Naomi & Ruth

It's wedding season again, and couples all over the U.S. will recite that inane quote from Ruth 1:16-17:

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (17) Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.

Ruth said this to her mother-in-law, another woman, not to her husband. After the death of both women's husbands, Ruth declares her intention to stay with her mother-in-law, Naomi, rather than be left behind when Naomi remarries. What other choice did Ruth have? Prostitution? Panhandling? In the end Ruth marries one of Naomi's relatives, has kids, and YIPPEE! God's plan is restored.

Family loyalty is supposedly mandated by the Commandment "Thou Shalt Obey they Mother and Father." There is no corollary commandment to parents to care for their children. Perhaps the Old Guy in the Sky assumed that even the most evil of parents would do this without being commanded to do it. The "moral" of this story is that once you've been given away to your husband's family, you belong to them forever. If you're going to use this at a wedding, it should probably be said by the bride while facing her future husband's family. It has nothing to do with a promise to him.

This of course derives from the comandment to honor thy father & mother. Naomi has become Ruth's mother by virtue of marriage. She gets married off to someone else in the family, which may have been due more to pity or obligation than to any love-matching. Again, nothing to do with modern marriage practices.

Ruth wasn't expressing loyalty or even love. She was expressing her obedience to an archaic notion that women are possessions. She was essential declaring that she was indeed Naomi's baggage and putting a tag on herself.

Is Logic the Opposite of Religion?

More about the debate ongoing in another blog. Occam's Razor is the current dispute, but what it comes down to in all these discussions is whether logic can be used to prove or disprove the existence of God or the Supernatural.

Because you can't literally prove a negative, merely deduce its likelihood, the theist automatically has the upper hand. The theist can come back with "just because you see no evidence for it doesn't mean it doesn't exist." When they resort to this it's tantamount to admitting that there is no proof that they could point to that would convince a skeptic (i.e., someone who is waiting for proof before deciding what to believe).

Now they're on the ropes. Having yielded ground on issues of the veracity of the Bible (some is myth, some is erroneously transmitted, some is inconvenient) and provability of the supernatural, there is only one place to turn: "It's a matter of faith."

I've boxed a few theists into that corner, and remarkably, they are smugly satisfied with it. In the end, they realize they believe merely because they want to believe.

Considering how inconvenient it is to be an atheist in American society, I'd kind of like to believe too. But believing in something that's not true just to fit in with society sticks in my craw. I have to wonder how many people make that ultimate choice between belonging to a big chunk of society and embracing reality at the risk of being despised, pitied, or worse.

As much as America admires the Lone Ranger and Rugged Individualist in theory, it doesn't have much use for them in theology.

On being mistaken for a male

I've been posting to the blog of a theology professor, under a rather bland screen name, for some time. I have only debated theology on this blog, nothing else. My posts have consisted of rather simple statements and questions that of course go unanswered.

Some examples:

• If God declared all the world "good" in Genesis, then why was it such a big deal for Adam & Eve to be kicked out of the Garden?
  
• Did Abelard really love Heloise? (our theologian quotes 12th-Century Abelard, who dumped Heloise after defiling her, on love)
• Because you can't prove a negative (non-existence of God) therefore you should believe in God?
• Where in the Bible is there a promise that the world would be any different (on the question of how God could permit "natural" evils such as earthquakes)
• How can believers believe that God *just is* but not believe that tectonic shifts just happen?
• If the Creation & The Fall are metaphors, how many other parts of the Bible are not to be taken literally?

Not particularly masculine, I think. By the time I asked about Heloise the theologian had decided I was male, along with the rest of his commenters. Most of them have very different styles than I do, debating issues point by point, citing mathematical & scientific principles, etc. My style of logic is more about pointing out the obvious, and if I quote anything it's more likely to be one of the less savory parts of the Bible than a mathemetician. It's clear from the theologian's responses to the other posters' challenges that he relishes them, though he has responded to a few of mine. Mostly, he dismisses my critiques as naïve or misguided. Often he accuses me of not understanding his posts. Okay, sometimes I don't, because he cites theories and philosophers that are so far into Nonsenseville that I've gotten off the train long before their depots.

So when I read a few references to myself using masculine pronouns I had a conundrum: admit that I'm female, and by my relatively "simple" or "naïve" mindset drag down his respect level for all other female atheists? or keep mum and see if he ever deduces my gender from my comments or style. Eventually I had to fess up, because other posters were writing about me in the masculine.

The line that shows I was "passing" for male was in response to my question about love, referencing seasonal mating patterns of ducks: "Do the male & female ducks 'love' each other in the Spring? They may have the same biochemical reactions to each others' company that humans do. Does that make human 'love' less real?"

So the topic that revealed I was passing for male was love, which I suppose should be a girly topic. Women are the primary readers of romance fiction, after all. But perhaps my skepticism about the theologian's definition of "true love" arises from being female. He created a scenario in which an 80-year-old man cares for his dying wife of 50 years.

How many times does that really happen? My mother has outlived three husbands, as did my great-aunt. Almost all of my friends have gotten divorced. I know many couples in which the man married a much younger woman after divorcing his wife. Is it only women who think of that when the topic of love comes up?

From my perspective, wife-as-family and family-as-community and community-as-protection explain the whole scenario, when it rarely does happen. No supernatural deity or unexplainable phenomenon necessary.

So I've finally outed myself as a female on the blog and there's been no response yet at all from the blogger. I decided not to make it an issue but not to be dishonest about it. After all, the odds are that in any random sampling of ten atheists only one might be female.

Now the important question: should I have been flattered or insulted to have been mistaken for a man?