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artist-issues · 4 months ago

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I'm curious, what do you think of 1st Corinthians 14:34-35?

What we think of it doesn’t matter; what I think of it matters even less; what it says is what matters. It’s the Word of God.

“The women are to keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. But if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church.”

Everyone’s got a problem with that because it sounds like the Bible is saying women can’t ever talk in church at all. That’s not what it’s saying, though. You know why? Because this is two verses plucked straight out of a book that has 437 verses in it. That’s like if I read two sentences out of the middle of one of your emails to a close family member and took issue with whatever those two sentences said. Even though the context determines the meaning, so I have no right to get offended when I don’t understand the context. So what’s the context of 1 Corinthians by the time you get to 14:34-35?

The Apostle Paul is writing to a church in the Gentile city of Corinth in AD 53 or 54. That church was a blend of Jewish Christians and Greek Christians. Two completely different cultures were figuring out what the “assembly of the saints,” or “the first church services” were supposed to look like. And to make matters more complicated, they lived in one of the most morally bankrupt cities of that age. Literally, the Corinthian people had a Greek word coined to describe their immorality. So the people who lived there were generally all messed up, in terms of not knowing what was right and what was wrong. That extended to their church services.

The whole context of 1 Corinthians is “what is a church that glorifies the Lord supposed to look like?” The context of the specific chapter, 14, is “what should church assembly that glorifies the Lord look like? What should it not look like?”

How do I know? Read the verses that come before it. At the beginning of the chapter, Paul explains that spiritual gifts are for edifying other people. In fact, everything done in a church service, where the saints are gathered, is not for an individual. It’s for the edification of the whole group. So what might be okay to do in your own home or in private between you and God is not okay, because it’s not mindful, considerate, or edifying to other Christians when you’re in a church service.

Specifically, the Corinthians are all claiming to “prophesy” (get direct revelation from God) and “speak in tongues” (speak in known, but various and foreign, languages) all at once during the service. Everybody’s shouting over each other. Some people are shouting over each other “THUS SAYS THE LORD,” which is a huge deal. Because obviously if you’re going to claim that God has told you something, everyone should shut up, listen, and determine whether or not you’re telling the truth, because what could be a bigger deal than God speaking? But that’s not how the church in Corinth was treating it. Their services were helping nobody, least of all themselves, because it was loud chaotic pandemonium and nobody I was being edified. Everybody was shouting and judging. Including women. By verse 26, Paul is going:

“What is the outcome then, brothers? When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has a translation. Let all things be done for edification. If anyone speaks in a tongue, it should be by two or at the most three, and each in turn, and one must translate; but if there is no translator, he must keep silent in the church, and let him speak to himself and to God. And let two or three prophets speak, and let the others pass judgment. But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, the first one must keep silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted. And the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets; for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.”

And then he adds,

“If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord’s commandment. But if anyone remains ignorant about this, he is ignored by God.

“Therefore, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid to speak in tongues. But all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner.”

Do you get it? The point is, “what does this specific situation, which is a church service, look like if we’re trying to do things in a God-honoring, orderly manner? Here’s what it does not look like: women can’t just stand up in church and take up the role of judge over men who are shouting that they are speaking from God, and call certain men impostors and certain men prophets.”

The point is not “all women should never ever speak in all church services because that’s disgraceful, they only get to talk to their husbands and get told what to do.”

If it were, then explain to me why, three chapters earlier, when he’s talking about head-coverings, Paul writes that women can prophesy in public?

“But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying, shames her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved.”

(if you want to talk about why the heck a woman has to have her head covered when she prophesies, blah blah blah, let’s talk about that too, but the answer’s going to be the same: context determines meaning, meaning is correct interpretation, etc.)

Additionally, why would Paul be commending the women in the church who have taught their sons and grandsons? How can they teach if they’re never allowed to talk in church, or if their only role in all contexts is “shut up and learn?”

