If you want even more proof that the denizens of A Voice for Men live in Imaginary Backwards Land, let me draw your attention to a recent posting from FeMRA TyphonBlue and JohnTheOther. The post’s bland title, Men, and patriarchy in the church, belies the loopiness of this particular bit of theological argument, the aim of which is to prove that Christianity is and always has been about hating dudes.
Oh, sure, TB and JTO note, it might look like Christianity in its various forms has been a tad dude-centric. I mean, it’s based on the teachings of a dude. And there’s that whole “God the Father” thing. Oh, and Christian religious institutions have been almost always headed up by dudes. There has yet to be a Popette.
But apparently to assume that the people running something actually run that something is to indulge in what MRAs like to call “the frontman fallacy,” by which they mean that even though it looks like men run most things in the world it’s really the sneaky ladies who call the shots, somehow. TB/JTO, citing the aforementioned faux “fallacy,” ask:
Because Christianity has a male priesthood, is headed by a man and uses masculine language to refer to the God and humanity’s savior, does it necessarily follow that Christianity is male favoring?
Bravely, the two decide not to go with the correct answer here, which is of course “yes.” Instead, they say no. And why is this? Because Jesus didn’t go around boning the ladies.
Seriously. That’s their main argument:
[Christ] had no sexual life. This absence leaves no spiritual connection between the masculine body and the divine.
The Christ is sexless; presumptively masculine, but never actually engaging in any activity unique to his masculine body. …
The implicit stricture of making the female body the vessel of Holy Spirit while offering no corresponding connection between the divine and the male body creates a spiritual caste system with women on top and men on the bottom.
Also: Joseph didn’t bone Mary, at least not before she gave birth to Jesus.
The birth of Christ is without sin because, quite simply, it did not involve a penis. The entire mythology around the birth of Christ implicitly indicts male sexuality as the vector of original sin from generation to generation.
Uh, I sort of thought that the notion of Original Sin had something or other to do with Eve and an apple in the Garden of Eden. But apparently not:
Forget Eve. Forget the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the Serpent. If all human women, tomorrow, conceived and gestated and gave birth without ever coming into contact with a penis, our race would be purged of original sin.
Pretty impressive theological revisionism from a couple of blabby video bloggers who apparently don’t know how to spell “canon.” (ProTip: “Cannon” refers to one of those tubey metal things you shoot “cannonballs” from.)
The two conclude:
Our culture’s war against masculine identity, male sexuality and fatherhood is an old one. That war arguably began as we adopted a faith which marginalizes the role of men in procreation, idolizing a story that removes them completely from the process. The exemplar of male virtue in this theology is a man who had no natural sexual expression, although his character is designated as male. And his primary purpose was to be flogged, literally tortured for the “crimes” of others, and then bound and nailed through his limbs, still alive to an erected cruciform scaffold, to die from shock and exposure on a hilltop. And we somehow manage to claim that this religion elevates men over women?
Well, yeah.
Rather than supremacy, Christianity provides to men the role of asexual stewards of women’s benefit, and sacrificial penitent, preaching the gospel of a female-deifying, male-demonizing faith. It is true that women have not historically been allowed to front this farce, but mostly because that would make the message too obvious.
What?
While some kinds of Christianity get rather worked up about the evils of premarital sex and/or birth control, I’m pretty sure married and/or procreative sex is a-ok with all Christians this side of the mother in the movie Carrie. Even — well, especially — if it involves dudes. (I’m pretty sure the church fathers were never big proponents of lesbianism.)
And if women really run the show, despite men “fronting” the church, could you perhaps spell out just who these all-powerful women are? Like, some names perhaps? Who’s the lady puppeteer behind the pope?
They of course don’t offer any real-world evidence for this secret supposed matriarchy. Instead, they ramp up for a sarcastic ending:
But we continue to ignore all of this, and we entertain the farce that our religious institutions constitute a male-elevating, female oppressing patriarchy.
Yeah, tell us another one.
No point in telling you guys anything any more. Clearly you can twist any and all facts about the world to fit your increasingly weird and baroque fictions about men always being the most oppressed, past, present and future.
