While we're on the subject of sex and religion

The Biblical patriarchs appears to be VERY sexually active!:D
 

Hi LincolnSpector.

The idea that "reproductive strategies" are the primary biological force which drives people either toward or away from religion?
Wow!

The present study used data from 296,959 individuals in around 90 countries from the World Values Survey/European Values Study to test the relative strength of individual differences in cooperative morals and reproductive morals in predicting individual differences in religiosity.
--Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban.​

"Cooperative" morals versus "reproductive" morals.
Which has a better claim to be the biological source of religion?

The long-held "cooperative morals" view - for the biological source of religion - goes something like this:

--Early agricultural people have times of plenty but also times of drought or other hardships.

--During times of hardship, most large farming groups breakup and each clan goes its separate ways, back to a hunting/gathering subsistence with some "patch agriculture."

--However, a few of the large agricultural groups stick-out the adversity together, working cooperatively together, expecting good times to return. Hang together as a group despite loose or nonexistent clan bonds. When the climate changes again and good times return, the payoff is immediate for these groups. They prosper and expand.
(It takes more time for those other clans who had returned to hunter/gatherer ways to get back up to speed as agriculturalists.)

--These suddenly prosperous agricultural groups are humbled by their success, crediting it to "Powers Beyond Themselves." (Ancestors at first, later forces of nature like Earth, River, Sun, Moon, Stormclouds, etc.) And sharing the agricultural wealth with these Powers ("sacrifices," to prevent future adversity) becomes the prudent thing to do. Thus "cultic rites" and temple gods develop, worship-practices which eventually transform into modern-style religions.​

This old view - that religion stems from the ethics of group cooperation - I personally believe to be (at core) historically and anthropologically correct (i.e. psychologically on target).
Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban's study (by contrast) targets people today. People today cooperate for numerous reasons, not just for religious ones. Their study is not an historical/anthropological study. Go back 50 years or 200 years or 2700 years or 7,000 years, and the results are liable to be quite different - back to times when religion was far and away the primary uniting agent within every culture.
Yet . . .

Weeden and Kurzban's evidence is pretty conclusive and intriguing, isn't it?:

High-commitment reproductive strategies . . .
(committed partnerships, higher fertility, and cooperative parenting, {where} both sexes' interests are threatened by promiscuous sexual activity — for men, arising primarily from the risk of cuckoldry and, for women, arising primarily from the risk of mate abandonment) . . .
{These} more-restrictive reproductive morals were significant predictors of increased religiosity in every region {of the planet}.​

People with conservative sexual mores, everywhere on the planet, (statistically) tend to be more religious (whatever their home-religion might be).
Quite revealing, isn't it?!

This all needs a longer look.
It has interesting implications.

Jane.

 

Hi Quirkybird.

The Biblical patriarchs appears to be VERY sexually active! :D​

Don't laugh!
Sexual property is one of the keys to social arrangements in the animal kingdom, amongst all mammal species.
You've watched Nature programs on TV, haven't you?

The bull elk with the biggest horns fights off or bluffs younger/smaller males into backing down, to prevent them from making sexual advances upon his harem of female elk.​

Why would you expect it to be otherwise with our hominid ancestors in Africa?
Why would you expect humans to progress much beyond that . . . just because they have learned to grow crops and herd animals? Or to build cities or to trade goods with faraway peoples?

The patriarchs of Jewish Monotheism are not called "patriarchs" for nothing.
Each clan's Patriarch (and each of his successors) owns everything, every stitch:
--the herds,
--the draft animals,
--the fields,
--the crops,
--the barns and houses,
--the tools and furniture,
--the slaves,
--the bond-servants,
--the maidservants and concubines,
--the wife,
--the girl children (until they marry away from the clan),
--the boy children (until they reach "maturity").
The clan is a corporation with one owner. And all the material (and human) property is his.
(The upside of this . . . being, that a righteous clan-chieftain genuinely looks after the welfare of his herds and his servants and his women. Just like his clan god looks after him.)