Because that’s not their only biblical role. And that’s not what Paul was saying. Paul was saying, “in this specific context, here’s how a woman (among all the other people groups I’m also addressing) should conduct herself when the goal is to edify the believers in a church service, and not let anything get in the way of that goal.”

Now.

Guess what?

If the Bible did say, “all women shut up and listen all the time, let the men do the talking,” would you listen to it?

You, reading this. Would you have a problem with it? If that’s what God Sid to do, would you sit in judgement over God and say, “no, infinite Creator of all matter and life, You’re mistaken about how You should be worshipped and what these little creatures You made are for, let me correct and educate You with the judgement coming out of the three-pound lump of gray matter, which You designed and graciously allowed me to have in the first place, sitting inside my skull. Let me, the creature, tell You, the Creator, where you’re wrong and what ‘Being God’ should be like.”

I hope not. But I was super convicted reading this chapter for the first time and finding myself a) misunderstanding it and then b) having the appalling gall and arrogance to be outraged by it.

Who in the world am I? Who am I to be outraged, if God did say, “be quiet and spend your life listening to men?” If that were what He was saying, my response should be, “Yes, Lord.”

Why are we so concerned about being allowed to speak? What do we have to say that’s so great, that’s so necessary, that’s so devastating to have “removed” from us, anyway? Why do we care so much about being heard? Is it because we have something to say that could really help men, in the church services? Oh, really? And if we women don’t say it, God won’t edify the men? He’ll be handicapped because we were muzzled?

What’s so offensive about being told to stop talking and ask questions to learn, anyway? Why is that so infuriating, to us? We’re fools. The whole point of the Gospel is, “He (Jesus) must increase; I must decrease.” The best place in the world to be is at the feet of Jesus, learning. Humble. Not producing anything of ourselves, but absorbing everything He has to teach us. Who cares if it’s our husbands He plans to do that through? Who cares if we can’t teach men in church? What, we think God can’t handle that? We think He can’t teach them His own way, that His plan was flawed, that they’re “missing out” because God dropped the ball by telling us not to stand up in service and disrupt everything with this great ‘word’ we have, that nobody else has?

Ugh. God forgive me for ever even approaching a mindset that thinks I have something to say, and if I don’t say it, He won’t be able to accomplish His will. God forgive me for ever thinking my Western modern culture knows better than His divine plan. He designed human beings and men and women and what would best serve us before “culture” or “social frameworks” were ever even conceived of.

We all need to be a lot more humble. Me first.

I would encourage you to test what I said. If you read this, you should spend an equal amount of time studying the Bible for yourself and seeing if I was right, and if that’s really what God said and meant, based on the context, which determines meaning, because there is such a thing as “correct and incorrect interpretation” when the God of the universe meant something by what He said. And I could’ve gotten it wrong. And you don’t want to get it wrong.

#asked #answered #1 Corinthians #1 Corinthians 14 #women in the church #egalitarian #🙄#Christianity #Jesus #apostle Paul #church culture #women #men #me #Yahweh

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months ago

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By: Olga Khazan

Published: Feb 18, 2018

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the U.S., where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM, as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife, and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report that I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys were significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls were. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

So what explains the tendency for nations that have traditionally less gender equality to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do?

[ A scatter plot of countries based on their number of female STEM graduates and their Global Gender Gap Index (y-axis), a measure of opportunities for women (Psychological Science) ]

According to a new paper published in Psychological Science by the psychologists Gijsbert Stoet, of Leeds Beckett University, and David Geary, of the University of Missouri, it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And typically, that path leads through STEM professions.

The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this disparity between boys and girls in showing science to be their best subject. (The most gender-equal countries are the typical snowy utopias you hear about, such as Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates rank among the least equal, according to the Global Gender Gap Index.)

The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.

What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields such as science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. Stoet and Geary posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at.

“Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,” they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose STEM professions because they offer a more certain financial future than, say, painting or writing.