A Voice for Men is slowly but surely disappearing up its own ass.
I am using this (intentionally) from now on. Bless my terrible editing.
yeah, i thought that was intentional too, and i chuckled at it. anyway, i’m totally using it in the future.
Did they ever mention about how in the Catholic church a priest has to be male because he’s an icon of Christ, and women can’t fill that role?
Yeah, considering the church actually held a meeting to decide if women actually had souls like men or if they did not like other animals (and we just barely squeaked by on that one), I’m going to have to call bullshit on that utterly stupid rant.
This has to be one of the funniest MRA logic pretzels that David has uncovered thus far. So, God has historically been understood to be male. Jesus was male. The power structure of the church has consistently been and continues to be male dominated. But because Mary was the empty vessel used to birth Christ — the OP admits as much above — it’s WOMEN who are deified by Christianity and women who hold all religious power? LOLwut?!
He does realize that the virgin birth myth exists because it’s the female body that is deemed “unclean” and “used up” following sex, right? We could also get into the whole issue of most religions having some sort of mythology regarding gods impregnating human women…man, only an MRA would feel cuckholded by God.
@falconer
ive read ecco too, dawg
Pretty impressive theological revisionism from a couple of blabby video bloggers who apparently don’t know how to spell “canon.” (ProTip: “Cannon” refers to one of those tubey metal things you shoot “cannonballs” from.)
“Canonballs” really sounds like something some church somewhere would be interested in.
Wow. MRAs are sooooo boring. And not very well read. And lacking in cognitive thinking. And…..did I mention boring? They’re oblivious to all the very real shit that’s been going down as of late. Like that business about The Catholic Church suing the Obama administration over that medical coverage/ birth control issue. Errrrr, how about the Catholic Church brow beating nuns for concerning themselves with the poor instead of preaching against gays and women who get abortions and use birth control? MRA dudes, the Catholic Church is on your side. You know that whole women-who-have-sex-only-for-pleasure-are whores riff? They’ve been singing that song long before any of you were born. You should be sending them your money.
Damn, you guys are dumber than a box of hair.
That was basically the plot of “The DaVinci Code” wasn’t it? Aside from not contradicting the death of Jesus, the whole thing was about his supposed bloodline with Mary Magdalene. Damn that movie was awful. Ian McKellen seemed to be the only one having fun with the whole nonsense.
Damn that Da Vinci Code. Back in the day, when you came across books that talked about the Merovingian dynasty’s divine bloodline, it meant that you’d found the real conspiracy nuts.
There is another story that Jesus had spent some time in Japan and was secretly replaced on the cross by his Japanese twin brother. Jesus proper then returned to Japan, where he died at the age of 106. One article I read said the town had exactly one Christian, she’d moved there from outside the area and had no idea what the hell these people were talking about.
I think this conspiracy theory about Jesus getting married and having babies also feeds off from the idea that men can’t possibly be celibate, because they all have such a strong sex drive.
Besides, that idea was used in the comic book Preacher too. After Holy Blood and Holy Grail, but before the Da Vinci Code. In Preacher Jesus’ offspring had only mated with each other for two thousand years in order to keep the bloodline pure, and were compleeeetely fucked up by inbreeding.
This how baby Jesus was really born, until those mangina edited the story to make it all about Mary.
http://oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/
(NSFW)
Preacher! I had forgotten about that comic. That was a good one. Also I was wrong, it was Jesus’ younger, not twin brother. I forget where I got the twin thing from.
Well, the religious knowledge of MRAs seems very limited. Remember how wrong Price was about Tibetan Buddhism? But that didn’t stop him from pontificating anyway.
Assuming the historical Xtian belief of a virginal (not immaculate :)) conception of Jesus, why does Mark (and I think another book) cover the genealogy of Jesus through the paternal line, e.g. http://www.biblestudytools.com/matthew/passage.aspx?q=matthew+1:1-17 ? This doesn’t seem to be relevant as Joseph has been assumed not to be the father, which makes the lineage irrelevant. It does seem to be an attempt to directly link the lineage of Jesus back to King David, although given that he’s supposedly the son of God, I’m not sure why one would care about attempting to show him to be the descendent of a king as well – especially as there are going to be a lot of direct male descendants from David (compared to, theoretically, one son of God).