The patriarchs choose to worship a god who protects their sexual-property rights (i.e. female marital fidelity, virgin brides, adultery warranting death sentence, etc) to insure that his male-genes are the genes which get passed on to the next generation.
This is "Patriarchy" in its original form, which the Bible displays so accurately.

If you take an unvarnished/matter-of-fact look at Torah, the Law of Moses boils down to just two agendas:

1. Cooperative strategies.
(A collective covenant for mutual cooperation within a clan and also between it and genetically-related clans, i.e. an in-group altruistic morality - a Semitic-"genome-worship," as it were.)
2. Patriarchal reproductive rights.
(Male sexual property is made sacrosanct, to protect and make "God-given" each adult Jewish male's privilege, male lineage, male reproductive rights, i.e. a spirituality built upon male-supremacy - a circumcised-"penis-worship," if you will.)​

The Torah serves to combine . . .
1. the Law of Covenant, and
2. the Law of Patriarchy
into the "Law of God."

Put negatively:
Jewish Monotheism in its earliest manifestation is . . .
1. against anyone not a Jew, and
2. against anyone not a righteous Jewish male.
This begins to change only in the time of the prophets. And change more substantially in the age of "lessening sectarianism" and "soft patriarchy" - i.e. the Roman era of Jesus and Hillel.
Sectarianism fades with Christianity but intensifies with Judaism, but Patriarchy continues to remain predominant in both emerging faiths (as it does in Islam when this new offshoot, centuries later, emerges as an alternative Monotheism).

Patriarchy also plays a significant role in the development of religion and philosophy in India and China as well as Greece.
These places also produce each their own potent religious and/or philosophical rationale for keeping and extending male privilege.
(Look at history, if you don't believe me. Everywhere on this planet, property and reproductive rights of women are rarely discussed and stingily granted until well into modern times.)
But if Weeden and Kurzban are correct, it all comes down to biology.

The world's major religions are each grounded in the male sex drive.
And the more strongly religious you are (male or female), the more you are likely to insist upon maintaining this patriarchal status quo.

And to me, Quirkybird . . .
That is no laughing matter!! :mad:

Jane.

 

You might ask:
Yeah, okay. But what's the alternative to Patriarchy?

I do not support it either, but there is Matriarchy.
In the [post=284832]God . . . He? or She?[/post] thread, I wrote:

There aren't many genuinely matriarchal cultures left in the world.
In the Indonesian archipelago, the Minangkabau in the hill country of West Sumatra and Nagovisi of South Bougainville. In the Tibetan highlands, the Khasi and the Garo people of Northeastern India as well as the Mosuo of southwestern China . . .

The Mosuo were featured recently on PBS's FRONTLINE/World Rough Cut in a segment (shot by Xiaoli Zhou) called "The Women's Kingdom." Isolated from the rest of the world till the 1970s, most of the 56,000 Mosuo live within shouting distance of the 1.6 mile high Lake Lugo. They call the lake "Mother."
Mosuo women make most of a community's significant decisions and control its finances. There is no marriage per se. Just a zouhun (a "walking marriage"). A woman will invite a man into her bed, but he must be gone by dawn. If a child results, it is raised by her and her brothers. The biological father has no claim on the child.
(The child is "owned" by the mother.)

The Neolithic world may well have been largely matriarchal.
One god: female, a Mother goddess. (Connected to water: river, lake, or sea.)
The Mosuo could well be a fairly accurate snapshot of what this lost Neolithic world looks like, twelve to seven millenniums ago, before patriarchal herder clans start conquering early agrarian communities and subjecting these communities to patriarchal commandments.
To the rule of "Law."​

Patriarchy is a biological choice, one amongst two alternatives.
Human history could have taken the other path.

(And "religion" - even what would be considered "conservative" in religious beliefs - would be pictured entirely differently today . . . if that other path had been taken.)

