression that most of you are not sympathetic to feminism.  It's on the third point that i seem to have stirred up such feeling, and it's the third point that i'd like to address in this entry, although i think that, in the process, i'm going to have to give some attention to point #2:  the nature of feminism.

First, i think it bears mentioning that (2) and (3) are very different issues; they just happen to have converged in my last post.  The criticism of feminism is a radically different thing from the criticism of superficialiity of thought among women.  Indeed, the second of these is a criticism that you might hear from a feminist, directed toward other women.  By the same token, the critique of feminism is something that many intelligent, godly Christian women would approach with impressive energy and conviction.  So perhaps we ought to begin with a brief discussion of what exactly feminism is, and why it is a problem.

Feminism is a poisonous conceptual framework that has implications for the nature of personhood and of relationship, society, the church, marriage, family, authority, the whole deal.  It is an essentially satanic system of thought, in that it undercuts the most basic structures of human life, foundations on which God has constructed the edifice of human reality.  During the period of roughly 1800-1970, "feminism" was a radical social and intellectual movement, going through various phases but concerned largely with such issues as women's suffrage and more equitable laws concerning marriage and the workplace, issues which seem reasonable enough in themselves but which were, in fact, merely the tip of the iceberg of what the women's movement represented.  During the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's, the discussion heated up considerably and some of the more frightening implications of feminism became apparent.

Now, during the past ten years or so, an even more frightening thing has occurred: feminism has succeeded in becoming mainstream.  In other words, most people (and certainly most women) are feminists without even realizing it, and without even necessarily liking or identifying with the term. 

Indeed, one of the interesting things in the story i related in my last post is that here we had a gathering of traditional, socially conservative women, all of them Christian and most married, who were articulating feminist ideas without even realizing it, many of them probably picked up from mainstream Christian books, radio preachers, etc.  Had you asked them if they considered themselves feminists, most of them would have said "No!"  But that's because most contemporary Christian women no longer have a clear understanding of the biblical teaching on gender and how it is distinguished from feminism.  And the Christian publishing industry isn't helping things any.

Here's the deal.  In the beginning, God created humanity, man.  The Hebrew word adam is simply the word for man, in either the generic or the gender-specific sense.  It makes all the sense in the world that the first man was named, in Hebrew, man.  Adam started out as an individual guy, was later split by God into two gender-differentiated people, then went on to split further into more and more people... and by now has become a race of 6.5 billion specimens.  We are all adam.  Adam's gotten a lot bigger over the past few thousand years. 

Now, when God split Adam into two parts, or persons, He sifted human nature into two major bodies of personhood and experience.  The male and female halves of the human race developed two different profiles in terms of personality, thought process, areas of concern, etc.  You've got the "male" approach to things, and the "female" approach to things, male and female natures.  This is all fine and good; it's what differentiation, division of labor, is all about.  There is nothing wrong, or inferior, about women--in terms of their God-given nature--and if you read my last blog entry carefully you know i never said that there is.

Why did this differentiation take place?  Because God had given man, adam, a daunting task:  to manage the entire world.  This creation mandate, or cultural mandate, carried within it the responsibility for the entire subsequent management of human history; not just agriculture and community, but politics and economics, the arts, literature, the sciences and technology, etc.  It was simply not reasonable to expect the adam to pull this task off by himself.  God therefore split him into complementary halves, carefully emphasizing that one of the halves was to retain the headship--the male half.  This was not a statement of superiority or worth, but a necessary management structure.  No organization (and the human race is, forgive me for saying it, the ultimate organization) can exist without a carefully-defined leadership structure, and God planted in the male half of the organization the gifts that would be necessary for leadership.  But the gifts distributed among the two halves of the race were all necessary and good, and neither gender is in any way to be disparaged, either women disparaged by men or (and i hear this all the time, increasingly now that feminism has taken such a firm grip on society) men by women.  We are two necessary halves of an overall human blueprint.

The standard way in which this blueprint works out in practical terms is that a male individual--a "man"--and a female individual--a "woman"--will unite for life as a covenant team dedicated to the service of God.  This is the purpose of marriage:  to create teams of servants for God, whereby He may be served more effectively, and His mandate for the human race carried out more efficiently, by these teams than the participating individuals would ever have been able to manage by themselves.  Some people will say that the production of children is the purpose of marriage.  But surely this is nonsense!  The having of children is a purpose of marriage obviously; it is part of the way these human teams--marriages, or families--carry out God's mandate.  The central purpose, though, the thing that defines marriage, is not offspring, but mutual service in God's kingdom--whether that involves one's own children, or (as in my case--except i'm not married) working with others' children, or something else entirely. 

A very strong case could be made that as the human race approaches the seven billion mark, as the resources of God's delicate creation are abused and strained and pushed to the limit, with millions of orphaned children all over the world waiting for some Christian family to adopt them, the production of children is no longer quite so prominent a component in the purpose of marriage as it once was.

