Mere Christianity

[lucimay]

what? i dont even merit a "piss off luci"?

[Cagliostro]

Piss off Luci.

And hang on Sloopy. Sloopy, hang on.

[aliantha]

Luci, I didn't see that you'd said anything to argue with.

Rus -- first, merry Christmas.

Second, I totally comprehend Lewis's world view re the place of women in society. I'm, uh, mumblemumble years old (eligible to join AARP, if that gives you a clue) -- old enough to remember when Lewis's world view meant that I had to fight for a spot in my high school pep band (girls weren't allowed to join unless they played an instrument which no boys played) and that I wasn't allowed to work the more lucrative morning shift in radio because "men don't want to hear a woman's voice waking them up". I'm *very* familiar with his, and your, "separate but equal" argument on the place of women in society, and I've rejected it as ridiculous. Which is why it sticks out like a sore thumb to me when I come across it now.

Third,

In defense of both GKC and Lewis, I think it important to say that they did NOT ignore the possibilities of other sources; they excluded them deliberately, via reason and experience.

Their reason being that Christianity had thoroughly defeated the old, archaic and "used up" pagan religion -- a theory which I shot down months ago. Come on, Rus, admit it: both of them are Christian apologists, champions of Christianity. They are trying to convert people. They are not going to be inclined to give polytheism a fair shake.

Have a great holiday, everybody.

[rusmeister]

Luci, I didn't see that you'd said anything to argue with.

Rus -- first, merry Christmas.

Second, I totally comprehend Lewis's world view re the place of women in society. I'm, uh, mumblemumble years old (eligible to join AARP, if that gives you a clue) -- old enough to remember when Lewis's world view meant that I had to fight for a spot in my high school pep band (girls weren't allowed to join unless they played an instrument which no boys played) and that I wasn't allowed to work the more lucrative morning shift in radio because "men don't want to hear a woman's voice waking them up". I'm *very* familiar with his, and your, "separate but equal" argument on the place of women in society, and I've rejected it as ridiculous. Which is why it sticks out like a sore thumb to me when I come across it now.

Third,

In defense of both GKC and Lewis, I think it important to say that they did NOT ignore the possibilities of other sources; they excluded them deliberately, via reason and experience.

Their reason being that Christianity had thoroughly defeated the old, archaic and "used up" pagan religion -- a theory which I shot down months ago. Come on, Rus, admit it: both of them are Christian apologists, champions of Christianity. They are trying to convert people. They are not going to be inclined to give polytheism a fair shake.

Have a great holiday, everybody.

Thanks!
I just had an evening celebration with family and friends - who came together for my sake - they are Russian and have no impetus to celebrate on the 24th/25th.

I can appreciate that you are an older person (although I don't imagine that I am much younger myself) - on the scale I talk/think about, that would be completely irrelevant, though. If you were 100 years old it wouldn't be terribly relevant. The scale I am operating on is one of centuries and millenia - with centuries being "flash-in-the-pan" - by that standard, protestant Christianity is quite short-lived; only a quarter of all of Christian history, but it is that quarter, and all of the insanities that devekloped out of it in the West, that helped form the objections many have to Christianity today - objections that are o0nly aware of that fractional chunk of Christian history in time and space.

You are speaking of your personal experience, which contributed to forming your world view. If there is a worldview that does not react to circumstances, but predicates them and consciously adopts its positions, and condemns the things that you experienced, while not accepting your position, then it can tenably hold a position that denies identicality of the sexes, while declaring their ontological equality in terms of value. That view does deny that there is a power position of the one over the other; and that any submission must be voluntary - generally limited to the voluntary submission of wives to husbands (regarding the sexes). The view you begin with "rejects that as ridiculous"; which to me says that it simply does not attempt to understand a mature version of that view, but insists on attacking a genuinely immature version of it (justly) and holding that as the sum of the view (unjustly).

