Quote of the night
- Thread starter KnowledgeIsQueen
- Start date
please post more often
gameover82
Pro
do u really wanna win or just look good losing
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-15-2013
"Many of us, as individuals, seek to forget our history and do not want to confront our history because of the anxiety, the anger, the fear, the shame, the guilty we feel when we read about some aspects of the Afrikan experience, and hence will often stay away from it. We think we have escaped its effects thereby. We can hear some of our uninformed children say, Well, that was back there 100 years ago; that aint got nothing to do with me today. The black child at this very moment is still affected and suffering from the slave experience, whether he or she knows it or not. In fact, as Russell Jacoby says in his book, Social Amnesia:
Because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged. To be transcended it must first be remembered. Social amnesia is societys repression of remembrance.
Simply because we choose to forget a traumatic event, simply because we choose not to learn of a traumatic history and a history that may make us feel ashamed, does not mean that that history is not controlling our behavior. Simply because we do not know our history, and may have not heard of it, does not mean the history does not control our behavior.
One of the most profound things that we've learned in psychology is that the most powerful forces that shape human behavior are those factors that are consciously not remembered by human beings, that are unknown by the person, are those experiences that the individual can sear hes never had. That is one of the paradoxes of human behavior, that the very things that shape us and make us behave the way we do, see the world the way we see it and relate to people the way we relate to them, are those things that occurred in our lives at points we cannot remember or recall.
Amnesia is a state where a person seeks unconsciously to forget aspects of his/her past life because apparently those aspects are painful and, therefore, the individual seeks to rid himself of them. Consequently, by ridding himself of his conscious remembrance of painful experiences he seeks to rid himself of anxieties and fears connects with them. He may then succeed in forgetting those experiences completely, to the point where he cannot recall them, but this does not mean that those experiences do not continue to operate within his personality.
There are those of us who are made ashamed of our history of enslavement, who are made ashamed by the distorted presentation of African history (which is why the European distorts it and presents it the way he does), are made to think that prior to slavery we were essentially culturally invisible and savage and only achieved visibility and civility when the European came on the scene. Many of us attempt to repress any knowledge of our American slave experience. But we should heed the fact that a person and people who suffer from social amnesia live lives that are determined by fear, anxiety, terror and trauma. When we attempt to escape our history because were afraid of it, when we escape knowledge because it terrifies us and makes us feel ashamed, then it is terror and fear and shame that determine our lives. We then live, not in terms of our reality and in terms of the integration of our reality but in terms of what we are afraid of, i.e., what we are ashamed of, what we are trying to hid, what we are trying not to confront ourselves with. Life is then lived in terms of denial, in terms of escape and addiction. Many of the murders, deaths, and much of the destruction that we see in our environments today are the result of people trying to escape history, and living their lives in terror and fear of their own history and reality. Thats I why I contend that history is directly related to our concrete existence; it is not something you happen to take in school. It is a part of our real lives because without it, it will make us take dope, kill, steal, and itll make us do all kinds of terrible things because our lives are not determined by relating to history appropriately but determined by fear.
Those people and parents who have escaped their own history as a result of trying to escape anxiety, fear, shame and so forth, may pass escapism onto their children as history. That history of escapism then becomes a part of their personality and they become vulnerable to addictions and all other kinds of terrible habits and orientation in the world. Why do we think we were robbed of our history if it was not to serve this purpose?
The individual who has amnesia suffers distortion of and blindness of reality. The individual who cuts himself off from his history is self-alienated. Theres a whole part of himself thats completely shut off from his use. Its as if there were two parts. One part is unknown, yet because it is unknown doesnt mean that it is not effective. We have to devote energy to unknowing. We have to direct perception to unknowing. We have to say: Let me turn my face so I cannot see; let me not think about it. So the struggle to not know itself becomes a creator of behavior and personality structure. So the idea that not knowing ones history somehow permits one to escape it is a lie. In fact, it brings one under the domination of the more pernicious effects of that history and opens the personality up to self-alienation, self-destruction.
A person who is suffering from amnesia lives a life based on negation, not on affirmation, not on growth and development, but lives life in such a way as to deny life and reality and to deny parts of his own personality and himself. Life then becomes a negation and is used to maintain a negation instead of life as it should be lived as affirmation, as growth, enhancement and development. And people who live their lives as a negation live the lives that we see ourselves living today going deeper and deeper into hell and going deeper and deeper into self destruction as people.
History is real; it brings real, tangible results. When we wish to negate it and not integrate it, when we wish to negate it and not affirm it, then it negates us in the end. The negation wins out. The Afrikan person who lives in social amnesia brought on by the projection of mythological Eurocentric history, lives a life that is unitegrated and misunderstood.
The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy
~*Amos N. Wilson
[ame=http://youtu.be/wtspQWOZ1ns]⥠NEW 2012 VIDEO Stephen Marley ⥠Old Slaves - YouTube[/ame]
"First, my people must be taught the knowledge of self. Then and only then will they be able to understand others and that which surrounds them. Anyone who does not have a knowledge of self is considered a victim of either amnesia or unconsciousness and is not very competent. The lack of knowledge of self is a prevailing condition among my people here in America. Gaining the knowledge of self makes us unite into a great unity. Knowledge of self makes you take on the great virtue of learning." ~*Honorable Elijah Muhammad
"Many of us, as individuals, seek to forget our history and do not want to confront our history because of the anxiety, the anger, the fear, the shame, the guilty we feel when we read about some aspects of the Afrikan experience, and hence will often stay away from it. We think we have escaped its effects thereby. We can hear some of our uninformed children say, Well, that was back there 100 years ago; that aint got nothing to do with me today. The black child at this very moment is still affected and suffering from the slave experience, whether he or she knows it or not. In fact, as Russell Jacoby says in his book, Social Amnesia:
Because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged. To be transcended it must first be remembered. Social amnesia is societys repression of remembrance.
Simply because we choose to forget a traumatic event, simply because we choose not to learn of a traumatic history and a history that may make us feel ashamed, does not mean that that history is not controlling our behavior. Simply because we do not know our history, and may have not heard of it, does not mean the history does not control our behavior.
One of the most profound things that we've learned in psychology is that the most powerful forces that shape human behavior are those factors that are consciously not remembered by human beings, that are unknown by the person, are those experiences that the individual can sear hes never had. That is one of the paradoxes of human behavior, that the very things that shape us and make us behave the way we do, see the world the way we see it and relate to people the way we relate to them, are those things that occurred in our lives at points we cannot remember or recall.
Amnesia is a state where a person seeks unconsciously to forget aspects of his/her past life because apparently those aspects are painful and, therefore, the individual seeks to rid himself of them. Consequently, by ridding himself of his conscious remembrance of painful experiences he seeks to rid himself of anxieties and fears connects with them. He may then succeed in forgetting those experiences completely, to the point where he cannot recall them, but this does not mean that those experiences do not continue to operate within his personality.
There are those of us who are made ashamed of our history of enslavement, who are made ashamed by the distorted presentation of African history (which is why the European distorts it and presents it the way he does), are made to think that prior to slavery we were essentially culturally invisible and savage and only achieved visibility and civility when the European came on the scene. Many of us attempt to repress any knowledge of our American slave experience. But we should heed the fact that a person and people who suffer from social amnesia live lives that are determined by fear, anxiety, terror and trauma. When we attempt to escape our history because were afraid of it, when we escape knowledge because it terrifies us and makes us feel ashamed, then it is terror and fear and shame that determine our lives. We then live, not in terms of our reality and in terms of the integration of our reality but in terms of what we are afraid of, i.e., what we are ashamed of, what we are trying to hid, what we are trying not to confront ourselves with. Life is then lived in terms of denial, in terms of escape and addiction. Many of the murders, deaths, and much of the destruction that we see in our environments today are the result of people trying to escape history, and living their lives in terror and fear of their own history and reality. Thats I why I contend that history is directly related to our concrete existence; it is not something you happen to take in school. It is a part of our real lives because without it, it will make us take dope, kill, steal, and itll make us do all kinds of terrible things because our lives are not determined by relating to history appropriately but determined by fear.
Those people and parents who have escaped their own history as a result of trying to escape anxiety, fear, shame and so forth, may pass escapism onto their children as history. That history of escapism then becomes a part of their personality and they become vulnerable to addictions and all other kinds of terrible habits and orientation in the world. Why do we think we were robbed of our history if it was not to serve this purpose?
