One of the objections was the idea that even if women were ignored, demeaned, and suffered more (than men) that was good for them, and good for women as a group.
This is a bad and harmful idea, and deserved to be ignored or refuted.
Not exactly. First, suffering is good for the soul if it is undertaken in the proper way. We humans are amphibians so to speak–we are body AND soul.
Second, taking the first proposition, any individual (or group) which did undertake suffering in the proper way would achieve benefit (in the soul). This benefit is good BUT:
If the individual or group suffers not just as a result of something like the tsunami, or a natural disaster, or suffers because of a desire to inflict deliberate evil, and this infliction is deliberately chosen and celebrated by another group, even if the first group (we’ll say women), in choosing to align their suffering properly with Christ do achieve benefit, the group (we’ll say men) which is deliberately and offensively going AGAINST Christ in order to inflict deliberate suffering on the women will suffer detriment to THEIR souls.
Thing is, not very many people (men or women) historically were guilty of, to put it in ‘sin’ terms, either full knowledge (that they were either doing deliberate evil, or that the evil done to them was hurting another besides themselves). . .
or grave matter (not every so-called ‘oppression’ was really ‘oppression’ to an individual. For every woman who ‘chafed’ at not realizing her full ‘potential’, there was at least another woman who never saw HER supposedly limited role as being anything other than the realization of her full potential. While the first may have ‘suffered’ the second did not. For every man who supposedly gloried in having opportunity, there was at least another man who felt pressured or forced into doing things he did not wish and felt he had far less opportunity for life, liberty and happiness than his wife secure at home with the children to raise.) . .
Finally, “full consent.” How many men or women were ‘free’ in the last 2000 years to the degree we are today? Very few. If you were a slave, if you were a serf, if you were a peasant, if you happened to live in a particular area at a particular time, no matter if you were a lordly male, you might find yourself living under Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, right in the path of the Mongol Hordes, near the latest advance of Muslims, in a port visited regularly by the Danes/Vikings, right in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, etc. etc. etc. Try living up to your ‘full potential’. Remember too that if there was any kind of fighting (and without antibiotics or surgery even stepping on a simple rusty nail or a simple arm or leg wound could easily result in tetanus, gangrene, and death) it was the MEN who were the expendable ‘fodder’ while the more valuable women were protected to the best of the mens’ ability. . .
So while the blanket statements sounds very ‘damning’, and as you will note I do in fact condemn deliberate evil toward any individual or group done with the full intent to inflict said evil. . .it is nowhere certain that through recorded history every single situation which is perceived in AD 2011 as being ‘evil’ regarding ‘women’s rights’ was necessarily perceived of as evil by the women themselves. . .
We need to stop thinking that people living x number of years ago had the same kind of perceptions we do today when it comes to a lot of cultural ‘fashions.’
I’d love to have a time machine and visit 300 years in the future just to see how barbaric, oppressive, ignorant and evil not just men but WOMEN of the 21st century will be seen as being by their 24th century descendants. . .