On your latter point, I freely admit that they are champions of Christianity. Where we differ is that I deny that you "shot down" their ideas, and insist that they did indeed give polytheism "a fair shake". Lewis, for example, recommends Hinduism, specifically after Christianity, as the religion most worthy of serious consideration.

It may be useless hammering all this out, but at least I can say that I seriously considered all of your points.

[Fist and Faith]

As an aside to Watchers in general, a thing that I have always thought a potential and particular danger here:

Commenting on the Socratic Club at Oxford, C.S. Lewis stated, “In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university, there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into ‘coteries’ where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.”

That's what I was 'bleating about' on the "Thank God" thread.

You need not worry. On only the last couple pages of this and the "Is science a religion" threads, you, Furls, ali, 7, Orlion, Avatar, cag, danlo, wayfriend, and I have all posted. Cybr, CJ, and others have also posted in them. Add Auleliel's thread called "Advent from a Catholic POV", and Menolly's "60 Day Journey" for a Jewish perspective. It would be difficult in the extreme to find a group of people with a wider range of beliefs than that! Even those of you in that list who call yourselves Christians are pretty far apart from each other's views, even though you're all much closer to each others' than to mine. The chances that either you or I will ever embrace ali's beliefs, or ANY of you will ever embrace mine, are so small as to be non-existent. No, you need not worry. We most certainly do NOT "think alike." We are all "outsiders" in this group, because not one of us agrees with another. There is no shared dogmatism here. Our opinions are all different, and we are not hostile to each other because of it.

[aliantha]

Hey Rus,

Glad you had a good visit with friends/family. Christmas isn't my holiday, either, btw -- we had our Yule celebration earlier this week.

By all means, feel free to insist that Lewis and GKC fairly considered polytheism. And I'm not saying that I shot down *all* their ideas. The only one I feel I've thoroughly refuted is the canard that paganism died with the collapse of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

Of course I'm using my personal experiences to form my view about women's place in the world -- as, I daresay, Lewis and GKC also did. The difference is that today, we understand how their world view limited women's advancement and deprived the world of their talents. I won't argue with you that women and men are built differently physically -- but short of those physical differences, I can't think of anything a man is better suited for than a woman is, and vice versa. Any other view on the subject, to my mind, is male chauvinism justifying itself in order to hold onto the status quo. And you can bet your @ss I'm not buying it.

[rusmeister]

As an aside to Watchers in general, a thing that I have always thought a potential and particular danger here:

Commenting on the Socratic Club at Oxford, C.S. Lewis stated, “In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university, there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into ‘coteries’ where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say.”

That's what I was 'bleating about' on the "Thank God" thread.

You need not worry. On only the last couple pages of this and the "Is science a religion" threads, you, Furls, ali, 7, Orlion, Avatar, cag, danlo, wayfriend, and I have all posted. Cybr, CJ, and others have also posted in them. Add Auleliel's thread called "Advent from a Catholic POV", and Menolly's "60 Day Journey" for a Jewish perspective. It would be difficult in the extreme to find a group of people with a wider range of beliefs than that! Even those of you in that list who call yourselves Christians are pretty far apart from each other's views, even though you're all much closer to each others' than to mine. The chances that either you or I will ever embrace ali's beliefs, or ANY of you will ever embrace mine, are so small as to be non-existent. No, you need not worry. We most certainly do NOT "think alike." We are all "outsiders" in this group, because not one of us agrees with another. There is no shared dogmatism here. Our opinions are all different, and we are not hostile to each other because of it.

This is one of the things I do appreciate here, in general - the high level combination of intelligence and reasonability. The thread I referred to was, imo, a fairly blatant example of coterie (up to the point where I posted, at any rate, after which other voices came into play - or came in to play, as the case may be), but it does seem, in general, that it is the exception and not the rule.

[rusmeister]

Hey Rus,

Glad you had a good visit with friends/family. Christmas isn't my holiday, either, btw -- we had our Yule celebration earlier this week.