The individual who has amnesia suffers distortion of and blindness of reality. The individual who cuts himself off from his history is self-alienated. Theres a whole part of himself thats completely shut off from his use. Its as if there were two parts. One part is unknown, yet because it is unknown doesnt mean that it is not effective. We have to devote energy to unknowing. We have to direct perception to unknowing. We have to say: Let me turn my face so I cannot see; let me not think about it. So the struggle to not know itself becomes a creator of behavior and personality structure. So the idea that not knowing ones history somehow permits one to escape it is a lie. In fact, it brings one under the domination of the more pernicious effects of that history and opens the personality up to self-alienation, self-destruction.
A person who is suffering from amnesia lives a life based on negation, not on affirmation, not on growth and development, but lives life in such a way as to deny life and reality and to deny parts of his own personality and himself. Life then becomes a negation and is used to maintain a negation instead of life as it should be lived as affirmation, as growth, enhancement and development. And people who live their lives as a negation live the lives that we see ourselves living today going deeper and deeper into hell and going deeper and deeper into self destruction as people.
History is real; it brings real, tangible results. When we wish to negate it and not integrate it, when we wish to negate it and not affirm it, then it negates us in the end. The negation wins out. The Afrikan person who lives in social amnesia brought on by the projection of mythological Eurocentric history, lives a life that is unitegrated and misunderstood.
The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy
~*Amos N. Wilson
[ame=http://youtu.be/wtspQWOZ1ns]⥠NEW 2012 VIDEO Stephen Marley ⥠Old Slaves - YouTube[/ame]
"First, my people must be taught the knowledge of self. Then and only then will they be able to understand others and that which surrounds them. Anyone who does not have a knowledge of self is considered a victim of either amnesia or unconsciousness and is not very competent. The lack of knowledge of self is a prevailing condition among my people here in America. Gaining the knowledge of self makes us unite into a great unity. Knowledge of self makes you take on the great virtue of learning." ~*Honorable Elijah Muhammad
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-17-2013
Don't be all dove.
"Let the guile of the serpent alternate with the innocence of the dove. No one is easier to fool than a good man; the person who never lies believes others easily, and the one who never deceives trusts others. Being fooled isn't always a sign of foolishness; sometimes it shows goodness. Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger : those who have learned at their own expense and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others. You should be as cautious at foreseeing difficulties as you are shrewd at getting out of them. Don't be so good that you give others the chance to be bad. Be part serpent and part dove; not a monster, but a prodigy."
The Art Of Worldly Wisdom
~*Balthasar Gracian
Don't be all dove.
"Let the guile of the serpent alternate with the innocence of the dove. No one is easier to fool than a good man; the person who never lies believes others easily, and the one who never deceives trusts others. Being fooled isn't always a sign of foolishness; sometimes it shows goodness. Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger : those who have learned at their own expense and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others. You should be as cautious at foreseeing difficulties as you are shrewd at getting out of them. Don't be so good that you give others the chance to be bad. Be part serpent and part dove; not a monster, but a prodigy."
The Art Of Worldly Wisdom
~*Balthasar Gracian
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-22-2013
"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain.
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow it' the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Far truer.
And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
True, he now
And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he 's forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
Not all in a moment, he said.
He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?
Certainly.
Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
Certainly.
He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Certainly, he would.
And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
To be sure, he said.
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
No question, he said.
This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
The Republic
~*Plato
"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain.
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow it' the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Far truer.
And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
True, he now
And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he 's forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
Not all in a moment, he said.
He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?
Certainly.
Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
Certainly.
He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Certainly, he would.
And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
To be sure, he said.
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
No question, he said.
This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.
The Republic
~*Plato
Last edited by a moderator:
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-24-2013
"Question #1
What is a man?
When answering the question of what defines a man, one has to be careful not to confuse the definition of man and male. Many people assume that one is born a man, when in fact, one is born a male and must mature and grow in stature, mentally, physically and spiritually to become a man. This is all so beautifully stated, that once a male always a male, barring scientific intervention.
I believe that manhood is a development of character. What is thought to be manly in one culture might not be seen as so in another culture. The rights of passage from boy to many vary greatly depending on culture, ethnic group, religion, race, very true. One culture deems you a man upon the slaying of a lion, while another uses the degree of formal education as the true measure of a man. In my opinion both are valid. One has always been considered to be a man when he had to prove himself able to provide for and protect himself, his family and his community – be that community a small village or nation.
The development to manhood cannot then be measured by age or size or physical strength but depends on what is required of him by the environment in which he lives. While many cultures afford young males the luxury of being able to reach the age of 18 before being expected to take on the responsibilities of being a man, others call on the males to take on the duties as early as 12 years old. I believe a male evolves into a man largely based on what is needed of him to survive. Being a male does not make one a man any more than making a baby makes one a true father.
A real man is one who is willing to step up to the plate and do whatever is necessary to provide and mentor the next generation. Money and degrees are not the measure of a man if they are not used to provide safety and security for the people for whom he is responsible. Sexual conquests do not make a man. Physical strength cannot alone determine the better man.
One only truly becomes a man when he is ready to take on the responsibility of LIFE.
Question #2
At what point did you realize you made the transition from boyhood to manhood?
I think my transition to manhood came in stages as my environment and requirements changed, requiring me to go from boy to man in stages and not all at once. At 10 years old without much warning, my father, the male figure in my life passed away. Like many young boys in my neighborhood, I found myself and two brothers being provided for by a single mom working two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. After being sent to live with my aunt and uncle who had six kids of their own, I think that my evolution into manhood started early out of necessity. When possible, everyone in the household was required to work, so that all the family needs were met. Because we lived in a rural farm area, the young boys had to take on many of the same responsibilities as the adults. Everyone worked and was assigned duties that helped to provide safety and security for the family as a whole.
As a teen, back living with my mother and surrounded by many family members, I was afforded the luxury of living as most teens do without the worries of the world. But by 17, I realized that my mother had done all she could and that the next stage of life was going to be up to me. I knew that at that age I would have to take responsibility for myself and my future. And although mom would always be there for me, it was my responsibility. In my mind, that was the time I became a man. And, that has been my journey every since.
Question #3
To date what has been your greatest failure as a man?
In my life, I have never spent much time looking back at successes and failures. Looking back always seemed to burn time that I needed to use to get ahead and sometimes to just stay even. I truly believe that I have had a blessed life. I have a beautiful family, a wonderful home, success in the career that I have chosen and the respect of my family and peers.
My regret, if any, is that I wasn’t able to achieve earlier. I regret having to spend so many years and so much time on the road that I couldn’t spend more time with my family when they were developing into the amazing people they are today. I wish we could have spent more vacations together and that they would not have had to go through the hard times of the early years.
But, in hindsight, I believe it is those times and regrets that helped make us appreciate who we are and what we have today.
So, for me, failures have always been just opportunities to move to the next great thing. And, if lessons are learned from failures, are they really failures? So, in my life maybe a few regrets, but no real failures.
Question #4
To date what has been your greatest success as a man?
Success like most other things in life is relative. One man’s success might be considered some degree of failure by another. Success generally is determined by how close you come to or it, in fact, you achieve your goals in life.
I have set many goals for myself over the years. As a student, as a competitor, as a teacher, promoter, business person and for my family. I have been blessed to have achieved a level of success for most of my goals. However like most people I have always tried to raise the bar on most goals once they are met. Therefore, there is always a feeling of not having complete success. Goals we set are goals we get. But, it seems we keep changing to goal post.
When contemplating my greatest success to date as a man, the answer is easy. They key phrase being “as a man”. Having success as a student, competitor, teacher, promoter, and in business all are just stepping stones leading to the greatest success for any man – being in a position to protect and provide safety and security for his family, and to have the ability to help them grow and pursue their dreams. In life, that is all that a man can hope for.
Question #5
Before you leave this plain of existence what is the one thing you want to accomplish as a man?
The one thing that I hope to achieve, as a man before I leave this plain of existence is simple – to be happy. I believe that this is what every man and woman truly is working for in life.
Some might say, it is to achieve higher degrees of knowledge or education, but that is something that would make them happy. Some might say it is to achieve fame and fortune, but that is only because that would make them happy. Others might say it is to have a secure home and family life, but that too is just to make them achieve happiness.
At the end of the day, I think we are all striving for the same true goals in life and that is to attain happiness. As men we must first determine what will make us happy in life then it is simple. Dedicate your heart and soul to working towards that."
Man by Choice Male by Birth
~* Dr. Michael Willett
"A man doesn't let the kid inside of him kill the king inside of him" ~*Jonathan Edmondson
"Question #1
What is a man?
