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LadyNTrainer -> RE: If you believe in God how do You fit being a Femdom into this? (5/17/2010 10:00:42 AM)
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Separate the human culture from the fundamental spiritual/religious ideals, and it's not a problem.
My secondary partner is deeply spiritual, and his faith is an ethnic Orthodox variant. He is also a pretty fair biblical scholar and is familiar with the earlier translations in the original language and other languages, and where various passages picked up meanings depending on the cultural implications of the various words chosen during historical time periods. When you read a bible that has been translated through more than one language, I guarantee you are reading some words that have the filters of all those cultures and accrued "slang" meanings attached to them.
One excellent example is the passage "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." In the original Middle Eastern language, the term was a specific one, and meant "well poisoner". There was a word for this crime, because it was a damn serious one. Poison a well and you condemn an entire community to death, not to mention anyone traveling through and counting on the water supply there. The Greek rendered this word as simply "poisoner", though the word used there implied one who makes and compounds chemical substances, an alchemist or pharmacist. The Latin in turn rendered it as "malicious poisoner", because the Greek term didn't really convey the criminal aspect too well. In Europe when this term was translated into English, a malicious poisoner was part of their cultural definition of a witch, so that was the word that was chosen at Nicea.
Fast forward to the King James Edition, and you have a lot of people thinking that this passage refers to harmless modern followers of Earth-based and Goddess-centered spirituality, eg, Wiccans. Poisoning wells is the *last* thing that these folks would ever do, but because of the four-way chain of cultural filters during translation, you have a pretty significant misunderstanding. And potentially an ugly one.
That's just one example; there are lots. There's also the issue of the document containing a lot of practical instructions for daily life in the desert that don't work so well outside their cultural context. If you literally obey every word of the Bible, you will find yourself going outside the city to take a dump and burying it to a prescribed depth with a wooden paddle. You will also be sacrificing doves, goats and cows on a rock at certain intervals, having sex with 12 year old girls, holding slaves, and tearing apart the entrails of pregnant women if they are of the race of your enemy. Good luck with that, and be sure to write us from your cell. That stuff worked for desert tribes way back when, but we're a little more enlightened now, and we can view their cultural practices as separate from the actual spiritual precepts that have survived the ages.
Dumb people tend to latch onto every cultural artifact associated with their religion and cling to it mindlessly, like sheep or cattle, following without thinking. Smart people who are also deeply spiritual, like my partner, have the intellect and the education to separate cultural artifact from the spiritual truths that are meaningful to them.
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