By all means, feel free to insist that Lewis and GKC fairly considered polytheism. And I'm not saying that I shot down *all* their ideas. The only one I feel I've thoroughly refuted is the canard that paganism died with the collapse of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

Of course I'm using my personal experiences to form my view about women's place in the world -- as, I daresay, Lewis and GKC also did. The difference is that today, we understand how their world view limited women's advancement and deprived the world of their talents. I won't argue with you that women and men are built differently physically -- but short of those physical differences, I can't think of anything a man is better suited for than a woman is, and vice versa. Any other view on the subject, to my mind, is male chauvinism justifying itself in order to hold onto the status quo. And you can bet your @ss I'm not buying it.

I've already objected to your claim of a canard, and view history without primary sources as fiction, or at the very least, as something accepted on faith, and not genuine scholarship. Certainly, we love to insist on that regarding histories that we disagree with. There's probably no point in going back and forth on that; I'd be happy if that one point were admitted regarding our various views - yours and mine.

But on men and women, I have to disagree. Personal experiences are only a starting point. Without knowledge, they are unexplained, unqualified experience.
It seems obvious to me that in saying

we understand how their world view limited women's advancement and deprived the world of their talents

you are assuming that you do understand their worldview, when in fact, I, who DO understand their worldview, understand nothing of the kind (that women's advancement was limited, etc). You are merely taking your worldview as a starting point and assuming its truths, and not really attempting to understand their worldview at all. I would insist that injustices done to any group at all, even in the name of faith, were only hypocritical use of the faith, and not something actually supported by authority within the faith. (Here you must make a clear distinction between Protestantism in general and the more traditional forms of Christianity accepted by L, C, and myself - High Anglican/Catholic (and by extension, Orthodox) - which do insist on external authority.) In short, their worldview DENIES, and does not at all support, injustices done to women (or men).

There are actual differences between men and women that do impact our lives as a species. I believe these extend to manner of thought and behavior, and see them as complementary, and not at all in terms of any kind of superiority. Views that do are a result of the modern blitz of dogmatic teaching of falsehood repeated endlessly in public schooling and the media, so that everyone should assume such "truths" and no one actually think critically about them.

[lucimay]

There are actual differences between men and women that do impact our lives as a species. I believe these extend to manner of thought and behavior, and see them as complementary, and not at all in terms of any kind of superiority. Views that do are a result of the modern blitz of dogmatic teaching of falsehood repeated endlessly in public schooling and the media, so that everyone should assume such "truths" and no one actually think critically about them.

i do believe that this is the first time i've ever agreed with you on anything rus but i believe you are absolutely right on this point.

men and women are equipped differently and think differently, neither of which is superior to the other. society has, at different times in history, ascribed and imprinted certain societal roles on the sexs according to the social heirarchy of the time. it has been these societal roles and the attitudes they engender that caused the battle for dominance that has waged between men and women for ever and a day. a paradigm shift is called for, i believe.

some religions had a hand in forming these societal roles, some religions didn't.

[rusmeister]

There are actual differences between men and women that do impact our lives as a species. I believe these extend to manner of thought and behavior, and see them as complementary, and not at all in terms of any kind of superiority. Views that do are a result of the modern blitz of dogmatic teaching of falsehood repeated endlessly in public schooling and the media, so that everyone should assume such "truths" and no one actually think critically about them.

i do believe that this is the first time i've ever agreed with you on anything rus but i believe you are absolutely right on this point.

men and women are equipped differently and think differently, neither of which is superior to the other. society has, at different times in history, ascribed and imprinted certain societal roles on the sexs according to the social heirarchy of the time. it has been these societal roles and the attitudes they engender that caused the battle for dominance that has waged between men and women for ever and a day. a paradigm shift is called for, i believe.

some religions had a hand in forming these societal roles, some

religions didn't.

I don't know, Lucimay, the trouble is that i don't believe there IS any battle for dominance between men and women. I believe THAT is one of the raging falsehoods of our time that people have indoctrinated into them until they can't believe anything different. One of the great things that I realized from reading GKC is that the fact of the attraction of the sexes puts it completely out of the category of competing groups - it makes stuff and nonsense out of the claims of war between the sexes.