When answering the question of what defines a man, one has to be careful not to confuse the definition of man and male. Many people assume that one is born a man, when in fact, one is born a male and must mature and grow in stature, mentally, physically and spiritually to become a man. This is all so beautifully stated, that once a male always a male, barring scientific intervention.
I believe that manhood is a development of character. What is thought to be manly in one culture might not be seen as so in another culture. The rights of passage from boy to many vary greatly depending on culture, ethnic group, religion, race, very true. One culture deems you a man upon the slaying of a lion, while another uses the degree of formal education as the true measure of a man. In my opinion both are valid. One has always been considered to be a man when he had to prove himself able to provide for and protect himself, his family and his community – be that community a small village or nation.
The development to manhood cannot then be measured by age or size or physical strength but depends on what is required of him by the environment in which he lives. While many cultures afford young males the luxury of being able to reach the age of 18 before being expected to take on the responsibilities of being a man, others call on the males to take on the duties as early as 12 years old. I believe a male evolves into a man largely based on what is needed of him to survive. Being a male does not make one a man any more than making a baby makes one a true father.
A real man is one who is willing to step up to the plate and do whatever is necessary to provide and mentor the next generation. Money and degrees are not the measure of a man if they are not used to provide safety and security for the people for whom he is responsible. Sexual conquests do not make a man. Physical strength cannot alone determine the better man.
One only truly becomes a man when he is ready to take on the responsibility of LIFE.
Question #2
At what point did you realize you made the transition from boyhood to manhood?
I think my transition to manhood came in stages as my environment and requirements changed, requiring me to go from boy to man in stages and not all at once. At 10 years old without much warning, my father, the male figure in my life passed away. Like many young boys in my neighborhood, I found myself and two brothers being provided for by a single mom working two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. After being sent to live with my aunt and uncle who had six kids of their own, I think that my evolution into manhood started early out of necessity. When possible, everyone in the household was required to work, so that all the family needs were met. Because we lived in a rural farm area, the young boys had to take on many of the same responsibilities as the adults. Everyone worked and was assigned duties that helped to provide safety and security for the family as a whole.
As a teen, back living with my mother and surrounded by many family members, I was afforded the luxury of living as most teens do without the worries of the world. But by 17, I realized that my mother had done all she could and that the next stage of life was going to be up to me. I knew that at that age I would have to take responsibility for myself and my future. And although mom would always be there for me, it was my responsibility. In my mind, that was the time I became a man. And, that has been my journey every since.
Question #3
To date what has been your greatest failure as a man?
In my life, I have never spent much time looking back at successes and failures. Looking back always seemed to burn time that I needed to use to get ahead and sometimes to just stay even. I truly believe that I have had a blessed life. I have a beautiful family, a wonderful home, success in the career that I have chosen and the respect of my family and peers.
My regret, if any, is that I wasn’t able to achieve earlier. I regret having to spend so many years and so much time on the road that I couldn’t spend more time with my family when they were developing into the amazing people they are today. I wish we could have spent more vacations together and that they would not have had to go through the hard times of the early years.
But, in hindsight, I believe it is those times and regrets that helped make us appreciate who we are and what we have today.
So, for me, failures have always been just opportunities to move to the next great thing. And, if lessons are learned from failures, are they really failures? So, in my life maybe a few regrets, but no real failures.
Question #4
To date what has been your greatest success as a man?
Success like most other things in life is relative. One man’s success might be considered some degree of failure by another. Success generally is determined by how close you come to or it, in fact, you achieve your goals in life.
I have set many goals for myself over the years. As a student, as a competitor, as a teacher, promoter, business person and for my family. I have been blessed to have achieved a level of success for most of my goals. However like most people I have always tried to raise the bar on most goals once they are met. Therefore, there is always a feeling of not having complete success. Goals we set are goals we get. But, it seems we keep changing to goal post.
When contemplating my greatest success to date as a man, the answer is easy. They key phrase being “as a man”. Having success as a student, competitor, teacher, promoter, and in business all are just stepping stones leading to the greatest success for any man – being in a position to protect and provide safety and security for his family, and to have the ability to help them grow and pursue their dreams. In life, that is all that a man can hope for.
Question #5
Before you leave this plain of existence what is the one thing you want to accomplish as a man?
The one thing that I hope to achieve, as a man before I leave this plain of existence is simple – to be happy. I believe that this is what every man and woman truly is working for in life.
Some might say, it is to achieve higher degrees of knowledge or education, but that is something that would make them happy. Some might say it is to achieve fame and fortune, but that is only because that would make them happy. Others might say it is to have a secure home and family life, but that too is just to make them achieve happiness.
At the end of the day, I think we are all striving for the same true goals in life and that is to attain happiness. As men we must first determine what will make us happy in life then it is simple. Dedicate your heart and soul to working towards that."
Man by Choice Male by Birth
~* Dr. Michael Willett
"A man doesn't let the kid inside of him kill the king inside of him" ~*Jonathan Edmondson
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-25-2013
Kind words
"Love is kind. If then we are to communicate love verbally, we must use kind words. That has to do with the way we speak. The same sentence can have two different meanings, depending on how you say it. The statement I love you, when said with kindness and tenderness, can be a genuine expression of love. But what about I love you? The question mark changes the whole meaning of those three words. Sometimes our words say one thing, but our tone of voice says another. We are sending double messages. Our spouse will usually interpret our message based on our tone of voice, not the words we use.
I would be delighted to wash dishes tonight, said in a snarling tone will not be received as an expression of love. On the other hand, we can share hurt, pain, and even anger in a kind manner, and that will be an expression of love. I felt disappointed and hurt that you didn't offer to help me this evening said in an honest, kind manner can be an expression of love. The person speaking wants to be known by her spouse. She is taking steps to build intimacy by sharing her feelings. She is asking for an opportunity to discuss a hurt in order to find healing. The same words expressed with a loud, harsh voice will not be an expression of love but an expression of condemnation and judgment.
The manner in which we speak is exceedingly important. An ancient sage once said, A soft answer turns away anger. When your spouse is angry and upset and lashing out with words of heat, if you choose to be loving, you will not reciprocate with additional heat but with a soft voice. You will receive what he is saying as information about his emotional feelings. You will let him tell you of his hurt, anger, and perception of events. You will seek to put yourself in his shoes and see the event through his eyes and then express softly and kindly your understanding of why he feels that way. If you have wronged him, you will be willing to confess the wrong and ask for forgiveness. If your motivation is different from what he is reading, you will be able to explain your motivation kindly. You will seek understanding and reconciliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened. That is mature love love to which we aspire if we seek a growing marriage.
Love doesn't keep score of wrongs. Love doesn't bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the best or right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask for forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked for forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse. When I have been wronged by my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice or forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her pack or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and she the felon. Intimacy becomes impossible. If, however, I choose to forgive, intimacy can be restored. Forgiveness is the way to love.
I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday. They insist on bringing into today the failures of yesterday and in so doing, they pollute a potentially wonderful day. I cant believe you did it. I dont think Ill ever forget it. You cant possibly know how much you hurt me. I dont know how you can sit there so smugly after you treated me that way. You ought to be crawling on your knees, begging me for forgiveness. I dont know if I can ever forgive you. Those are not the words of love but of bitterness and resentment and revenge.
The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history. Yes, it happened. Certainly it hurt. And it may still hurt, but he has acknowledged his failure and asked your forgiveness. We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history. We can choose to live today free from the failures of yesterday. Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment. It is a choice to show mercy, not to hold the offense up against the offender. Forgiveness is an expression of love. I love you. I care about you, and I choose to forgive you. Even though my feelings of hurt may linger, I will not allow what has happened to come between us. I hope that we can learn from this experience. You are not a failure because you have failed. You are my spouse, and together we will go on from here. Those are the words of affirmation in the dialect of kind words."
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts
~*Gary D Chapman
[ame=http://youtu.be/d6QYoJRZPvM]Anthony David - Words ft. India.Arie - YouTube[/ame]
"Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive." ~*Daphne Rose Kingma
Kind words
"Love is kind. If then we are to communicate love verbally, we must use kind words. That has to do with the way we speak. The same sentence can have two different meanings, depending on how you say it. The statement I love you, when said with kindness and tenderness, can be a genuine expression of love. But what about I love you? The question mark changes the whole meaning of those three words. Sometimes our words say one thing, but our tone of voice says another. We are sending double messages. Our spouse will usually interpret our message based on our tone of voice, not the words we use.
