A woman’s place
I caught another choice piece of Christian radio yesterday. I tuned in near the end of the program, but I found the transcript of the entire show online. You can read it here. It’s part of a series called “God’s Beautiful Design for Women.” It turns out that the “beautiful design” that God has in mind for us is to be mindlessly subservient to our husbands. I don’t dispute that the Bible says women ought to “be subject to their husbands” (Titus 2:1-5, the focus of the series). My problem is the fact that they call this teaching — well, their interpretation of this teaching — beautiful.
I understand the ideology that if God teaches it, it must be good and wonderful. Well, I don’t understand it per se, but I understand that it exists. Still, I have a hard time believing that, hearing or reading all of these testimonials from women about how they learned to submit to their husbands, Nancy Leigh DeMoss and fans of her program wouldn’t have a second thought about whether this was truly a good teaching, or whether their interpretation of those five words in Titus 2 was really the most accurate. Here’s one pretty telling quotation:
My husband has never been very open to constructive criticism or change so I have come to the point where I give him to the Lord for the Lord to work in his heart and life. It is a very freeing thing not to have the responsibility for my husband.
So let me get this straight. The wife believes the husband is making bad decisions, but he is not “very open to constructive criticism” (read: he’s a jerk), so her response is to wait for God to fix the situation. Unclear whether this works, and how long she expects it to take. Never mind that the husband is making lots of bad decisions in the meantime. She’s free! Subservient to him as per the teachings of her religion, she does not have to take any responsibility for his bad decisions. If God wants him to start making good decisions, He’ll make it so.
To me, this is a very troubling outlook on life. If you know someone is doing something wrong, and you choose not to intervene to stop them, your actions are morally equivalent to having done those wrong things yourself. (I know this statement is not undisputed, but I don’t buy the other side’s arguments. Imagine that you’re walking down the street and you see a baby lying face-down in a puddle. You didn’t put that baby there, so it’s not your fault, right? But you could easily reach down to turn the baby over to keep him from drowning. If you actively choose not to take the baby out of the puddle, you are condemning it to drowning just as surely as the person who put it there in the first place. There is no action/inaction distinction.) Feeling free in such a situation strikes me as pretty morally repugnant.
It is suggested in the program, though, that wives’ submission to their husbands inspires the husbands to be more responsible. Since their wives have chosen to accept everything they say unquestioningly and made this choice clear, husbands’ future actions are informed by this sensibility and thus they have to be more careful to make the right calls. That’s a nice idea, but I’m not convinced that it always happens. It sounds to me like the perfect set-up for a real power trip. After all, it’s God’s will that the husband is always obeyed, so how could a husband’s decision ever be wrong?
The program makes the case that submission is a sign of love. I can see what DeMoss is getting at when she talks about having a “soft and responsive heart” versus as “hardened” heart. But if we agree that this is a way to express love, what are we to make of the way husbands are supposed to act? Husbands do not have to listen to what their wives say, unless God happens to change their minds accordingly. Does this mean that husbands should not be expected to express love to their wives?
Naturally, the interpretation of this is simply that men and women have different natures, and express love in different ways. Husbands show their love for their wives by making responsible decisions and maintaining strict authority — right? Right, except for when they don’t. What if a husband is abusive with his power? DeMoss explains that this one marriage could easily have ended in divorce, because the husband’s heart was neither soft nor tender. She praises the wife for saying,
I still have daily struggles to forgive, to choose to care for my husband, to judge my pride. I do what I do because of what Jesus has done for me. He deserves to have my obedience, and my husband deserves my forgiveness and kindness because Jesus loves and forgives me.
Well, that’s nice. According to DeMoss, it’s your job, wives, to supply enough love and kindness for both yourself and your husband. You should worship your husband as just you worship a supposedly infallible deity, no matter how stupid or harmful his decisions are.
But wait! This sounds too terrible, so they’ve written in an exception:
…I don’t mean that you stand around and you watch your husband beat you up or you just say, “Hit me again.” The whole counsel of God would make it clear that if you or your children’s health or lives are being threatened, there is the biblical permission to separate, to remove yourself from that immediate danger.
I’m not talking about your body being threatened, as Jesus was—to the point of death. Most of the time it’s not life and death or physically threatening for us, though there are some. Most of the time it’s our wishes, our desires, our convenience, our comfort, our personal desires and pleasure, and He says, even if it makes your life difficult, “be subject to your own husbands . . . even if some do not obey the Word.”
I have two pain problems with this passage. First: even if the husband does not follow the Word of God, the wife should submit to him? That seems like poor advice. Second, and more importantly: where do we draw the line, and why do we draw it there? DeMoss and the Revive Our Hearts ministry have an easy answer. The Bible says that these cases are on this side, and these cases are on the other, and we don’t have to think about it anymore. But what happens if we do, horror of horrors, apply some of our own independent critical thinking to the Bible? What should a wife do if she is forbidden from buying the new shoes she wants, because her old ones are giving her back pain? What if her husband wants to take the kids out for fast food most nights, but she wants them to eat healthier? How much health should a wife consider an exception for? Also… what about emotional abuse, rather than physical abuse?
I think that cuts to the heart of the issue. If a woman is expected to humble herself before her husband just as she humbles herself before Jesus Christ, how could it possibly not be an emotionally abusive situation? Divorce is a tragedy, but sometimes it is better than remaining married — in a broader range of situations than merely the ones where there is physical violence. I don’t understand how someone could consciously decide to follow the teachings of a religion which is so blatantly in contradiction with common sense and moral intuition.
