Reply #85: You Do Understand, Sir, What Low-Grade Stuff This Is You Are Peddling?

[The Magistrate]

No one you are addressing here has not seen these tired wheezes for years. They do nothing to advance your claims, or to mitigate the statements whose full implications you are trying to evade.

It remains a fact that the code of law, claimed to be the direct product of the deity, a deity righteous altogether, etc., pronounces homosexual acts a capital crime.

It remains a fact that a leading apostle, held to be divinely inspired in his writings, directed that women should remain silent in services.

The reasons for this do not matter, or certainly do not matter in any way that helps you. The most they could stand for would be as mitigating circumstances in determining punishment: yes, the defendant has committed the crime, but he had a harsh up-bringing, is not very bright, and so perhaps should be shown some leniency in sentencing. It does not matter that these acts were forbidden, and in some cases punished harshly, because they were acts that could be found in the worship of other religions, and devotees of this particular deity could not be suffered to allow even the appearance of doing something some other religion viewed as sacred. This does not provide the slightest defense against the charge a murderous attitude towards homosexuality, and regarding women as inferior creatures, are things embodied in the religion from its roots, and indeed rendered as sacred charges.

Your defense of Paul, a fellow who, in my view, comes in for a good deal of unjustified disparagement, gives the key to what is really going on here. That defense boils down to stating 'Paul was no more of a misogynist than most anyone else around at the time', and that is true enough as a broad statement concerning the cultures centered on the Mediterranean. But you are contained now by a culture which rejects the views concerning women which were dominant in his time. You bring those views of your culture to your desire for religious belief, and find them a poor fit with the texts of the religious belief which is still nominally dominant in your culture. You accept the easy identification of religion with the good and moral that so many make, and so must find what you consider good and moral within your religion. Thus, necessarily, you set out to find ways to make the texts your religion holds sacred and divinely inspired say things that are in accord with your own views of what is good and moral, the present standards of your own culture and social world. Thus, Paul becomes, despite numerous plain statements that women are subordinate, an apostle of gender equality, fit for a seat on the board of MS. Magazine, a bold proto-feminist from the era of the Caesars. But it is you, you yourself, who works this change; it is not a reflection of a deeper understanding of the book or of the ways of the deity, a discovery of things that were always there if only looked at properly. You brought them to the book, and made it into your mirror. The book remains what it was and is: a product of a place and time, peculiar to that place and time, constructed by humans for their own purposes in that place and time, and no more or less relevant outside it than any other ancient work of literature.