|
My axe to grind with Christianity and religion in general was out of line regarding a story that in no way has any mention of religion. I have been following many stories regarding the continent this year where religion and superstition have been involved, much to the detriment of African people--and many of them are truly horrifying--but you are completely correct in that its injection and my tone weren't appropriate here. Your criticism is deserved, and I was inapt.
My more egregious error, however, and the one I'm currently kicking my own tail over, was of rank generalization regarding this situation to an entire continent of people--that's actually extraordinarily ignorant of me, and for that, even though not mentioned, I really am genuinely sorry for that.
My inelegant point had to do with with two over-arcing themes that I've seen in these stories: patriarchy and disregard for human life. Note how the story reads:
"The police said the man had confessed to getting the girls pregnant and selling their children."
The children would doubtless be those of their mothers--but the point is that if he is impregnating the girls--they are his own children, as well! But he is not only using the women as things for this enterprise, but selling his progeny as if they were things....and in some respects, may feel it is his right to do so as the man of the household. And the way more depressing thing is--there was a market for these children. There's a market for human beings in general. People are bought and sold--he's not some aberration, trying to sell human beings with no market. He's responding to a demand.
When issues like the AIDS epidemic, the treatment of women, human trafficking, poverty, and the like are treated by people coming from outside the culture, I see a huge part of the problem is in treating the symptoms that arise from the perceived cheapness of life without striking at the heart of them. In the case of religion, which I view as having paternalistic, patriarchal, and dogmatic aspects, I in general feel like they are doing the equivalent of treating a vomiting patient with ipecac. The single most valuable thing that could be expressed by any creed would be the message of individual worth and dignity, and that actually is at times a message within Christianity--
But what I'm saying is that that alone is message enough. Not submission to God, not exclusion of some people because of sin, not the thoroughly unhelpful business about women being subservient to spouses, not the message that there will be financial rewards for faithfulness to God, not any of the things that tend to reinforce an already detrimental and endemic attitude about male privilege and the ownership of or lack of worth in the lives of persons.
I am also incredibly wrong in singling out Christianity as if it were the worst offender--Islam strikes me as far more patriarchal, and sharia law punishments strike me as intolerably dismissive of and wasteful of human life. Also, folk superstition, which fuels a lot of the "witch craze" nonsense, is also a huge unhelpful mess. But insofar as a number of those who come to "deliver" people from their misery from the west are carrying the cross with them, and because the visit of the Pope and stories about The Family and Rick Warren's church were so very 2009 and unhelpful, I think my point got bogged down in them--my hang-up, entirely.
And since I'm guilty in this post of even still generalizing, paternalistically talking about "what those people really need is..." and expanding on my wrongness to hopefully be better understood, I guess I'm still an ass. I just don't want to be thought a completely poor-intentioned ass.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