I would be delighted to wash dishes tonight, said in a snarling tone will not be received as an expression of love. On the other hand, we can share hurt, pain, and even anger in a kind manner, and that will be an expression of love. I felt disappointed and hurt that you didn't offer to help me this evening said in an honest, kind manner can be an expression of love. The person speaking wants to be known by her spouse. She is taking steps to build intimacy by sharing her feelings. She is asking for an opportunity to discuss a hurt in order to find healing. The same words expressed with a loud, harsh voice will not be an expression of love but an expression of condemnation and judgment.
The manner in which we speak is exceedingly important. An ancient sage once said, A soft answer turns away anger. When your spouse is angry and upset and lashing out with words of heat, if you choose to be loving, you will not reciprocate with additional heat but with a soft voice. You will receive what he is saying as information about his emotional feelings. You will let him tell you of his hurt, anger, and perception of events. You will seek to put yourself in his shoes and see the event through his eyes and then express softly and kindly your understanding of why he feels that way. If you have wronged him, you will be willing to confess the wrong and ask for forgiveness. If your motivation is different from what he is reading, you will be able to explain your motivation kindly. You will seek understanding and reconciliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened. That is mature love love to which we aspire if we seek a growing marriage.
Love doesn't keep score of wrongs. Love doesn't bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the best or right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask for forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked for forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse. When I have been wronged by my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice or forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her pack or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and she the felon. Intimacy becomes impossible. If, however, I choose to forgive, intimacy can be restored. Forgiveness is the way to love.
I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday. They insist on bringing into today the failures of yesterday and in so doing, they pollute a potentially wonderful day. I cant believe you did it. I dont think Ill ever forget it. You cant possibly know how much you hurt me. I dont know how you can sit there so smugly after you treated me that way. You ought to be crawling on your knees, begging me for forgiveness. I dont know if I can ever forgive you. Those are not the words of love but of bitterness and resentment and revenge.
The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history. Yes, it happened. Certainly it hurt. And it may still hurt, but he has acknowledged his failure and asked your forgiveness. We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history. We can choose to live today free from the failures of yesterday. Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment. It is a choice to show mercy, not to hold the offense up against the offender. Forgiveness is an expression of love. I love you. I care about you, and I choose to forgive you. Even though my feelings of hurt may linger, I will not allow what has happened to come between us. I hope that we can learn from this experience. You are not a failure because you have failed. You are my spouse, and together we will go on from here. Those are the words of affirmation in the dialect of kind words."
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts
~*Gary D Chapman
[ame=http://youtu.be/d6QYoJRZPvM]Anthony David - Words ft. India.Arie - YouTube[/ame]
"Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive." ~*Daphne Rose Kingma
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
1-29-2013
"You will come across many breeds of opponent, sucker, and victim. The highest form of the art of power is the ability to distinguish the wolves from the lambs, the foxes from the hares, the hawks from the vultures. If you make this distinction well, you will succeed without needing to coerce anyone too much. But if you deal blindly with whomever crosses your path, you will have a life of constant sorrow, if you even live that long. Being able to recognize types of people, and to act accordingly, is critical. The following are the four most dangerous and difficult types of mark in the jungle, as identified by artists con and otherwise of the past.
The Arrogant and Proud Man. - Although he may initially disguise it, this mans touchy pride makes him very dangerous. Any perceived slight will lead to a vengeance of overwhelming violence. You may say to yourself, But I only said such-and-such at a party, where everyone was drunk . It does not matter. There is no sanity behind his overreaction, so do not waste time trying to figure him out. If at any point in your dealings with a person you sense an oversensitive and overactive pride, flee. Whatever you are hoping from him isnt worth it.
The Hopelessly Insecure Man. - This man is related to the proud and arrogant type, but is less violent and harder to spot. His ego is fragile, his sense of self insecure, and if he feels himself deceived or attacked, the hurt will simmer. He will attack you in bites that will take forever to get big enough for you to notice. If you find you have deceived or harmed such a man, disappear for a long time. Do not stay around him or he will nibble you to death.
Mr. Suspicion. Another variant on the breeds above, this is a future Joe Stalin. He sees what he wants to see usually the worst in other people, and imagines that everyone is after him. Mr. Suspicion is in fact the least dangerous of the three: Genuinely unbalanced, he is easy to deceive, just as Stalin himself was constantly deceived. Play on his suspicious nature to get him to turn against other people. But if you become the target of his suspicions, watch out.
The Serpent with a Long Memory. If hurt or deceived, this man will show no anger on the surface; he will calculate and wait. Then, when he is in a position to turn the tables, he will exact revenge marked by a cold-blooded shrewdness. Recognize this man by his calculation and cunning in the different areas of his life. He is usually cold and unaffectionate. Be doubly careful of this snake, and if you have somehow injured him, either crush him completely or get him out of your sight.
Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some men are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger.
The ability to measure people and to know who youre dealing with is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. Without it you are blind: Not only will you offend the wrong people, you will choose the wrong types to work on, and will think you are flattering people when you are actually insulting them. Before embarking on any move, take the measure of your mark or potential opponent. Otherwise you will waste time and make mistakes. Study peoples weaknesses, the chinks in their armor, their areas of both pride and insecurity. Know their ins and outs before you even decide whether or not to deal with them."
The 48 Laws of Power
~*Robert Greene
"Anyone with a serpents heart can use a show of kindness to cloak it; a person who is blustery on the outside is often really a coward. Learn to see through appearances and their contradictions. Never trust the version that people give of themselves it is utterly unreliable."
"You will come across many breeds of opponent, sucker, and victim. The highest form of the art of power is the ability to distinguish the wolves from the lambs, the foxes from the hares, the hawks from the vultures. If you make this distinction well, you will succeed without needing to coerce anyone too much. But if you deal blindly with whomever crosses your path, you will have a life of constant sorrow, if you even live that long. Being able to recognize types of people, and to act accordingly, is critical. The following are the four most dangerous and difficult types of mark in the jungle, as identified by artists con and otherwise of the past.
The Arrogant and Proud Man. - Although he may initially disguise it, this mans touchy pride makes him very dangerous. Any perceived slight will lead to a vengeance of overwhelming violence. You may say to yourself, But I only said such-and-such at a party, where everyone was drunk . It does not matter. There is no sanity behind his overreaction, so do not waste time trying to figure him out. If at any point in your dealings with a person you sense an oversensitive and overactive pride, flee. Whatever you are hoping from him isnt worth it.
The Hopelessly Insecure Man. - This man is related to the proud and arrogant type, but is less violent and harder to spot. His ego is fragile, his sense of self insecure, and if he feels himself deceived or attacked, the hurt will simmer. He will attack you in bites that will take forever to get big enough for you to notice. If you find you have deceived or harmed such a man, disappear for a long time. Do not stay around him or he will nibble you to death.
Mr. Suspicion. Another variant on the breeds above, this is a future Joe Stalin. He sees what he wants to see usually the worst in other people, and imagines that everyone is after him. Mr. Suspicion is in fact the least dangerous of the three: Genuinely unbalanced, he is easy to deceive, just as Stalin himself was constantly deceived. Play on his suspicious nature to get him to turn against other people. But if you become the target of his suspicions, watch out.
The Serpent with a Long Memory. If hurt or deceived, this man will show no anger on the surface; he will calculate and wait. Then, when he is in a position to turn the tables, he will exact revenge marked by a cold-blooded shrewdness. Recognize this man by his calculation and cunning in the different areas of his life. He is usually cold and unaffectionate. Be doubly careful of this snake, and if you have somehow injured him, either crush him completely or get him out of your sight.
Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some men are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger.
The ability to measure people and to know who youre dealing with is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. Without it you are blind: Not only will you offend the wrong people, you will choose the wrong types to work on, and will think you are flattering people when you are actually insulting them. Before embarking on any move, take the measure of your mark or potential opponent. Otherwise you will waste time and make mistakes. Study peoples weaknesses, the chinks in their armor, their areas of both pride and insecurity. Know their ins and outs before you even decide whether or not to deal with them."
The 48 Laws of Power
~*Robert Greene
"Anyone with a serpents heart can use a show of kindness to cloak it; a person who is blustery on the outside is often really a coward. Learn to see through appearances and their contradictions. Never trust the version that people give of themselves it is utterly unreliable."
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
2-1-2013
Carter G. Woodson, in one of his most significant works, "The Mis-education of the Negro, reminded his audience:
"Philosophers have long conceded....that every man has two educations: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. If that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves."