The most ancient of human institutions has an authority that may
seem as wild as anarchy. Alone among all such institutions it
begins with a spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly
and not sentimentally to be founded on love instead of fear.
The attempt to compare it with coercive institutions complicating
later history has led to infinite illogicality in later times.
It is as unique as it is universal. There is nothing in any other social
relations in any way parallel to the mutual attraction of the sexes.
By missing this simple point, the modern world has fallen into
a hundred follies. The idea of a general revolt of women against
men has been proclaimed with flags and processions, like a revolt
of vassals against their lords, of slaves against slave-drivers,
of Poles against Prussians or Irishmen against Englishmen;
for all the world as if we really believed in the fabulous nation
of the Amazons. The equally philosophical idea of a general
revolt of men against women has been put into a romance by
Sir Walter Besant, and into a sociological book by Mr. Belfort Bax.
But at the first touch of this truth of an aboriginal attraction,
all such comparisons collapse and are seen to be comic.
A Prussian does not feel from the first that he can only
be happy if he spends his days and nights with a Pole.
An Englishman does not think his house empty and cheerless unless
it happens to contain an Irishman. A white man does not in his
romantic youth dream of the perfect beauty of a black man.
A railway magnate seldom writes poems about the personal fascination
of a railway porter. All the other revolts against all the other
relations are reasonable and even inevitable, because those
relations are originally only founded upon force or self interest.
Force can abolish what force can establish; self-interest can
terminate a contract when self-interest has dictated the contract.
But the love of man and woman is not an institution that can be abolished,
or a contract that can be terminated. It is something older than all
institutions or contracts, and something that is certain to outlast
them all. All the other revolts are real, because there remains
a possibility that the things may be destroyed, or at least divided.
You can abolish capitalists; but you cannot abolish males.
Prussians can go out of Poland or negroes can be repatriated to Africa;
but a man and a woman must remain together in one way or another;
and must learn to put up with each other somehow.

www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/divorce.txt

[Fist and Faith]

I can completely grant that people feel that way about laws of society - which, at their best, only reflect attempts at the human ideal, and that that in no way negates Lewis's point. The answer is that people feel that way about laws that they feel are actually unjust. If the command against stealing means that the rich may steal from the poor, but the poor may not steal from the rich (as is usually the case), then the rich will feel that the law is a good thing and the poor feel that the law is wrong. However, as outside observers both you and I (and anyone else) would agree that such a state of affairs is wrong, and that such laws ought to be thrown out in favor of laws supporting a fair and just society for all. However, if there is a fair and just law regarding stealing (your example), show me the person who will say there ought to be no such law ensuring that poor and rich alike really are subject to and I will show you a mentally and/or spiritually ill person - an extreme exception, and the kind that a healthy and viable society restrains. In fact, where such laws really do exist, those who steal really do everything they can to justify it and do not, in fact, say 'to hell with that standard'; at the very least, they really do appeal to that standard when it works in their favor; they actually do get angry when someone steals from them - they do not philosophically hold that everyone has an equal right to disdain those standards; they always make an exception in their own case. People actually do not differ on this point, and so we are back to a compass. Lewis doesn't "start with the compass" - he comes to it reasonably.

I moved this from the other thread, since that conversation crossed over to this topic. But really, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to respond to it any more. We're just repeating ourselves. I say the best indicator of the morality of a person is his actions. Lewis and you say that everybody has the same morality, and the wide variety of actions to the contrary do not indicate otherwise.


As for this:

I don't know, Lucimay, the trouble is that i don't believe there IS any battle for dominance between men and women. I believe THAT is one of the raging falsehoods of our time that people have indoctrinated into them until they can't believe anything different. One of the great things that I realized from reading GKC is that the fact of the attraction of the sexes puts it completely out of the category of competing groups - it makes stuff and nonsense out of the claims of war between the sexes.

