The point is that any clear reading indicates that the prophecy was meant for specific people and specific place, and not any indication of how subsequent believers should live.
Note that that Prophet gave predictions that came true.
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It was nothing that scholarly….y’know,I think I my have been thinking of Ian Morris’ “War! What is it good for?”
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I think it is true, (although I never thought of it before, so if anybody thinks of any passages that refute it, let me know) that the Gospels do not exhort the faithful to reproduce. And Jesus, while He was famously tolerant of the “little children” then extant, and adamant about the marital vows, He neither joined any couples in marriage nor was given in marriage Himself.
It seems to me that in the NT the parent-child relationship is just kinda a metaphor forGod’s fatherhood of us all, the texts don’t much concern themselves with the human reality. Idk, seems funny, now I think about it, when actual parenthood is such a big theme in the OT, both in the stories and in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, etc.
Mary Beard in her book about Rome, “SPQR”, says that in the Roman world infanticide was ubiquitous: anybody who wanted a baby coulda gone to the town dump any day and found some unwanted infant abandoned, still squalling, before it died of exposure or got eaten.
I can’t remember whether she discusses abortifacients, but I don’t know why people woulda bothered with them since they could simply discard the kid at birth, apparently with no legal consequences or moral obloquy.
That was the world of the New Testament.
City dwellers did that in the OT too, witness Ezekiel 16:6. But in general, Children were more of a valuable commodity in the pastoral societies of the Old Testament. You needed lotsa women and children to turn animals into usable, salable and edible products: hides,fabrics, cheese, etc. Each wife’s prestige probably woulda increased as she demonstrated her fertility. Children were an element of the patriarch’s wealth.
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For what little it is worth – back in high school Latin class, attention was drawn to the Roman founding myth, that Romulus & Remus as babies were “exposed” (I think that was the technical term) on a hillside, being the then-accepted way of dealing with babies whom the father did not want. But a she wolf came along and suckled the babies; the rest is history.
When later Romans followed the same practice, if no she wolf happened to come along – well, that was simply the will of the gods.
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An effective abortifacient would spare the mother months of metabolic demands plus inconvenience (ask any woman who’s carried to term how much physical fun it is to waddle around, lose teeth due to calcium robbing for the fetus…). There were known abortifacients in antiquity, and they were known because there was a demand.
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Eeeeek, you sound like my daughter! She seems to think pregnancy will be a horrible debilitating experience, despite MY assurances that she’ll very probably be like me, who sailed through it at an advanced age. But you’re right, of course there have always been abortifacients. I’ve spent (nay, wasted) time on other sites trying to find out at exactly what point “pro-life”people believe post-coital measures to be murderous, starting with the bucket of water in the prostitutes’s room. It is something people always have done and always will do. And the Bible does not say Word One about it.
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As evidence of this, the original Hippocratic Oath, dated to between the fifth and third centuries B.C., included the item:
ὁμοίως δὲ οὐδὲ γυναικὶ πεσσὸν φθόριον δώσω
Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
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I thought a pessary was a contraceptive measure. But I reckon, like n IUD, it works by preventing nidation of the fertilized egg if the wearer does conceive.
The Hippocratic Oath for doctors is, in my state at least, purely ceremonial (whereas we attorneys recite an oath that could been written by Cicero). Doctors only have to swear or affirm that they are adults and not drug-addicted. But for every doctor I’ve known the recitation of the ancient oath with their classmates was the most meaningful and memorable part of graduation into the profession.
I doubt they do it anywhere any more. And, as with all such customs, opposition to it didn’t begin from the Left but from the Right, not people who DIDNT take it seriously, but people who DID, who believe that “I swear by Apollo” is tantamount to invoking the devil. That’s the reason we have the option in our laws to “affirm” rather than swear; it’s not for people who don’t believe you can invoke God, it’s for people who believe it is a sin to do so. “let your yea be yea and your nay be nay”.
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I mostly meant that if a pregnancy is not wanted, there are alternatives other than abandonment of a full-term infant, such as early abortion. No, a wanted pregnancy need mot be a metabolic nightmare, although it can be for some women.
And blind eyes were often and still are, turned away from inconveniences - not inconvenient babies.
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This passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:37):
King James: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”
Vulgate: “sit autem sermo vester est est non non quod autem his abundantius est a malo est”
is taken by computer scientists as Jesus’s endorsement of digital data communications, in which transmissions are exclusively made up of one (yea) or zero (nay), and anything in between or ambiguous always ends in evil.
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Undoubtedly true. Although it makes ya wonder then, if Beard is correct, why so many women evidently DID go to term with an unwanted fetus.