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information. How that information is presented to us, its accuracy and how its perceived determines our perception of reality. Learning to develop critical thinking skills is the first lesson one must master in the pursuit of the "other education".
Critical thinking skills allow people to become aware of hierarchal levels of thought, which gives them the capacity to assume greater control over their lives. The three essential levels of cognitive thought are:
The Literal: where one learns to accept all information at face value and never looks beneath the surface for additional details.
The inferential: Where one learns to infer or "read between the lines," and sees the hidden or dual meaning in information that is presented.
The Evaluative: where one learns to make an intelligent decision based upon the comparison of various sources of information, particularly those drawn from one's own personal experiences.
The objective of critical thinking is to learn how to not take all information literally, to read between the lines for deeper understanding and then evaluate that information by comparing it with outer sources of knowledge. This process expands one's mind and opens up new vistas for learning. It is the means by which one may be resurrected from mental death and experience a profound rebirth of consciousness."
Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization
~*Anthony T. Browder
"Know Thy Self'
A person who knows not
And knows not that they know not
Is foolish - disregard them
A person who knows not
And knows that they know not
Is simple - teach them
A person who knows not
And believes that they know
Is dangerous - avoid them
A person who knows
And knows not what they know
Is asleep - awaken them
A person who knows
and knows that they know
Is wise - follow them
All of these persons reside in you
Know thyself
And to Maat be True"
A person who knows not
And knows not that they know not
Is foolish - disregard them
A person who knows not
And knows that they know not
Is simple - teach them
A person who knows not
And believes that they know
Is dangerous - avoid them
A person who knows
And knows not what they know
Is asleep - awaken them
A person who knows
and knows that they know
Is wise - follow them
All of these persons reside in you
Know thyself
And to Maat be True"
Carter G. Woodson, in one of his most significant works, "The Mis-education of the Negro, reminded his audience:
"Philosophers have long conceded....that every man has two educations: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. If that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves."
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information. How that information is presented to us, its accuracy and how its perceived determines our perception of reality. Learning to develop critical thinking skills is the first lesson one must master in the pursuit of the "other education".
Critical thinking skills allow people to become aware of hierarchal levels of thought, which gives them the capacity to assume greater control over their lives. The three essential levels of cognitive thought are:
The Literal: where one learns to accept all information at face value and never looks beneath the surface for additional details.
The inferential: Where one learns to infer or "read between the lines," and sees the hidden or dual meaning in information that is presented.
The Evaluative: where one learns to make an intelligent decision based upon the comparison of various sources of information, particularly those drawn from one's own personal experiences.
The objective of critical thinking is to learn how to not take all information literally, to read between the lines for deeper understanding and then evaluate that information by comparing it with outer sources of knowledge. This process expands one's mind and opens up new vistas for learning. It is the means by which one may be resurrected from mental death and experience a profound rebirth of consciousness."
Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization
~*Anthony T. Browder
Equally hazardous for sexual maturity, however, is the lure of town culture, the period we have most recently left behind, at least in most respects; In the area of sexual ethics, this period speaks to us through the traditional sexual practices of our Puritan and Victorian pasts. Since the melody of this ethic lingers on today, our sexual ethics are caught in the cross fire of contradiction and confusion. To illustrate this tension, let us take the traditional ideal of premarital chastity.
I choose this not because of any belief that it is really the key issue. It does seem clear, however, that for many young adults today "to bed or Not to bed" seems to be the Big Question, and I believe the reasons they press it so vigorously merit exploration. Three aspects of the problem require particular attention: (I) why the yes or no of premarital chastity is more critical for young adults today than in the past; (2) why the answers we usually give to this question are either not heard or provide little guidance and (3) what, if anything, we should be saying about the matter.
Let us reject at the outset any Kinseyan inference that what is being done should determine what ought to be done. But let us candidly admit that our culture has undergone drastic changes. Though our Puritan style of life has vanished almost completely, the Puritan sex ethic remains, at least on paper. We have exchanged ankle-length dresses for bikinis. We hold blanket parties instead of bobbing for apples. But the people caught up in these epochal changes are still taught, albeit with winks and evasions, the selfsame code of total premarital abstinence that was instilled into Priscilla Alden.
We have thus fashioned for unmarried young adults a particularly unfortunate combination of emotional environments. They are constantly bombarded-through clothing styles, entertainment, advertising, and courtship mores-with perhaps the most skillfully contrived array of erotic stimulants ever amassed. Their sexual fears and fantasies are studied by motivational researchers and then ruthlessly exploited by mass-media hucksters. Elizabeth Taylor's Brobdingnagian bosom decorates billboards, and throaty songstresses hum their hoarse invitations from transistors.
Yet we pass on to our youth, unaltered, a set of behavioral taboos that, in a sex-saturated society, seem diabolically created to produce a high level of duplicity and desperation.
Why have we deliberately constructed such a bizarre imbalance in our moral and psychological milieu? Obviously because we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to gorge ourselves at the table of an affluent society whose continued prosperity, we are told, necessitates a constantly expanding market. And sex sells anything. At the same time we want to cherish our national memories of Pilgrims and piety, including the sexual code of Massachusetts Bay. The inherent contradiction comes home to roost in the already tormented psyche of the unmarried young adult.
The essential contradictions of any society, as the Marxists say, are concentrated in its proletariat. In a sexually exploitative society, youth subculture becomes the psychological proletariat. It picks up the tab for our hypocrisy. Exposed to all the stimulants married people are, young people are forbidden the socially acceptable form of fulfillment. The refusal is expressed both in the laws of the realm and in the official taboos of the culture. Enforcement, however, is sporadic, and, because the signals are so confused and contradictory, adolescents suspect that it is all one vast dissimulation.
No wonder the beatnik, who rejects both the signals of the mass media and the sexual mores, becomes the secret hero of many young adults.
To make matters just a bit more trying, we have thoughtfully provided Jane and Joe more privacy and permissiveness in dating than ever before. This extends far beyond Harvard dormitory rooms. I wonder if Henry Ford ever realized his invention would be viewed by many not primarily as a means of transportation but as the urban society's substitute for Keats' "elfin grot."
Remember also that dating (and with it various types of petting) now reaches down to the sixth grade. Youngsters are thus exposed for a longer period and much more intensely to the mutual exploration of erogenous regions, which is the American courtship pattern. The only advice they get is "Don't go too far," and it is usually the girl who is expected to draw the line.
By the time a girl who begins petting at thirteen has reached marriageable age, she has drawn an awful lot of lines. If she is especially impressed with her religious duty to avoid sexual intercourse, she will probably have mastered, by twenty-one, all the strategems for achieving a kind of sexual climax while simultaneously preventing herself and her partner from crossing the sacrosanct line.
What this border-skirting approach does to inhibit her chances for a successful adjustment in marriage is a question now engaging the attention of psychologists and marriage counselors. One psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior remarked recently that if Americans had consciously set out to think up a system that would produce maximal marital and premarital strife for both sexes, we could scarcely have invented a sexually more sabotaging set of dating procedures than we have today. This may be an overstatement, but I suspect the inherent hypocrisy of the cultural taboo and the patterns of behavior it engenders must have considerable negative influence on marriage.
Add to this the fact that penicillin and oral contraceptives will soon remove the last built-in deterrents to premarital coitus, and the reason for the recent rumblings of discontent with traditional standards becomes clearer. Not that the young adults themselves are guiltless. They share the blame for perpetuating the same values. But they also consider themselves the victims of a kind of cultural charade. They are shown one thing, told another, and they never know when the society will wink and when it will whip them. Their suspicion that they are the fall guys in a giant collusion is expressed in their growing demand that we come clean on this matter.
Now we can turn to the question of why, amid this schizophrenic carnival of prurience and prudery, the Christian Gospel seems to offer so little positive guidance. I believe the answer to this question is that most young adults do not perceive Christian sexual ethics as "evangelical," that is, as good news. They are not hearing the Gospel as good news and therefore they are not hearing the Gospel at all, but something else.
The German theologian Friedrich Gogarten states that the two most serious dangers from which the Gospel must be protected are (a) its being dissolved into a myth and (b) its being hardened into a religion of Law. In either case it ceases to be the Gospel. When we examine what has happened to the Gospel as it touches the area of sex, it is evident that both of these distortions have set in.
