wala

Defend Pauline "Logic"



One of the aspects of Christianity that has always disturbed me so is blind acceptance of Paul's non sequiters. Let’s start by examining two instances:

In 1 Timothy 2:12-14, Paul states that a woman should be quiet in church and, moreover, should never teach her male counterpart. According to Paul, the order of the human Falls makes this an evidential fact:

“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” (KJV)

Is this not infantile logic? I anticipate that some will counterargue that Paul was speaking specifically to the loud Corinthian sluts who had yet to shed their pagan habits. But this is no answer, since the logic given to justify the gender hierarchy still doesn’t make a lick of sense. In other words, how would Eve’s sinning before Adam affect the quality of her descendants’ instruction?

I understand the concept of original sin and that it extends to all of humanity; what I can’t get my mind around is the additional heaping of shame that Paul dispenses on man’s counterpart in order to make some half-baked point about women having the lesser intellect. It is an astounding claim to make--a classic non sequiter.

It has been used throughout the years to manipulate a woman into thinking that she is more prone to error and obnoxious volume than her male counterpart. The order of the human Falls has proven this to be so.

If anyone has qualms with my objection and claims that I am overemphasizing the importance that Paul puts on gender hierarchy, consider the following verse:

I Corinthians 14:34
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law.” (KJV)

As also saith the law.

Another example of insane Pauline logic is found in Romans 9:20-23. Here Paul compares the highest species to clay in order to convey the terrifying authority of God:

“Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed [it], Why hast thou made me thus?

Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

[What] if God, willing to shew [his] wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory” (KJV)

Quite aside from the fact that Calvin and his creepy future adherents have used this verse to support their monstrous theology, we must also consider the inherent idiocy of comparing two completely different things. This is called false analogy, and it’s right there in one of the most famous epistle passages in the New Testament. Inerrantists will argue that this was the best analogy available to Paul at the time while concurrently failing to recognize the ridiculousness of a speaking pot or the implications of parents using the same nothing logic to justify crimes against their offspring.

Anyone else have a problem with Pauline logic? Provide examples, please. I want to see if they are in harmony with mine.







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Stumpjumper

Hmm.. There are a good majority of Christians that don't believe that Paul wrote the Pastorals... It is generally undisputed, though, that he wrote 1 Cor... In that instance, I would say that his logic was well in line, if not ahead of his time in some instances, with the prevailing cultural views of the day.

Paul tells women to remain silent in Church, but many Synagogues and Pagan Temples did not even let women in! I don't see you castigating Epicurus or Socrates for their view of the role of women

Also, I think Paul's logic is also pretty much right on when he says that there is "neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free as we are all one in Christ"... Meaning that God sees past these categories that we create....

Buck Laser

The more I think about Paul, the more I think he did a lot to ruin Chrisitanity. In one sense, he created Christian theology. My memory is fuzzy on this, but I do believe that the Pauline epistles are the earliest written documents of the NT. I don't have the time to be detailed and specific right now, but I intend to delve further into the NT and Paul's work, because I've been increasingly bothered by this problem for years. Most recently, Christian homophobes seem to have used (or twisted) Paul's letters to build their case.

MrWhy

We would expect god revealed ethics or wisdom to be consistently ahead and outside prevailing cultural views. That so much religious writing reflects the originating cultural views is strong evidence that religion is a cultural construct. culture originates and perpetuates religion.

The god revealed Christian ethics should have been much more advanced than they were. We would expect great thinkers to have some advanced ideas, but still constrained by their culture in some areas. Why would a god let a culture restrain the teaching of its ethics and practices

That's nice that a god would see past these categories, but why doesn't the revealed scripture, in all of its books, consistently preach and demand that it's followers see past them.

lpetrich

Richard Carrier has found otherwise, as he explained in his

Some Godless Comments on McFall's Review of On Jesus
Reply to McFall on Jesus as a Philosopher (2004)

He notes that while some pagans had indeed been very sexist, others explictly defended improved treatment of women, and some even claimed that women can benefit from education as much as men do. Which is more than anything Jesus Christ ever said about the female sex.

Thus, if one learns that eclipses of the Moon are caused by the Earth casting a shadow on it, one will not be impressed by someone who claims that he can make the Moon go away, thus causing an eclipse of it. Richard Carrier himself had written his master's thesis on Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire, noting that that was a commonly-claimed ability back then.

Which ones? I know that Mithraism was all-male, but that was not exactly typical. And in some pagan sects, women could become priests. Now where were all the female Xian religious leaders over most of the centuries of Xianity? All the female priests and bishops and archbishops and popes and matriarchs?

Actually, at least according to Richard Carrier, Epicurus was one of the first philosophers to admit women into his school.

But the reason that we aren't flaying Socrates or Epicurus for various ethical lapses is because we don't have any Socratean or Epicurean fundamentalists here waving around their heroes' books and claiming that those books contain nothing but Absolute Truth and Moral Perfection.

No, he was simply saying that one could be a good Xian no matter what one's social status, ethnicity, or gender is.

I'll now quote those pagan sort-of-feminists:

Kosh3

tell me about Socrates and his view on women.

sodium

There's some bad reasoning here. Christ must have been raised from the dead because otherwise, we'd all be a bunch of losers, and that would be really bad, so he must have been raised.

Also, there must be resurrection of the dead because it happened to Christ. Of course, there's a kernel of an argument here, in that if Christ was raised, then there is some resurrection of the dead, which presumably makes a general resurrection more plausible. But Paul is claiming there must be a general resurrection of the dead on the basis that Christ was resurrected. And his argument proceeds by equivocating the issue of whether there has ever been anyone raised with the issue of whether there will be a general resurrection.