This is not to imply, by the way, that there is anything wrong with large families.  I am well aware that some of my readers represent families with six, eight, ten, or even a "little dozen" kids.  These people are among my most bright, interesting readers, and i'd hate for any of them to misconstrue what i've said.  I merely point out that, whereas filling the earth may at one point have been one of the major purposes of marriage and family, now that the earth has been filled, it ought no longer to be viewed as a requirement and cannot be used as a basis for criticizing married couples for whom children are not part of the agenda.  God certainly still has the option of moving upon the hearts of some families to have a large number of kids and to bless the world and the kingdom through their godly heritage, and i'm very glad He has.  I am also aware that several of my readers are involved in the Pro-Life movement.  I worked in a Pro-Life ministry many years ago; we helped women who had been injured medically, emotionally or spiritually as a result of abortion.  It was a powerful experience.  Relax:  we're on the same page.

So, marriage is the creation of a man/woman team in the service of the most high God.  The man and woman get married because God calls them to; their gifts fit together in such a way that they are ideally suited to work together in the advancement of God's kingdom. 

"Whoah!" you may be thinking.  "You're making marriage sound so clinical, so religious, so cold and deliberate!  What's love got to do with it?  I thought people got married when they fell in love!"

Well, they generally do, and then get divorced a few years later.  Half of America's marriages end in divorce, and that includes the Christians.  It's an interesting thing that this cult of "romance," with its roots in the French tradition in literature starting in the late Middle Ages, has really taken off during the past couple of centuries and expecially just during the past 100 years or so, during which time the rate of marital breakups has gone through the roof.  In traditional societies, and in Western society until modern times, it was generally not assumed that you got married to someone because of romantic feelings.  You got married because you'd found (or your family had found) a suitable mate, and it made sense.  Love would then be nurtured within the marriage relationship.

Am i opposed to marrying someone that you feel wildly attracted to?  Not at all.  Gosh, i'm hoping to!  It's just not the defining criterion.  Suitability is the main criterion; will this person and i be able to function together well as a team?  Has God called us together?  Do the gifts that He has equipped us with fit together well?  And oh yes, by the way, am i attracted to him/her?  Falling in love is not hard.  Happens all the time in chick flicks.  Finding a suitable match can be.

So, again, God created them male and female, to be matched together in marriage-teams with the man as the head.  This does not mean that the woman is his servant, housekeeper, cook, etc. but that he is the one responsible for supplying the vision and leadership in the marriage.  The man is responsible to lovingly serve his wife in areas of more subjective, personal concern--in other words, what color the wallpaper is to be is a matter that needs to be worked out in love and humility, and the man may just need to defer to his wife's wishes--and the woman is responsible to submit herself to her husband, again, in terms of the overall leadership structure / vision of the marriage relationship. 

This does not mean that she will not be a strong, intelligent woman with opinions of her own and areas of strong disagreement with her husband.  One hears of marriages in which a woman has married a man who is her intellectual or academic inferior.  Nevertheless, it is his responsibility to step up to the plate and lead--and, with God's help, he should be able to do just fine, so long as he has her cooperation.

Now, what would feminism have to say about all of this?

Feminism argues that men and women are equal; not just equal in worth or contribution, but equal in identity, job description, roles in marriage and society, etc.  Women are not, according to feminism, designed to be the companion-assistants to men; they are simply his female counterpart, and on an equal footing with him.  The purpose of life, for women no less than for men, is to find self-fulfillment.  This may best be done by "pursuing a career."  Marriage becomes an arrangement wherein two equal people, each living a life autonomous from that of the other, leave each other for 8-10 hours a day to pursue totally unrelated vocations and then come together to share a life reduced to relational, sexual and social elements.  The defining reality of marriage, that of being a team created by God for His service, is thus eliminated and the center destroyed.  Marriage comes to be defined by a constellation of important, yes, but secondary concerns, and is thereby weakened fatally.

This is patently unbiblical, and the implications are obvious.  Our society is being eaten away by them.

Now, to pursue a different track.  What happens when the differentiated natures with which God has equipped men and women are distorted?

Well, we all know what happens among men, and several people felt the need to point out the obvious to me in your well-meaning comments.  Yes, men's God-given proclivities in the areas of leadership, the development of vision and agenda, aggressive pursuit of a goal, protection of family and property, the analytical approach to things and situations, etc. tend commonly to be distorted into the most obscene monstrosities.  Men can be violent, overly obsessed with sexuality (although, in our feminism-saturated culture, women are rapidly catching up in both of these departments), concerned with gadgets and sports rather than more important things, etc.  But what doesn't get as much attention is what happens when women's God-given natures are distorted. 