The Gospel comes to the sexual puzzlement of most young adults not as a liberating yes, not as God's Good News freeing them for personhood and community. It comes rather as a remnant of cultural Christendom and an assortment of confused conventions. To be heard once again as the Gospel it must be demythologized and delegalized.
Let us turn first to the task of demythologizing it from odd bits of sexual folklore with which it has been confused. I shall refer to only two of the many mythical motifs that obfuscate the Gospel in its bearing on sexual conduct. First the ideal of romantic love, which Denis de Rougement has traced to paganism and which is almost always fused with any young American's ideas about sex. Second, the Western obsession with coital intercourse as normative sexuality and hence as that which defines the content of chastity and virginity. The identification is now so complete, that, as Theodor W. Adorno recently pointed out, intercourse now means coitus."
Both the romantic ideal and the identification of intercourse with coitus are cultural accretions that have been coalesced with the rule of premarital chastity. The combination has so beclouded the liberating power of the Gospel that it can scarcely be heard because of them, and the Gospel is frequently perceived to be saying almost the opposite of what is intended.
The ideal of romantic love is the most obvious mythical excrescence. It leads often to the belief, especially among girls, that certain forms of intimacy become progressively less objectionable the more you "love" the boy. The snares in this curious amalgam of Our Gal Sunday and Saint Teresa are manifold. Among adolescents of all ages, love has come to mean nothing more than a vague emotional glow. It's "that ol' black magic, ... those icy fingers up and down my spine."
The belief that love is the only honest basis for sex forces countless maidens into anguished efforts to justify their sexual inconstancy by falling in and out of love with a passing parade of partners. Naturally, opportunities for self-deception are almost endless, and the outcome is often an acid cynicism about the possibility of ever really loving anyone.
Furthermore, the sex-and-romantic-love equation sets up an inevitable collision course. The conflict occurs because, although girls tend to "go the limit" only with a boy they believe they "love," many boys, as sociologist Winston Ehrmann shows in his Premarital Dating Behavior, will stop short of intercourse with girls they "love" or "respect," though they will go as far as possible with another girl. Thus girls associate sex with romantic love far more than boys do, and emotional scars emerging from this built-in contradiction often last far into married life.
I choose this not because of any belief that it is really the key issue. It does seem clear, however, that for many young adults today "to bed or Not to bed" seems to be the Big Question, and I believe the reasons they press it so vigorously merit exploration. Three aspects of the problem require particular attention: (I) why the yes or no of premarital chastity is more critical for young adults today than in the past; (2) why the answers we usually give to this question are either not heard or provide little guidance and (3) what, if anything, we should be saying about the matter.
Let us reject at the outset any Kinseyan inference that what is being done should determine what ought to be done. But let us candidly admit that our culture has undergone drastic changes. Though our Puritan style of life has vanished almost completely, the Puritan sex ethic remains, at least on paper. We have exchanged ankle-length dresses for bikinis. We hold blanket parties instead of bobbing for apples. But the people caught up in these epochal changes are still taught, albeit with winks and evasions, the selfsame code of total premarital abstinence that was instilled into Priscilla Alden.
We have thus fashioned for unmarried young adults a particularly unfortunate combination of emotional environments. They are constantly bombarded-through clothing styles, entertainment, advertising, and courtship mores-with perhaps the most skillfully contrived array of erotic stimulants ever amassed. Their sexual fears and fantasies are studied by motivational researchers and then ruthlessly exploited by mass-media hucksters. Elizabeth Taylor's Brobdingnagian bosom decorates billboards, and throaty songstresses hum their hoarse invitations from transistors.
Yet we pass on to our youth, unaltered, a set of behavioral taboos that, in a sex-saturated society, seem diabolically created to produce a high level of duplicity and desperation.
Why have we deliberately constructed such a bizarre imbalance in our moral and psychological milieu? Obviously because we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to gorge ourselves at the table of an affluent society whose continued prosperity, we are told, necessitates a constantly expanding market. And sex sells anything. At the same time we want to cherish our national memories of Pilgrims and piety, including the sexual code of Massachusetts Bay. The inherent contradiction comes home to roost in the already tormented psyche of the unmarried young adult.
The essential contradictions of any society, as the Marxists say, are concentrated in its proletariat. In a sexually exploitative society, youth subculture becomes the psychological proletariat. It picks up the tab for our hypocrisy. Exposed to all the stimulants married people are, young people are forbidden the socially acceptable form of fulfillment. The refusal is expressed both in the laws of the realm and in the official taboos of the culture. Enforcement, however, is sporadic, and, because the signals are so confused and contradictory, adolescents suspect that it is all one vast dissimulation.
No wonder the beatnik, who rejects both the signals of the mass media and the sexual mores, becomes the secret hero of many young adults.
To make matters just a bit more trying, we have thoughtfully provided Jane and Joe more privacy and permissiveness in dating than ever before. This extends far beyond Harvard dormitory rooms. I wonder if Henry Ford ever realized his invention would be viewed by many not primarily as a means of transportation but as the urban society's substitute for Keats' "elfin grot."
Remember also that dating (and with it various types of petting) now reaches down to the sixth grade. Youngsters are thus exposed for a longer period and much more intensely to the mutual exploration of erogenous regions, which is the American courtship pattern. The only advice they get is "Don't go too far," and it is usually the girl who is expected to draw the line.
By the time a girl who begins petting at thirteen has reached marriageable age, she has drawn an awful lot of lines. If she is especially impressed with her religious duty to avoid sexual intercourse, she will probably have mastered, by twenty-one, all the strategems for achieving a kind of sexual climax while simultaneously preventing herself and her partner from crossing the sacrosanct line.
What this border-skirting approach does to inhibit her chances for a successful adjustment in marriage is a question now engaging the attention of psychologists and marriage counselors. One psychologist who specializes in sexual behavior remarked recently that if Americans had consciously set out to think up a system that would produce maximal marital and premarital strife for both sexes, we could scarcely have invented a sexually more sabotaging set of dating procedures than we have today. This may be an overstatement, but I suspect the inherent hypocrisy of the cultural taboo and the patterns of behavior it engenders must have considerable negative influence on marriage.
Add to this the fact that penicillin and oral contraceptives will soon remove the last built-in deterrents to premarital coitus, and the reason for the recent rumblings of discontent with traditional standards becomes clearer. Not that the young adults themselves are guiltless. They share the blame for perpetuating the same values. But they also consider themselves the victims of a kind of cultural charade. They are shown one thing, told another, and they never know when the society will wink and when it will whip them. Their suspicion that they are the fall guys in a giant collusion is expressed in their growing demand that we come clean on this matter.
Now we can turn to the question of why, amid this schizophrenic carnival of prurience and prudery, the Christian Gospel seems to offer so little positive guidance. I believe the answer to this question is that most young adults do not perceive Christian sexual ethics as "evangelical," that is, as good news. They are not hearing the Gospel as good news and therefore they are not hearing the Gospel at all, but something else.
The German theologian Friedrich Gogarten states that the two most serious dangers from which the Gospel must be protected are (a) its being dissolved into a myth and (b) its being hardened into a religion of Law. In either case it ceases to be the Gospel. When we examine what has happened to the Gospel as it touches the area of sex, it is evident that both of these distortions have set in.
The Gospel comes to the sexual puzzlement of most young adults not as a liberating yes, not as God's Good News freeing them for personhood and community. It comes rather as a remnant of cultural Christendom and an assortment of confused conventions. To be heard once again as the Gospel it must be demythologized and delegalized.
Let us turn first to the task of demythologizing it from odd bits of sexual folklore with which it has been confused. I shall refer to only two of the many mythical motifs that obfuscate the Gospel in its bearing on sexual conduct. First the ideal of romantic love, which Denis de Rougement has traced to paganism and which is almost always fused with any young American's ideas about sex. Second, the Western obsession with coital intercourse as normative sexuality and hence as that which defines the content of chastity and virginity. The identification is now so complete, that, as Theodor W. Adorno recently pointed out, intercourse now means coitus."
Both the romantic ideal and the identification of intercourse with coitus are cultural accretions that have been coalesced with the rule of premarital chastity. The combination has so beclouded the liberating power of the Gospel that it can scarcely be heard because of them, and the Gospel is frequently perceived to be saying almost the opposite of what is intended.
The ideal of romantic love is the most obvious mythical excrescence. It leads often to the belief, especially among girls, that certain forms of intimacy become progressively less objectionable the more you "love" the boy. The snares in this curious amalgam of Our Gal Sunday and Saint Teresa are manifold. Among adolescents of all ages, love has come to mean nothing more than a vague emotional glow. It's "that ol' black magic, ... those icy fingers up and down my spine."