When the study authors looked at the “overall life satisfaction” rating of each country—a measure of economic opportunity and hardship—they found that gender-equal countries had more life satisfaction. The life-satisfaction ranking explained 35 percent of the variation between gender equality and women’s participation in STEM. That correlation echoes past research showing that the genders are actually more segregated by field of study in more economically developed places.

The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.

The findings will likely seem controversial, because the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is used by some to argue that we should forget trying to recruit more women to the STEM fields. But, as Janet Shibley Hyde, a gender-studies professor at the University of Wisconsin who wasn’t involved with the study, put it to me, that’s not quite what’s happening here.

“Some would say that the gender STEM gap occurs not because girls can’t do science, but because they have other alternatives, based on their strengths in verbal skills,” she said. “In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less.”

Instead, this line of research, if it’s replicated, might hold useful takeaways for people who do want to see more Western women entering STEM fields. In this study, the percentage of girls who excelled in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. The women-in-STEM advocates could, for starters, focus their efforts on those would-be STEM stars.

Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science.

Abstract

The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a continual concern for social scientists and policymakers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading ( N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys' science achievement and girls' reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls' and women's engagement with STEM subjects.

The definition of "STEM" is deceptive. It selects for primarily male-dominated "things" areas, while excluding female-dominated "life" domains, such as medicine, psychology, nursing, biology and environmental sciences.

Despite what people assume, "STEM" does not include all the sciences.

When you factor in all of the sciences, women outnumber men. Meaning, all the handwringing over "women in STEM" is complete nonsense.

Especially when it turns out that gender - that is, average sex-differences - aren't a "social construct." The average differences between men and women are real, demonstrable, measurable, and they're larger in more equal societies, because individuals have greater opportunity to do what they really want, without external pressures like financial demands. This has been studied repeatedly; see below.

Abstract

We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, as well as parental occupations and family wealth. In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women’s empowerment. We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women’s empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in. Implications for better understanding the sources of sex differences in career aspirations and associated policy are discussed.

Abstract

Preferences concerning time, risk, and social interactions systematically shape human behavior and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between women and men. We present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of measures of willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust for 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. Gender differences in preferences were positively related to economic development and gender equality. This finding suggests that greater availability of and gender-equal access to material and social resources favor the manifestation of gender-differentiated preferences across countries.

Abstract

Sex differences in personality have been shown to be larger in more gender equal countries. We advance this research by using an extensive personality measure, the IPIP-NEO-120, with large country samples (N > 1000), from 22 countries. Furthermore, to capture the multidimensionality of personality we measure sex differences with a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis distance D). Results indicate that past research, using univariate measures of effect size, have underestimated the size of between-country sex differences in personality. Confirming past research, there was a strong correlation (r = .69) between a country's sex differences in personality and their Gender Equality Index. Additional analyses showed that women typically score higher than men on all five trait factors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness), and that these relative differences are larger in more gender equal countries. We speculate that as gender equality increases both men and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles.

Abstract

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Abstract

Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Across nations, men and women differed significantly on all four traits (mean ds = -.15, -.56, -.41, and 1.40, respectively, with negative values indicating women scoring higher). The strongest evidence for sex differences in SDs was for extraversion (women more variable) and for agreeableness (men more variable). United Nations indices of gender equality and economic development were associated with larger sex differences in agreeableness, but not with sex differences in other traits. Gender equality and economic development were negatively associated with mean national levels of neuroticism, suggesting that economic stress was associated with higher neuroticism. Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.

Abstract

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

The only way to force arbitrarily equal outcomes - for no better reason than to say you achieved it - is to remove or limit people's choices. Because the places where men's and women's outcomes are the most equal is where they're both toiling in the rice-fields for 12 hours a day.

#Olga Khazan #science #STEM #science technology engineering math #technology #engineering #math #women in STEM #gender equality #egalitarian #sex differences #gender differences #religion is a mental illness

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