Sexual behavior like rape is the result of learned violent behavior combined with sexual tendancies.
Is it the sociological consensus that this is always the case? If so, is it also true of rape-like behavior observed in the animal kingdom, I wonder?
It only sounds redundant because you have been conditioned to think that all hierarchies need to involve dominance -- they don't. A dominance hierarchy is simply a hierarchical organization where those higher in rank dominate those below them.
Hmm. What is the significance of rank in non-dominant hierarchies? Is it merely conceptual (as in taxonomic hierarchies)?
With respect to human hierarchies, I think the reason "dominant hierarchies" sounds redundant is that the word
dominant frequently means "exercising chief authority or rule" and the word
hierarchy is derived from the word
hierarch, meaning "one who exercises rule or authority", esp. in holy things.
All governments are dominance hierarchies to some extent, but some are much worse than others. A government whose activities are limited to simply preventing the citizens from playing "unfair" with each other exerts very little "dominance," while one, for example, enforcing Sharia law is the exact opposite.
There are entire bodies and doctrines of law which are designed essentially to keep private parties from "playing unfair with each other", but I assure you that a great deal of authority is required to enforce such a system. The same authority could conceivably turned to the enforcement of Sharia.
Families may or may not be. It depends on if family members are dominated by others in the family. My childhood family was not. The stereotypical muslim extremist family definitely is.
Again, I have difficulty imagining a normally functioning family in which the parents are not dominant ("exercising chief authority or rule") with regard to the children - and it's downright unpleasant to think of the condition in which children emerge from family structures where such dominance is not present.
For example, look at the history of Christianity. Accepting the religion is like the bad guys getting their foot in the door. All of a sudden, there is a male god, supreme to all other beings, and his first creation is a male, for who he made a female "to provide company." We just set up a dominance hierarchy based on gender. All of a sudden, god is white, adam is white, eve is white, jesus is white, the israelites are white, etc. We just set up a dominance hierarchy based on skin color. All of a sudden, god wants people to be heterosexual. We just set up a dominance hierarchy based on sexuality.
Sounds more like the projection of other "dominance hierarchies" onto religion to me. And a questionable assessment of the history of Christianity, as well.
Certainly, in today's world, any argument that skin color, sexuality, or gender matters a hoot when it comes to someone's intelligence or capability would be very difficult to make indeed without some doctrine from an organized religion to back it up.
Such doctrines may exist, but they do not appear to be representative of Christianity - if that's what you had in mind.
It has taken hundreds of years of slow policy change, hundreds of years of education, and hundreds of years of human suffering to even make a dent in the problem caused by those dominance hierarchies. It is very unlikely that they would be here, certainly to the extent they are, if they didn't have Christianity to prepare the way for them. There have been numerous societies in history where skin color, gender, and sexuality had virtually nothing to do with the social rank of a person. It is highly suspicious that these cultural values swept much of the civilized world at the same time Christianity did -- I would say it is not a coincidence.
Do you have anything in the way of compelling historical evidence for:
- "Numerous societies in history where skin color, gender, and sexuality had virtually nothing to do with the social rank of a person"
- "these cultural values [presumably, values contradicting the foregoing] swept much of the civilized world at the same time Christianity did"
- the (implied) proposition that Christianity materially contributed to the introduction or establishment of such values in regions to which it spread
It is not speculative at all. It is a simple case of people pulling their heads out of their a--es. Religion is fine, I am happy for people who benefit from theology. My problem is with organized religion that exploits people so overtly by indoctrinating them with arbitrary babblygook and ideas designed to funnel their resources up the ranks in the hierarchy. In this respect, at least, Christianity doesn't look so bad, but only because 500 years of secular forces have beaten the priesthood back to where they belong and we have a separation of church and state.
To what do you refer when you speak of "500 years of secular forces beating the priesthood back to where they belong"?
I misspoke, I meant Galileo, not Newton.
That's rather close to the "Copernican ideas" example, isn't it? I'm skeptical of the notion that we could establish any kind of reliable pattern of the Church opposing major human advances. Perhaps five or six other examples would be useful, if there really are many from which to draw.
What does the church oppose when it comes to evolutionary theory? Quite simply, any idea that suggests creationism to be false. Why are you asking me that question, we all know the stance organized religion has taken regarding evolution theory.
"Organized religion" doesn't have a monolithic stance regarding evolutionary theory, any more than "organized politics" has a monolithic stance on any given issue. Specifically, the Church does not endorse creationism.
They key concept, however, is their agenda, which is why the current battle regarding the origins of our existence is raging like it is. It has been happening for the last 500 years -- the organized religions are little by little loosing ground to logic and reason because they have nothing to do with logic and reason.
I think that depends largely on the religion. The great medieval logicians (
e.g. Scotus, Abelard, Ockham, Aquinas, Bonaventure), for example, thought that logic and reason had quite a bit to do with their religious beliefs. Indeed, I think it only fair to recognize that in Western intellectual history, the development of logic and reason is quite bound up in the development of Christian religious philosophy.
As people get smarter, the major religions have to modify their doctrine, going even as far as proclaiming the basis for their own doctrines to be admittedly nonsense (do most educated Christians consider the bible to be literal truth, even "the written word of god?"), because if they don't people will simply walk out on them. It is that simple.
Again, this may be true of some religions. But consider that the "Bible as literal truth" notion is a relative novelty in the history of Christianity. That was a modification in the
other direction. The oldest institutional form of Christianity never had to modify its doctrine (to my knowledge) on the basis you outline, in part because it refrained from promulgating as dogma any doctrines which could later be shown to be nonsensical.
What I don't understand is why anyone would want to be part of an organization that has been falling apart for the last 500 years.
Perhaps they don't see it as such an organization. Certainly it's far from a universal perception.
If you follow a doctrine that has to be constantly changed to appease rational thought, shouldn't you think about changing doctrines? You wouldn't drive a car that had to be recalled every month. You wouldn't pay for software that needed a patch every month just to run. So why do people buy into ideologies that must be constantly fixed?
Good question. For the reasons I mentioned earlier, however, this doesn't appear to describe accurately all religions, however (and certainly not all forms of Christianity). On the other hand, all kinds of ideas (cultural, political, scientific, etc.) are susceptible to frequent modification for the purpose of reconciling them with greater knowledge and experience.
". You would immediately respond with, "No, they're just pretending it's science to seem credible!" The Ku Klux Klan does the same thing with Christianity- it's not religion, it's pseudoreligion.