But of course, that still happens today, despite the widespread and well publicized availability of chemical and surgical pregnancy termination: witness the “prom mom” cases, girls who just leave the infant face down in the Girls’Room toilet.
And THAT gives me a chance to write sump’n I have long wanted to write: I think that is instinctual mammalian behavior. When I look back at my immediate post-partum weeks, it seems to me almost everything I did was instinctual, although I rationalized it all at the time of course.
Plenty of mammal moms will destroy and devour their own young if they give birth in circumstances where they don’t feel safe, or there isnt enough food. It makes sense because mammalian young have a loooong dependency period. If mom doesn’t survive, they won’t either, they wont live to breed, so in terms of perpetuation of the species it’s more efficient if she takes their protein back to nourish herself and she, the adult, lives to breed again.
When we give birth in a delivery room, with everyone praising us and exhorting the beauty of the baby our mammalian bonding instinct naturally kicks in right away. But the opposite instinct (be rid of the offspring so you yourself can live!) probably takes control when a woman delivers alone, terrified, maybe never even having known or acknowledged that she was pregnant. I don’t think the prom moms really know or intend what they’re doing.
And I think everyone knows that on some level; such cases are rarely or never prosecuted, unless there’s an accomplice.
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I have to make a guilty admission – I never finished “Quiet Flows the Don”. I was doing well until reaching the section where the unhappy wife decided to punish her unfaithful husband by aborting his child. I seem to remember it took about 3 horribly graphic chapters for the wife to die from the village abortionist’s efforts. Closed the book and never went back.
Before modern medicine, sex and childbirth were life & death matters for the average woman. Going to term might have been perceived as less risky than a primitive abortion.
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Did you see the movie Тихий Дон?
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No, I have not seen that movie. The book was more than I could handle!
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The ultimate irony of feminism is that feminists adopt the masculine values for women, instead of celebrating feminine values. To restore balance, men are being pushed towards adopting feminine values for themselves.
This won’t end well, but one of my frustrations has been how long the fires of stupidity last and how much they consume.
SciFi author Ursula Le Guin has explored taking the ‘progressive’ values to the extreme (herself being a ‘progressive’ of course). For example, in Lathe of Heaven, there are no races, everyone is grey. In The Left Hand of Darkness, there are no sexes, everyone is ambisexual. There’s also The Dispossessed about anarchism vs capitalism. It’s an entertaining voyage into the ideology. As they say: ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’.
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I’m not sure whether it’s a matter of being pushed to restore balance or simply boys and men responding to the incentives present in the environments in which they find themselves today. The primary and secondary educational edifice which has been erected is largely controlled and operated by women who prefer the behaviour of girls (quiet, cooperative) to that of boys (rambunctious, defiant) and structure rewards and punishments accordingly. Boys who do not respond to these incentives are diagnosed with the fictional “Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD) “disease” and drugged into submission. Here is a chart of ADHD diagnoses through the years from the impeccably trustworthy U.S. Centers for Disease Control:
According to this same document, in 2016, 62% of those diagnosed were taking “ADHD medication”:
- Ages 2–5: 18%
- Ages 6–11: 69%
- Ages 12–17: 62%
“ADHD” is what we used to call “boys will be boys”.
The boys who are not zombified by the drugging and “behaviour treatment” (47% receive it) and are ambitious and wish to go to university to get ahead find themselves in a female-dominated environment. Campus Explorer reports in “Analyzing College Gender Ratios” across all U.S. colleges men accounted for only 43% of students and this same ratio was true of bachelor’s degrees granted.
As graduates enter the workplace, many are filtered through a “human resources” establishment which is heavily female-dominated and disinclined to value traditional male behaviour such as ambition, assertiveness, and independence.
Is it any surprise that males run through this gauntlet are coming out less “masculine” than when those characteristics were valued in the academic, business, and professional fields?
My guess is that one of the reasons for the extraordinary proliferation of facial hair among younger men today, especially “dumbeards” that look like scraggly four day stubble grown by those who cannot grow, or cannot be bothered to cultivate a proper beard, is because that is about the last remaining way males can distinguish themselves from women, who now dress, behave, and compete just like men used to, and all other forms of traditionally male behaviour are forbidden, discouraged, or pose a risk to their careers.
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What? The majority of young people whose lives are already compromised by being burdened with high non-dischargeable student debt are female? The Lord works in mysterious ways!
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And yet, and yet…. women are attracted far more to the “bad boys” than to the demure, quiet, non-assuming men. Especially those “highly educated” ones. (Unless they’re rich.)
Go figure.
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Biology (still) beats culture…
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