Thank goodness I didn't have a mouth full of coffee when I read that!!
It's great being the oppressor telling the oppressed that they're not, eh? Just because you and I may not oppress women, doesn't mean it is not done in a huge number of individual cases (as the horrifying number of women who have suffered sexual assaults and/or domestic violence will attest), and by the governmental powers as a whole (as the lower wages for equal work that still happens often enough will attest). But I'll let whichever ladies want to get specific respond further.

[rusmeister]

Fist, by all means, let them respond. I realize that a dozen people could bring out (probably in a sudden and almost violently emotional manner) arguments and statistics to show what all affirm to each other and prove me wrong.

It IS a non-conventional view today, but I hold that the conventional view is the one that is completely wrong.

That is not to say that people can treat other people badly because they are misogynist - but to take those insane exceptions and cast them as the rule is unreasonable - and again, it ignores the enormous point I made.

As soon as you speak of men as oppressors as a class you reveal that you already take it as an unquestionable given; and I have questioned it.

There are a number of bases for questioning it. Political ones, such as voting, are predicated on the value of voting; that voting really does represent real and significant political power. If it doesn't, all examples of political oppression fall apart, and I hold that it doesn't. Voting doesn't do squat to change policy in areas that really matter, the ones involving real money and power.

Economic views of today assume the individual as the base unit of society, rather than the family. If the family is considered as the base, then many of today's popular charges would seem far less sensible than they do, and frankly, I don't believe any society in the world has ever been so militantly individualistic, making a regular religion out of the enshrining of the individual, as if he were not part of something much bigger than himself.

If there are differences between men and women that tend toward particular aptitudes for public vs private life - and I believe there are, then it would be irrelevant that people trotted out examples of public life while ignoring private life. Thus, talking about how women have not been prominent in public life ignores their traditional dominance of private life. Again, literature provides sufficient evidence that popular ideas of universal oppression of women, encouraged by modern history books, are false - at any rate such literature as "The Wife of Bath's Tale" or Pushkin's tale of the "Fisherman and the Golden Fish" would not have been possible if men really dominated women in the home. People would have laughed off such silly and unrealistic stories - unless they were not silly and rang of truth.

I believe that the views that most hold are a result of conditioning, rather than actual thought. Like I said, public schooling and the media are very good at getting people to hold ideas without thinking about them. Most of us are defenseless, from childhood, against the twin onslaught. That you would have spurted coffee suggests that you never seriously considered the matter in any light other than the one instilled into you. I wouldn't be so confident that you have an open-and-shut case, in any case.

[lucimay]

oh! oh goodness. well...
there's no use me arguing with you on this rus.

i'd love to cite and support and back you up here fist but i don't see the
sense in it. if someone has convinced themselves to believe something
its soooooo not my job to convince them otherwise.

rus would not agree with any evidence of the oppression of women that i could provide. he'd read what i posted, think to himself about how i've been taken in by my education and indoctrination, shake his head and explain to me how he believes that i think what i think because i've been duped by a silly..er...RUSE into thinking what i think.

i think this is what would happen because, rus, a lot of times it seems like you think you're the only person on the forum who can think for themselves and examine things and come to appropriate and "correct" conclusions. it seems like you think all the rest of us incapable of thinking our own thoughts, regardless of what we've learned in our churches and schools. that is why people get so frustrated when discussing these things with you.

so yeah, no. i'm not interested in attempting to reason with rus on this subject, fist. maybe ali will have a go at it but...it won't do any good. unfortunately.

[Fist and Faith]

rus, you've managed to... *sigh*

It has long been clear that you are conditioned to believe Chesterton was incapable of having written anything that is not absolute truth. But, seriously. Laws were passed that, for example, gave women the right to vote, and forced employers to pay women the same wage they pay men for the same job. Do you understand what this means? They actually had to pass laws for these things! They would not have had to make those laws if women were already allowed to vote, and if employers gave them equal pay. The fact that they made those laws means that, before the laws, women were not allowed to vote, and employers did not have to give them equal pay. Do you understand that? Women had to be raised up to equal status. To say that those laws are not proof that women were being held down by men is... I'm not sure what it is...