Jane.

 
Jane-Q said:
The bull elk with the biggest horns fights off or bluffs younger/smaller males into backing down, to prevent them from making sexual advances upon his harem of female elk.​

Why would you expect it to be otherwise with our hominid ancestors in Africa?
Click to expand...

Odd choice of comparison, it's not like the elk is some how the norm of the animal kingdom. If you would have compared it to chimpanzees it would have been more understandable. And why would we assume that we haven't evolved socially and/or biologically from other species?

There is indeed logic to your macro theory, but since I question it's foundation I do question the whole.
 
Also, Jane, the concept that Neolithic humans had a matriarchal society is highly debatable. It is a romantic notion, but there is little real evidence from so far back. We don't have enough evidence to make any real determinations one way or the other whether it was matriarchal or patriarchal at that time.
 
40 thousand years of the Venus sex goddess figures and pan flutes made of bone.
Such was the original.

I think abstinence religions are a reaction against such original Baal cults.
 
Gordian Knot said:
Also, Jane, the concept that Neolithic humans had a matriarchal society is highly debatable. It is a romantic notion, but there is little real evidence from so far back. We don't have enough evidence to make any real determinations one way or the other whether it was matriarchal or patriarchal at that time.
Click to expand...

Linguistically the proto indo-aryan god of 5000 bc was called Div, and was the sky father. From him we get the word 'Divine'.

Hardly a feminist commune when you think about it.

The three matriarchys were
the Amazons of southern Turkey the 'har Amazan' of perpetual war and slavery.
The snake people of india who live in villages and worship snakes.
And the Nubians of central Sudan, who lived nude in mountain villages.
 
What I like about the future is that in order for Humanity to reach a Sustainable Society, male and female ... masculine and feminine, including these energies as they reflect in politics, religion, and even to much greater degree in the arts and popular entertainment media ... must increasingly come to a Balance.

No compromise will occur whereby the feminine Powers of Nature decide that Man can continue to desecrate the planet, each other and maintain this imbalance unchecked. If anything, matriarchy will again achieve and maintain the upper hand, while Mankind gradually catches up morally, acting more in line with Conscience, rather than enslaving Nature - and especially the Feminine Principle, including both Higher and lower Creativity.

Intelligent Love will lead us to yield power-politics and fighting-in-the-sandbox games for a Higher Purpose. Planetary symbiosis includes mineral, vegetable, animal, Human and Spiritual Kingdoms. The coordination and integration of entire planets - not unlike the same process within individuals, groups and Movements - can be a slow, difficult and painful process. Whoever said that Coming-of-Age was supposed to be easy?
 
And now for something completely related:

While we're on the subject, while we're on the subject, while we're on the subject how's the old wazoo!?

Bonus points if you don't have to look elsewhere, but know where that's from - or have a clue. ;)
 
taijasi said:
What I like about the future is that in order for Humanity to reach a Sustainable Society, ...

No compromise will occur whereby the feminine Powers of Nature decide that Man can continue to desecrate the planet, each other and maintain this imbalance unchecked. If anything, matriarchy will again achieve and maintain the upper hand, while Mankind gradually catches up morally, acting more in line with Conscience, rather than enslaving Nature -...
Click to expand...

Yours is an appeal to Druidism. Druids were usually male. Sustainers of the forest and the herd for the hunt. Kernunos and Herne the shaman of neolithic era.
The avarice of the great whore is the more female dynamic that society is in the snare of. That and the anti-Venus prude of the anti-Baal.
 
This study may, and I do emphasize 'may' say something about modern western society. To suggest that the findings have any relation with earlier times is completely spurious. Sexual attitudes were different 20 years ago, much less 2,000 years ago.

It is also flawed in that it makes a connection with people's stated beliefs versus what they actually do. Having a relationship outside a marriage is just as prevalent amongst the religious as those who aren't. Strong religious views may or may not lead to strong religious actions.
 
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