The belief that love is the only honest basis for sex forces countless maidens into anguished efforts to justify their sexual inconstancy by falling in and out of love with a passing parade of partners. Naturally, opportunities for self-deception are almost endless, and the outcome is often an acid cynicism about the possibility of ever really loving anyone.
Furthermore, the sex-and-romantic-love equation sets up an inevitable collision course. The conflict occurs because, although girls tend to "go the limit" only with a boy they believe they "love," many boys, as sociologist Winston Ehrmann shows in his Premarital Dating Behavior, will stop short of intercourse with girls they "love" or "respect," though they will go as far as possible with another girl. Thus girls associate sex with romantic love far more than boys do, and emotional scars emerging from this built-in contradiction often last far into married life.
2
Since girls feel they must be swept into sexual experience by something "bigger than both of us," they often fail to take the precautions against pregnancy they might otherwise. Somehow it doesn't seem romantic to go out with a boy, having prepared in advance to be swept off one's feet. Consequently, many instances of intercourse are not "planned," but occur more or less spontaneously at the end of an evening of progressively heavier necking. Unwanted pregnancies, abortions, shattered family relations, and forfeited careers are the inevitable result.
One solution is to admonish everybody to avoid any physical contact that could spiral toward intercourse. But how sane or compassionate is this advice in a society where various types of petting are the only socially approved way of handling tensions exacerbated by a sexually saturated culture? Petting does sometimes lead to intercourse, but not always. Most of the time it does not. To try to abolish it while still retaining our prosperity and our aphrodisiac advertising would be even less honest than the preach-and-wink pharisaism.
Another antidote is simply to deromanticize sex. This would mean urging young people who are going to have intercourse anyway (arid who, under layers of unsuccessful self-deception, know they will)to accept the full responsibility for their behavior and to take the necessary steps to avoid pregnancy.
Such a solution, although more realistic, has almost as little chance of acceptance as the first. It would necessitate dispelling the illusions of romantic love and suggesting that young people ponder soberly in the light of day what they are really doing. But it would also require our society to face up to the fact and flimflam of its sexual folkways, and this no one really wants to do. So the black magic, petting, and pregnancies will probably continue.
A more stubborn and deceptive segment of folklore that has been equated with the doctrine of premarital chastity is one that is rarely discussed openly: the curious presumption that a person who has not experienced coital intercourse remains a virgin-no matter what else he or she has done. This popular piece of legerdemain explains in part the discovery by Kinsey that, although the incidence of premarital intercourse among women has merely mounted steadily, premarital petting of all varieties has skyrocketed.
Kinsey's finding could be substantiated by the most casual observer of the American college scene. The number of students who do not pet at all is negligible. An increasing number regularly carry their necking to the point of heavy sex play and orgasm. A pert young graduate of a denominational college assured me recently that although she had necked to orgasm every weekend for two years, she had never "gone all the way." Her premarital chastity was intact.
Or was it? Only, I submit, by the most technical definition of what is meant by preserving virginity. True, some writers actually advocate such noncoital orgasm as the "safest" way for unmarried people to achieve sexual climax. However distasteful this idea may seem to some, it is extremely important to realize that the church's traditional teaching actually functions in such a fashion as to give considerable support to this view.
The ideal of premarital chastity is generally understood to mean that, although necking is somewhat questionable, the fragile gem of virginity remains intact so long as coitus is avoided. This myth has helped open the floodgate to a tidal wave of noncoital promiscuity.
Here the demythologizing process might be helped if we note Saint Paul's insistence (in I Corinthians 6: I5-I6) that liaisons intended to be highly casual, for example with prostitutes, nevertheless involve us in a relationship that is inevitably much deeper than we bargained for. We "become one flesh." D. S. Bailey calls this "a psychological insight ...altogether exceptional by first-century standards."
Saint Paul saw the striking fact that as human beings we both have and are bodies. This is 'an issue that has been explored at length by such contemporary philosophers as Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Paul saw that sex- unlike excretion, for example-is not simply a physiological but also a "bodily" (somatic) activity. It involves us at the deepest levels of our personal identity.
But why limit Saint Paul's insight to coital intercourse alone, or to contacts with prostitutes? The mere avoidance of coitus does not exempt anyone from becoming "one flesh" with another. All "virgins" who are promiscuous neckers should know that. Nor can the "one flesh" phenomenon be restricted to the bordello.
Saint Paul knew that no sexual relationship could be kept merely physical without ceasing to be really sexual in the fully human sense of the word. This is why the playmate-of-the-month domestication of sex as a purely recreational pursuit just doesn't work. Paul really appreciated sex more than Hugh Hefner does. He expected more from it. Sex is certainly fun, but to make it simply fun is to eviscerate and enfeeble it. Then it eventually ceases even to be fun.
When it is demythologized, the evangelical sexual ethic turns out to be an invitation to. life together in a community of personal selves. The Gospel frees us from the need to cling to romantic self-deception and the righteousness by which we clothe our promiscuity in the costume of technical virginity. By delivering us from mythology into history, Jesus Christ allows us to see that the marvelous skein of privileges and responsibilities in which we find ourselves as human beings is something for which we are responsible. But how do we exercise this responsibility?
At this point the going becomes more difficult. Any effort to arrest the degeneration of the Gospel into some form of Law will be viewed in some quarters as antinomianism, the belief that the precepts of the Law are not binding for Christians. A Gospel ethic, however, demands more maturity and more discipline than a Law ethic. Evangelical ethics are by nature riskier. This risk must be run since the New Testament insists unequivocally that it is the Gospel and not the Law that saves. How then can we begin to "delegalize" the Gospel when sexual behavior is the question at issue?
The Gospel is addressed to persons; the Law sees acts. One weakness of the traditional ethical formulation on premarital chastity is its sweeping inclusiveness and total lack of discrimination. Reduced to a precept, the ideal of premarital chastity permits no distinction between intercourse by engaged couples, for example, and the chilling exploitation of high school girls at fraternity parties. Both are transgressions of the Law, and there is no middle ground between virginity and non-virginity.
Consequently there emerges alongside the technical virgin her shadowy counterpart, the technically fallen woman-the girl who, because she once consented to intercourse, now feels she is permanently pastured among the goats. She has crossed the sexual Styx and there is no way back. Because she can no longer present herself to her husband in purity on the wedding night anyway, why shouldn't anything go?
Her self-condemnation arises in part because she has not heard the good news. She has perceived the traditional teaching as a law. Law without Gospel is arbitrary and abstract. It cannot discriminate among cases. And it has nothing helpful to say to the transgressor. Consequently, for the increasing proportion of young people who have already had sexual intercourse, the rule of premarital chastity is simply irrelevant. And since for many it appears to be the only record the church ever plays on this subject, they conclude the church has nothing to say to them.
But preaching the Gospel also entails preaching the Law- exposing the false absolutes from which one is liberated. Negatively this means making clear the distorted images of sex from which the Gospel delivers us. Positively it entails protecting sex as a fully human activity against all the principalities and powers that seek to dehumanize it. In our day these include the forces, both within and without, that pervert sex into a merchandising technique, a means of self-aggrandizement, a weapon for rebelling against parents, a recreational pursuit, a way to gain entrance into the right clique, or-let the reader beware- a devotional act with some sort of religious significance.
To be freed from the "bondage of the Law" means to be freed from these dehumanizing powers. It also means to be freed from those diabolical pressures toward subcultural conformity that push so many adolescents into whatever is "in" at the moment. Sexual freedom in Christ, in one concrete case, means that a harried co-ed can say no to a cloying Romeo without feeling she is being hopelessly square.
Evangelical ethics cease to be Law and once again become Gospel when the Word liberates people from cultural conventions and social pressures, when persons discover their sexuality as a delightful gift from God that links them in freedom and concern to their fellows. But how do we make this Gospel heard by young adults in today's sexually rapacious society?
The Secular City
Harvey Cox
Since girls feel they must be swept into sexual experience by something "bigger than both of us," they often fail to take the precautions against pregnancy they might otherwise. Somehow it doesn't seem romantic to go out with a boy, having prepared in advance to be swept off one's feet. Consequently, many instances of intercourse are not "planned," but occur more or less spontaneously at the end of an evening of progressively heavier necking. Unwanted pregnancies, abortions, shattered family relations, and forfeited careers are the inevitable result.
