Yes, they are speaking about St. Paul's instructions in Ephesians for a Christian household from Ephesians Chapter 5:
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. (He is speaking of the spiritual principle of reciprocity in a relationship, not oppression. He goes on to clearly describe it.)
The Southern Baptists seem to have different ideas:
The messengers, as the Baptists call their convention delegates, rejected an amendment that would have said that husbands and wives should submit to each other.
Ahem. Let's continue.
22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. (As you do to the Lord, implies that free will is still involved) 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church....
In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body.
31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”[c] 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (The last verse he he sums it up in the consensual, mutual, spiritual, reciprocal dedication to God and the marriage)
Wives must submit to their husbands' rule over the household, while husbands only have to love their wives. This is not an equal relationship. This is the same relationship dogs have to their owners. This stuff is just horribly patriarchal, and makes me
Let me know if you agree with this guy, too:
oscar Ware, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said women desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin.
“And husbands on their parts, because they’re sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged–or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches,” Ware said from the pulpit of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas.
He goes on and on like this. Really, read the whole thing, it's repugnant.
If the Bible is such a great moral guide, why has it been so easy through the centuries to use it to justify the most horrible atrocities and suffering?
Human nature my friend, is why atrocities and suffering occur, not "justification" from the Bible. The Bible has also been used to justify, motivate, and inspire a great amount of good in this world as well.
Sweet. When atrocities and suffering occur, the Bible had nothing to do with that. When awesome stuff happens, YES, the Bible inspired and justified it!
Let's be real. The Bible has justified, motivated and inspired both good and bad stuff. The question is, did MORE bad stuff happen because of the Bible than without it? We'll never know for sure, but it is safe to say there would not have been the Inquisitions, Crusades, holy wars and witch trials, just for starters, but I could go on and on.
Finally, Christians abuse women at a higher rate than non-believers.
Data? or just a platitude?
Data, at least with regards to Protestants:
One 2004 study by William Bradford Wilcox examined the relationship between religious affiliation, church attendance, and domestic violence, using data on wives' reports of spousal violence from three national United States surveys conducted between 1992 and 1994.[4] The study found that the lowest reported rates of domestic violence occurred among active conservative Protestants (2.8% of husbands committed domestic violence), followed by those who were religiously unaffiliated (3.2%), nominal mainline Protestants (3.9%), active mainline Protestants (5.4%), and nominal conservative Protestants (7.2%).[4] Overall (including both nominal and active members), the rates among conservative Protestants and mainline Protestants were 4.8% and 4.3%, respectively.[4]
So domestic violence rates among Protestants is about 4.6, 4.7%, considering there are more conservative than mainline Protestants. That compares to 3.2% for the religiously unaffiliated. About 1.5% difference. Not a huge difference, but a real one.
Also, this study was dependent on wives' reports of spousal violence. Wives would be less likely to report such violence if they thought it was justified. I think this is why the rate among active conservative Protestants is so low. Allow me to quote one excellent article at length:
Mary Potter Engel, a Christian theologian and novelist, has called this the "Just Battering" tradition. She models her analysis of the Christian justification of violence against wives on the Just War tradition. Just War principles start with "Right Authority." In the "Christian home," ideologies of "submission" mean that only the husband has authority. This makes physical abuse of women "just" in the same way that political authorities can claim a war is "just" if it is authorized by them.
(See Kay Marshall Strom, In the Name of Submission: A Painful Look at Wife Battering)
Evangelical Christian ministries such as those run by Rev. Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church or James Dobson of Focus on the Family all stress "submission" as the Christian family role for wives. At the same time, these Christian Evangelical ministries staunchly deny that submission is a cause of violence against wives.
Some Evangelicals strongly disagree and have explicitly charged that it is submission that is responsible for wife battering in the "Christian" home. James and Phyllis Alsdurf, in Battered Into Submission: The Tragedy of Wife Abuse in the Christian Home, have noted that conservative Christian women can't even get help because of this religious ideology of submission. "When she [the battered wife] musters up the courage to go public with 'her' problem (very likely to her pastor or a church member), what little human dignity she has retained can soon be 'trampled underfoot' with comments like: 'What have you done to provoke him?' 'Well, you've got to understand that your husband is under a lot of pressure right now,' or 'How would Jesus want you to act: just submit and it won't happen again.'"
In fact, Jesus gets invoked a lot to justify wife battering, especially as a model for suffering. In an article Time Magazine did when Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ was first released, I noted the direct connection between an overemphasis on suffering as "saving" people and what women have told me for years about how their priests or ministers advise them to stay in a violent home. "Countless women have told me that their priest or minister had advised them, as 'good Christian women' to accept beatings by their husbands as 'Christ accepted the cross.' An overemphasis on the suffering of Jesus to the exclusion of his teaching has tended to be used to support violence." (April 12, 2004)
As the Chicago Tribune recently reported, there is an epidemic of teen "date battering". I have counseled young women involved in date-battering relationships. In one case, members of a conservative "Christian" youth group to which she belonged were encouraging this teenage girl to stay with the battering boyfriend in order to "convert him to Christ" by her model of "perfect submission and love." It took a lot of support and a very different religious interpretation to help her make better life choices.
OK, that's all I got for now. I'm not posting any more today. The rest of you heathen fuckers feel free to reply in my place.