[aliantha]

I've already given two examples from my own personal experience of how women have been held back by male-dominated society, and they weren't good enough for Rus because they *were* my personal experiences and don't represent society in a macrocosm. Or something. I'm kind of unclear.

I could also talk about how our society has oppressed *men's* roles in the private sphere that Rus mentions -- how men in our society are looked down on for being househusbands, and how men have had to fight for custody of their children in divorce cases because for years the mother automatically won custody regardless of whether she was a nutcase. But I guess Rus will say that those would also be situations where we have been duped by the media and our schooling to believe something that's not truly happening.

So -- no. I'm not going any further with this line of discussion. Because Luci's right -- unless I agree with Rus, I clearly haven't thought things through.

[rusmeister]

oh! oh goodness. well...
there's no use me arguing with you on this rus.

i'd love to cite and support and back you up here fist but i don't see the
sense in it. if someone has convinced themselves to believe something
its soooooo not my job to convince them otherwise.

rus would not agree with any evidence of the oppression of women that i could provide. he'd read what i posted, think to himself about how i've been taken in by my education and indoctrination, shake his head and explain to me how he believes that i think what i think because i've been duped by a silly..er...RUSE into thinking what i think.

i think this is what would happen because, rus, a lot of times it seems like you think you're the only person on the forum who can think for themselves and examine things and come to appropriate and "correct" conclusions. it seems like you think all the rest of us incapable of thinking our own thoughts, regardless of what we've learned in our churches and schools. that is why people get so frustrated when discussing these things with you.

so yeah, no. i'm not interested in attempting to reason with rus on this subject, fist. maybe ali will have a go at it but...it won't do any good. unfortunately.

One point of clarification, Lucimay:
I would probably agree that much of what you would bring out is injustice, and injustice done to women. What I would question is the idea that it is done as a class, by a class. That there are, and always have been, unreasonable people in the world who do unjust things is something I don't question.

I am aware that everyone thinks their own thoughts. What I said was a suggestion, based on my particular knowledge of public education, that thinking formed there has particular biases that are not openly discussed and explored, thus leaving people thinking certain things that they were taught to think, and never questioning them - and I think my challenging this idea is a good example of that, as witnessed by Fist's hypothetical coffee. If my ideas on public education are true, they would be offensive - in the way Morpheus's ideas were offensive to Neo in "The Matrix", and reactions would likely be similar.
I actually think you do know a lot of correct facts - in this case I've think you've been taught to believe a wrong conclusion based on the selection of facts generally taught (and ignorance of others).
I do not think you are silly at all, or that there is a silly ruse in effect. It is a highly institutionalized attack on the family called "public education".
I think it is a great evil done to children, leaving everybody with the phony idea that men and women are natural competitors and enemies. Those children grow up, and then run the media , write the scripts, etc, which reinforce these ideas, making them really hard for people to resist, or think critically about.

But you'd have to learn what I have learned about public education to even begin to suspect that it might be worthwhile to criticize how most are educated.

[rusmeister]

rus, you've managed to... *sigh*

It has long been clear that you are conditioned to believe Chesterton was incapable of having written anything that is not absolute truth. But, seriously. Laws were passed that, for example, gave women the right to vote, and forced employers to pay women the same wage they pay men for the same job. Do you understand what this means? They actually had to pass laws for these things! They would not have had to make those laws if women were already allowed to vote, and if employers gave them equal pay. The fact that they made those laws means that, before the laws, women were not allowed to vote, and employers did not have to give them equal pay. Do you understand that? Women had to be raised up to equal status. To say that those laws are not proof that women were being held down by men is... I'm not sure what it is...

Yes, Fist, I am aware of those things. (Examples of knowledge of certain facts interpreted a certain way. Those facts, as such, are not disputed.)

I'd ask if you were aware that a mere hundred years prior to that, there was no such thing as an industrial revolution? It almost seems that your thinking begins at the end of the 19th century.