One solution is to admonish everybody to avoid any physical contact that could spiral toward intercourse. But how sane or compassionate is this advice in a society where various types of petting are the only socially approved way of handling tensions exacerbated by a sexually saturated culture? Petting does sometimes lead to intercourse, but not always. Most of the time it does not. To try to abolish it while still retaining our prosperity and our aphrodisiac advertising would be even less honest than the preach-and-wink pharisaism.
Another antidote is simply to deromanticize sex. This would mean urging young people who are going to have intercourse anyway (arid who, under layers of unsuccessful self-deception, know they will)to accept the full responsibility for their behavior and to take the necessary steps to avoid pregnancy.
Such a solution, although more realistic, has almost as little chance of acceptance as the first. It would necessitate dispelling the illusions of romantic love and suggesting that young people ponder soberly in the light of day what they are really doing. But it would also require our society to face up to the fact and flimflam of its sexual folkways, and this no one really wants to do. So the black magic, petting, and pregnancies will probably continue.
A more stubborn and deceptive segment of folklore that has been equated with the doctrine of premarital chastity is one that is rarely discussed openly: the curious presumption that a person who has not experienced coital intercourse remains a virgin-no matter what else he or she has done. This popular piece of legerdemain explains in part the discovery by Kinsey that, although the incidence of premarital intercourse among women has merely mounted steadily, premarital petting of all varieties has skyrocketed.
Kinsey's finding could be substantiated by the most casual observer of the American college scene. The number of students who do not pet at all is negligible. An increasing number regularly carry their necking to the point of heavy sex play and orgasm. A pert young graduate of a denominational college assured me recently that although she had necked to orgasm every weekend for two years, she had never "gone all the way." Her premarital chastity was intact.
Or was it? Only, I submit, by the most technical definition of what is meant by preserving virginity. True, some writers actually advocate such noncoital orgasm as the "safest" way for unmarried people to achieve sexual climax. However distasteful this idea may seem to some, it is extremely important to realize that the church's traditional teaching actually functions in such a fashion as to give considerable support to this view.
The ideal of premarital chastity is generally understood to mean that, although necking is somewhat questionable, the fragile gem of virginity remains intact so long as coitus is avoided. This myth has helped open the floodgate to a tidal wave of noncoital promiscuity.
Here the demythologizing process might be helped if we note Saint Paul's insistence (in I Corinthians 6: I5-I6) that liaisons intended to be highly casual, for example with prostitutes, nevertheless involve us in a relationship that is inevitably much deeper than we bargained for. We "become one flesh." D. S. Bailey calls this "a psychological insight ...altogether exceptional by first-century standards."
Saint Paul saw the striking fact that as human beings we both have and are bodies. This is 'an issue that has been explored at length by such contemporary philosophers as Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Paul saw that sex- unlike excretion, for example-is not simply a physiological but also a "bodily" (somatic) activity. It involves us at the deepest levels of our personal identity.
But why limit Saint Paul's insight to coital intercourse alone, or to contacts with prostitutes? The mere avoidance of coitus does not exempt anyone from becoming "one flesh" with another. All "virgins" who are promiscuous neckers should know that. Nor can the "one flesh" phenomenon be restricted to the bordello.
Saint Paul knew that no sexual relationship could be kept merely physical without ceasing to be really sexual in the fully human sense of the word. This is why the playmate-of-the-month domestication of sex as a purely recreational pursuit just doesn't work. Paul really appreciated sex more than Hugh Hefner does. He expected more from it. Sex is certainly fun, but to make it simply fun is to eviscerate and enfeeble it. Then it eventually ceases even to be fun.
When it is demythologized, the evangelical sexual ethic turns out to be an invitation to. life together in a community of personal selves. The Gospel frees us from the need to cling to romantic self-deception and the righteousness by which we clothe our promiscuity in the costume of technical virginity. By delivering us from mythology into history, Jesus Christ allows us to see that the marvelous skein of privileges and responsibilities in which we find ourselves as human beings is something for which we are responsible. But how do we exercise this responsibility?
At this point the going becomes more difficult. Any effort to arrest the degeneration of the Gospel into some form of Law will be viewed in some quarters as antinomianism, the belief that the precepts of the Law are not binding for Christians. A Gospel ethic, however, demands more maturity and more discipline than a Law ethic. Evangelical ethics are by nature riskier. This risk must be run since the New Testament insists unequivocally that it is the Gospel and not the Law that saves. How then can we begin to "delegalize" the Gospel when sexual behavior is the question at issue?
The Gospel is addressed to persons; the Law sees acts. One weakness of the traditional ethical formulation on premarital chastity is its sweeping inclusiveness and total lack of discrimination. Reduced to a precept, the ideal of premarital chastity permits no distinction between intercourse by engaged couples, for example, and the chilling exploitation of high school girls at fraternity parties. Both are transgressions of the Law, and there is no middle ground between virginity and non-virginity.
Consequently there emerges alongside the technical virgin her shadowy counterpart, the technically fallen woman-the girl who, because she once consented to intercourse, now feels she is permanently pastured among the goats. She has crossed the sexual Styx and there is no way back. Because she can no longer present herself to her husband in purity on the wedding night anyway, why shouldn't anything go?
Her self-condemnation arises in part because she has not heard the good news. She has perceived the traditional teaching as a law. Law without Gospel is arbitrary and abstract. It cannot discriminate among cases. And it has nothing helpful to say to the transgressor. Consequently, for the increasing proportion of young people who have already had sexual intercourse, the rule of premarital chastity is simply irrelevant. And since for many it appears to be the only record the church ever plays on this subject, they conclude the church has nothing to say to them.
But preaching the Gospel also entails preaching the Law- exposing the false absolutes from which one is liberated. Negatively this means making clear the distorted images of sex from which the Gospel delivers us. Positively it entails protecting sex as a fully human activity against all the principalities and powers that seek to dehumanize it. In our day these include the forces, both within and without, that pervert sex into a merchandising technique, a means of self-aggrandizement, a weapon for rebelling against parents, a recreational pursuit, a way to gain entrance into the right clique, or-let the reader beware- a devotional act with some sort of religious significance.
To be freed from the "bondage of the Law" means to be freed from these dehumanizing powers. It also means to be freed from those diabolical pressures toward subcultural conformity that push so many adolescents into whatever is "in" at the moment. Sexual freedom in Christ, in one concrete case, means that a harried co-ed can say no to a cloying Romeo without feeling she is being hopelessly square.
Evangelical ethics cease to be Law and once again become Gospel when the Word liberates people from cultural conventions and social pressures, when persons discover their sexuality as a delightful gift from God that links them in freedom and concern to their fellows. But how do we make this Gospel heard by young adults in today's sexually rapacious society?
The Secular City
Harvey Cox
KnowledgeIsQueen
Duality Duel
3-8-2013
She has a young face
An old face
She carries herself well
In all ages
She survives all man has done
In some tribes she is free
In some religions
She is under man
In some societies
She's worth what she consumes
In some nations
She is delicate strength
In some states
She is told she is weak
In some classes
She is property owned
In all instances
She is sister to earth
In all conditions
She is life bringer
In all life she is our necessity
See the woman eyes
Flowers swaying
On scattered hills
Sundancing calling in the bees
See the woman heart
Lavender butterflies
Fronting blue sky
Misty rain falling
On soft wild roses
See the woman beauty
Lightning streaking
Dark summer nights
Forests of pines mating
With new winter snow
See the woman spirit
Daily serving courage
With laughter
Her breath a dream
And a prayer
See The Woman
~* John Trudell
"I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves." ~* Mary Wollstonecraft
She has a young face
An old face
She carries herself well
In all ages
She survives all man has done
In some tribes she is free
In some religions
She is under man
In some societies
She's worth what she consumes
In some nations
She is delicate strength
In some states
She is told she is weak
In some classes
She is property owned
In all instances
She is sister to earth
In all conditions
She is life bringer
In all life she is our necessity
See the woman eyes
Flowers swaying
On scattered hills
Sundancing calling in the bees
See the woman heart
Lavender butterflies
Fronting blue sky
Misty rain falling
On soft wild roses
See the woman beauty
Lightning streaking
Dark summer nights
Forests of pines mating
With new winter snow
See the woman spirit
Daily serving courage
With laughter
Her breath a dream
And a prayer
See The Woman
~* John Trudell
"I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves." ~* Mary Wollstonecraft
Last edited by a moderator:
I bargained with life for a penny
And life would pay no more
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store
For life is just an employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.
And life would pay no more
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store
For life is just an employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.