Then, of course, there is the whole mistranslation of the Hebrew word used to refer to Mary, e.g. http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/articles/mistranslation-virgin-extract-selfish-gene , which seems to be an ongoing debate as to whether the two words differed in practice in the historical context. I can see how one could argue they would be synonymous if the woman was unmarried, and I do not know how long a young woman would typically remain a virgin after marriage circa that time.
The reason for this is because the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament said that the promised Messiah was supposed to be a descendent of King David. Christians say that while the Holy Spirit was the biological father, Joseph was the adopted father. That way they can say Jesus was a result of a virgin birth while also being a descendent of King David. Your link already shows how the original text said the Messiah was supposed to be born of a young woman, not a virgin. It’s more likely the virgin idea came from the other popular pagan religions at that time. The Christians who translated the Old Testament for Christian Bibles just slipped it in there to make Jesus look like he fulfilled more Messianic prophecies.
That same verse also said he was supposed to be named Emmanuel. Yet he was named Jesus. Some Christians go ahead and call him either name in order to fix that problem.
Ha ha ha, now that I’m an unbeliever, the only times all of my Biblical study come in handy is for Internet discussions and Jeopardy! questions.
I wish you’d been my Sunday school teacher. I was eight the first time I remember thinking ‘nothing you people are saying makes any sense,’ and fully checked out before I started on the sacraments. If I’d known trivia like this, it probably wouldn’t have checked me back in but it probably would have kept me from worrying about it quite so much.
I’m sorry, I seem to have given the impression that I adhered to the idea.
I don’t even accept that there was a historical Jesus to begin with.
I guess I need to work on being clearer in my writing.
I was at a Christmas party last year that included a carol sing-along. I was there with a friend, who is pretty religious, and his girlfriend, who isn’t much.
When we were done singing O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, said girlfriend asked my friend who Emmanuel was, because she’d never heard of him.
I immediately wished I’d grown up where she had (Canada, for the record).
There’s also Handel’s Messiah, which picks verses out of the Bible. It picks up the verse about how a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, “God with us.” The Messiah doesn’t give it nearly as much baroque ornamentation as the larger verses.
@Falconer
that is okay, I am just used to “it’s interesting to think about” being code for WHY ARE YOU SO CLOSED MINDED, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST CONSIDER THAT NOSTRADAMUS WAS A SECRET KENYAN MUSLIM WHO BUILT THE PYRAMIDS FROM DIRECTIONS IN THE BIBLE CODE???
Wow, people here are quite creative with the strawman arguments. I don’t think I’ve ever had my views so misrepresented. Well, whatever. I’m not going anywhere. I have just as much right to come here and vent about MRA’s as anyone else. Oh hey, maybe you can get David to boot me off? I would hope he’d understand that not all feminists think the same way. And yeah, I do care about women’s rights.
No, Ruby, you don’t have a right to come here. You are here under the goodwill of our host, just like anyone else. Believe me, I wish you would get booted.
Your views aren’t misrepresented, because unlike you, we can read.
I went on a blind date with that guy in 1999. Nostradamus failed to predict that there would be no second date.
I know how that is. The fundie church I went to as a kid frowned upon questions and doubts. Well if they didn’t want me asking questions, then they shouldn’t have told me to read the Bible.
I had one really awesome Sunday school teacher, but she left the church after she divorced her abusive husband. Other people in the church thought she was a big sinner for filing for divorce, yet her abusive husband got a free pass. The Christian right victim blames abuse survivors just like the MRA’s do.
@Ruby: yeah, I do care about women’s rights.
Only in a very limited fashion.
For example, women in prison–you don’t seem to give a flying fuck about their right not to be raped.
You say you come here to vent about MRAs.
We see you coming here spouting a lot of misogynistic crap while claiming to be a feminist.
And yeah, you have every right to spew that stuff (though not here, if David doesn’t want you here), but we have every right to point out just how full of crap and trollish you are.
Free speech works both ways, you know.