Women, created by God to nurture relationships and to support an existing agenda in the carrying out of administrative detail and environmental maintenance, etc., also have patterns by which these magnificent and gorgeous patterns of gifting can be distorted.  There is nothing-- i repeat, nothing--superficial or superficializing about an interest in the maintenance of relationship.  It's a good thing.  An intelligent, substantial, strong, godly, cultured woman can be extremely relationship-oriented.  No contradiction there.  The feminists would like us to believe that there is a contradiction, but we're not talking about them anymore.    There is also nothing superficial about an attention to detail, either expressed through the impeccable management of a household, or of an office, or of a computer network, or of a nonprofit organization.  And there is nothing inherently superficial about a style of thinking / processing the world that is weighted toward feeling and intuition--so long as reason, evidence and the Word of God retain their rightful places. 

Women, are not, by nature, superficial any more than men are.  However, we are no longer what God created us to be, by nature.  Our natures have been corrupted by sin.

Hence, the criticisms i made of certain kinds of women in my last blog entry.  I complained of a tendency among many women to discuss issues sloppily, superficially, giddily, tossing opinions about with an insufficient basis in fact and logic.  Women (not the godly, sharp women i praised at the end of my last post, but the kind of women i complain of) tend to share opinions with each other, and to evaluate each other's opinions, on the basis of feeling, intuition and tradition (by which i simply mean opinions that one has picked up from some other source).  They tend to influence each other almost with a kind of gravitational pull, without recourse to reason or evidence.  Sometimes, out of deference to each other's sensitivities, they refrain from pointing out weaknesses in each other's argumentation--because the other woman's feelings might be hurt by such a discolsure and the discussion shut down. 

Now of course, feeling, intuition and the influence of others are all important sources in deriving and developing a sense of what an issue is all about.  However, none of them can establish or disprove anything.  In a discussion involving both men and women, in which the entire range of intellectual and intuitive resources is being brought to bear, there will be no such lack of foundation.  Such discussions are the bread-and-butter of God's kingdom.  The more men and women hang out together, working through issues with recourse to each other's strengths and uniquenesses of perception, the better our chances of developing a sound theology and worldview becomes.  It's when intuition, feeling and interpersonal and cultural influences are the only criteria by which ideas are being judged that trouble arises. 

This, too, might be said.  Our whole culture has become increasingly feminized in recent decades (the discussion of this would require a whole new post!), and one result is that an increasing number of men suffer from the same kinds of deficits in rational discussion that i rant against in women.  Of course, in addition to this, men have our own set of deficits in discussion simply by virtue of being men; i didn't think that needed to be stated in my last post, as it was not about men, but women.

Too, it begs to be said (again!) that not all women are like the stereotypical woman i take aim at in this and the last post.  My woman readers are doubtless rational, analytical thinkers whose opinions are based on sound reasoning and empirical fact and a thorough familiarity with God's word.  Well, then, i'm not talking about you!

As The Great Knock taught C.S. Lewis during the course of a rigorous education, an opinion is the sort of thing one must earn the right to have.  One must have evidence, reason, sound argumentation, and of course it doesn't hurt to have a strong familiarity with the Word of God... not isolated verses, but the whole thing, from beginning to end. 

Gosh, it's disheartening that i had to go and say all of that.  It was all obvious in the original post, if you'd only read carefully.     Or... maybe not....

Jeepers!  It's been a while. 

Okay.  Look at the top, or to one side, of this post.  Is there a Xanga banner ad featuring a quiz question about some idiotic pop performer about whom there really is no good reason why anyone ought to be able to answer any questions?  If so, then my remarks are well-illustrated.

I am quite pleased to say that i am entirely unfamiliar with most of the musicians, film stars, etc. about whom the Xanga site tends to ask such penetrating quiz questions in their banners.  Here's an example: "Whose bottom is featured in this picture?"  Answers:  (1) Da Horsey-Q, (2) Yobladda, (3) Kid Punk, (4) Dreamy MacBooger, or (5) Berlin Mariott.  I would almost consider it a criterion of friendship that anyone i am to spend regular time with must be familiar with fewer than 50% of these people.  Unless, that is, the prospective friend writes for a music or pop culture magazine and has accidentally learned about them through unavoidable exposure.

Have you noticed that it is gradually being foisted upon us that to be "with it," one must be familiar with the faces and personal lives of a number of silly musicians, actors, athletes and other performers about whom it really is not necessary to know anything, and who have made no real contribution to our civilization?  Where are the Xanga banners featuring quiz questions like, "The paper, Toward a Theory of Post-Phenomenological, Neo-Structuralist Literary Criticism, was written by which of the following obscure scholars?"  But no.  We are called upon to recognize the bodily extremities of people whose chief claim to fame is that they are able to write songs featuring grammatically inventive uses for the "f"-word.  

I fear the apocalypse is upon us.