Science and fiction
Science and fiction may sound like two opposing concepts. Surely fiction has little place in science. However, there’s plenty of room for science in fiction! The sci-fi genre has been close to my heart since elementary school, so I was happy to hear that there will be a session at ScienceOnline ’09 in January focusing on science communication through science fiction. It’s being co-moderated by Peggy Kolm (who writes the fantastic Women in Science, as well as Biology in Science Fiction which I just found out about today), and she’s asked science bloggers to answer a few discussion-provoking questions. It’s hard to tell if I’m a “science blogger,” but I’m definitely both a scientist and a blogger, so here are my answers.
What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?
I read science fiction often, and watch it sometimes. (Sci-fi movies and TV shows are sometimes a little too overboard/silly with the special effects for my taste, and in my experience tend to butcher the science more often than written sci-fi does.) In general I think sci-fi appeals to me because of its capabilities to challenge our most basic assumptions and to explore human nature in different settings. Sci-fi is not just narrowly about imagining future technology, but rather about imagining future society in the context of human discoveries and how they influence our lifestyles. Also, I’m impressed by the many discoveries and inventions that were foreshadowed in science fiction, and to some extent as a scientist I read sci-fi to find new ways of thinking about research questions.
My favorite book of all time is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and I love the rest of that series as well. Some other examples of books I like for the above reasons are Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Galapagos, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and pretty much everything ever written by Philip K. Dick.
What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?
I don’t see science fiction so much as a tool for promoting science as such, though I suppose it has that effect on plenty of people. It can harm the cause of science if it’s unnecessarily alarmist. I think science fiction’s role with respect to science is primarily to give it context, to help us hypothesize about science ethics or to help us recognize benefits and drawbacks to thinking scientifically. Occasionally a sci-fi author’s message may be to discourage a certain path of R&D, or to discourage a certain style of scientific inquiry, but if that attempt at supposedly stifling science is based on a belief that such work would be unethical, I think it would be aiding the cause of science rather than harming it.
Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?
I haven’t used sci-fi all that much in this way, though it’s a great idea. It’s certainly easier to strike up a conversation with my fellow physics grad students by talking about people doing it wrong; the movie The Core is a classic in this regard. As a starting point for some more educational endeavor, I think the standard wouldn’t be so much whether the science was accurate or inaccurate, but rather whether the underlying science stuck out as strange to a viewer or reader. Often this would be blatantly inaccurate science, but I could easily imagine it being something verifiably true that happens not to match our real-world intuition. In either case, it’s a good hook to get people interested in the lesson to come.
Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?
I don’t have any specific blogs to recommend, but I would recommend the general guideline that writers make sure they are well-informed about the science they’re incorporating. There’s nothing that turns me off to a poem faster than an ill-advised metaphor about quantum mechanics. I’ll change the channel on the TV if I hear an astronaut’s dying screams as he drifts off into space. (I could go on, but I’ll spare you.) If you’re looking for blogs by scientists about their areas of expertise, the SEED ScienceBlogs are a good place to start.
Silly meme time
Progressive Conservative from The Big Stick has tagged one of us to write six random things about ourselves. I’ll be a good sport and do it, since A is pretty swamped with work this term. Hopefully he’ll return to posting soon. (Feel free to leave encouraging comments for him! Maybe we can guilt him into writing more.) Anyway, because memes are a bit of a departure from our usual style, I’m going to say a few words on the nature of memes first.
As a child of the information age, I was actually surprised when I first learned that “meme” was not originally an internet-related term. (Amateur etymologist that I was, I assumed that it came from the repetition of the word “me,” almost like a desperate cry for attention, not entirely inconsistent with the LiveJournal culture in which I’d seen memes most often.) The word “meme” was actually coined in Richard Dawkins’ 1973 book, The Selfish Gene; he shortened the Greek mimeme, meaning “something imitated” and related to the English mimic. Building an analogy to the gene, Dawkins explained how society evolves through a sort of natural selection applied to memes, cultural practices and ideas that propagate throughout a population. So the term “meme” encompasses much more than one of these gimmicky chain letters in blog form. Also included are fashions and fads, slang words and commonly used phrases, and even scientific theories and technologies.
As is the case with genetics, with memetics it’s tempting to think of surviving memes as somehow better, having proven themselves fit through natural selection. After all, that’s sort of the idea behind the marketplace of ideas. What’s fascinating to me, though, is that “fit” doesn’t mean good for human society. It means good for the meme. Just like a disease epidemic, the widespread adoption of a meme could actually be harmful to society and simply a result of the meme’s propensity to reproduce and endure. (Perhaps it was set to a catchy tune, came with a free prize in every box, or dispensed along with the promise of eternal salvation.)
At the same time, some memes survive because the people who learn them survive. These are bits of information passed on from expert to apprentice, or from parent to child. They are cultural practices and beliefs that help society, or at least help individuals make it in society. The key, I think, is in determining which memes you want to acquire, and which memes are just contagious. Relying on a vaccime or a meme-allergy (see the Memetic Lexicon for definitions to these and more cool terms) to protect you from the “bad” or unuseful memes isn’t always going to work. That means we need to step back from the context of our everyday lives and reflect on what’s happening and why. Critical thinking once again saves the day. (Skepticism is a meme too, though. So what do I know?)
-
Recent Comments
sandeep on Thoughts on religious tolerance
bruce on Alternative medicine: worth a try?
Mike on Think before you speak
Zychan on What is Acts 29?
Emily on Grad students, 1…