I suggested reading "What's Wrong With the World" as a non-apologetic work, but no one took me up on it. WHY were women seeking to go out into a "workplace" in the first place? Where on earth did this idea of "a workplace" come from? What existed before it did? Who benefited from such a change? What effects did the industrial revolution have on the family, when poor women were forced out of the home and to go to work, when the raising of their children had to be turned over to others - or to nobody, thus giving the excuse to form the modern public schools you all seem to take for granted?

If you ever trouble to look at it from that perspective, it becomes, not a war of men on women, but a war of the rich on the poor, with the family as a main target to be broken up, as something that has a natural loyalty to something other than big government and big business and certain independence from both. If the development of factories was something that ended the effective distributive wealth to all who got off their butts and worked in early 19th century America (as the best example of the effects of the process) and resulted in the mad idea of having strangers raise one's children according to a Prussian/German model (why do we use the word "kindergarten"?), then everybody would be broken up from everybody else. If the state is raising the children, then the children have a greater loyalty to the state, while employers have a doubled work force and can subsequently halve their wages, and everybody becomes individual, separate. Mom and dad are now both at a workplace created by somebody else, rather than their OWN workplace that they created themselves, while the children are off being indoctrinated to believe heaven knows what elsewhere. The oldest charge against slavery was that it broke up families.

All of that casts a great deal of doubt on the idea that men and women are natural enemies or competitors (never mind taking for granted the idea of obligatory public schools) that starts by treating people as individuals and ignoring the fundamental institution of the family - as a lot of modern thinking today does (such as "gay marriage").

[rusmeister]

I've already given two examples from my own personal experience of how women have been held back by male-dominated society, and they weren't good enough for Rus because they *were* my personal experiences and don't represent society in a macrocosm. Or something. I'm kind of unclear.

I could also talk about how our society has oppressed *men's* roles in the private sphere that Rus mentions -- how men in our society are looked down on for being househusbands, and how men have had to fight for custody of their children in divorce cases because for years the mother automatically won custody regardless of whether she was a nutcase. But I guess Rus will say that those would also be situations where we have been duped by the media and our schooling to believe something that's not truly happening.

So -- no. I'm not going any further with this line of discussion. Because Luci's right -- unless I agree with Rus, I clearly haven't thought things through.

Hi, Ali,

Since your guess on what I would say is wrong, then it seems quite possible to me that on this matter you really haven't thought things through. I do not say those things are "not truly happening". I say that the understanding and interpretation of such events by those who were publicly educated is formed to not think certain things and to take certain things for granted without questioning them - to embrace facts that support their worldview and to ignore and not report/discuss those that don't. (This may be true of a great deal of private education as well - but that is not organized in the manner that public education is so I'm not making declarative statements about it.)

Your statements ASSUME that "society" (whatever that is) is "male-dominated" (whatever that means). They seem unable to contend with ideas that deny that starting proposition and that could be the cause of the lack of clarity. Your examples ARE "good enough" as true facts that actually happened. I concede them as such. It is the interpretation that I question, and that means identifying what your worldview is and what dogmas may not be questioned, for we interpret all events and facts through our worldview - our base philosophy.

[lucimay]

But you'd have to learn what I have learned about public education to even begin to suspect that it might be worthwhile to criticize how most are educated.

oh contraire mon ami...i have learned enough to know that it's worthwhile to criticise how a LOT are educated. i have criticisms galore!
i think maybe i just don't work with the same sources at you.

I actually think you do know a lot of correct facts - in this case I've think you've been taught to believe a wrong conclusion based on the selection of facts generally taught (and ignorance of others).

and i think you assume too much about what i think. in fact, you're sort of discounting that i can.

its okay rus, you aren't the first and you won't be the last!

[aliantha]

...for we interpret all events and facts through our worldview - our base philosophy.

As do you.

I'm not going to argue with you on this, other than to refute your stance that my thoughts on this are unclear. They are *very* clear.

Is it your contention that women have not been discriminated against?