It's Alive!

The following is a guest post by Greg Dglas Teed in response to a news article about the banning of pet dogs in Iran.  I found his hypothesis that Muslims don't like dogs for the same reason they dislike women intriguing.  He discusses the motivation that inspired the Qu'ranic verses:

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I suspect it's about control and dogma. Over the millennia, dogs have evolved, courtesy of contact and interaction with humanity, into creatures that are capable of inspiring strong emotional reactions in us. These emotional reactions are the stuff of possible conflict with doctrines that require us to hold dogma immune from competing emotional involvements, including love of pets. Affection for anything other than the tenets of the dogma is an element in competition with the demands of the dogma.

This, I suspect, is why prescriptive religions despise women as well. Love of woman is an element that competes with love of god, and therefore, must be eradicated if at all possible. Yes, this is a male-oriented explanation, but religions tend to be male-oriented, do they not?

But it gets darker. Hold on tight.

The Vatican is in the grips of rampant pedophilia, and we see elements of pedophilia in islam as well. The question to ask, and it is a harsh one, is what the attraction of very young children is for clergymen and prophets. Perhaps it is the same reason virginity is held as having such import - innocence. To state it in a vulgar fashion, the innocent are trainable. Now, I stated that in this vulgar fashion for a reason. There is a complex interaction between male ego (indeed all ego, but male ego in particular) and dogma that seems to need investigation.

Just as no man wants to be compared to other men (perhaps to be found lacking), so too people with emotional investment in dogmas do not want those investments to be subject to negotiation. Now, we need to understand that this emotional involvement is with the content of the dogma as well as the dogmatism as well.

People invest emotionally in dogma, and dogmas have their content designed to inspire emotional involvement. People who benefit from being authorities of the dogma very much like this emotional involvement and will disdain competing emotional involvements.

Sex (and indeed any emotional involvement) with a *partner* requires something antithetical to religious dogma (indeed antithetical to any dogma). It requires negotiation. Shoehorning emotional involvements into dominance-submission structures eradicates negotiation, and negates any possible tempering of dogma that might arise from negotiation arising from human sympathy.

In short, pedophilia is a control situation in which the abuser needn't ever negotiate the relationship. The dogma is held immune to tempering. The same is true of obsessively valuing women as virginal innocents. Hence arranged marriages, child brides, and the obsession with virginity. It turns all relationships into dominance-submission ones. The clergy are drawn to pedophilia because their victims cannot hold them responsible for it (both on personal and doctrinal levels). Pedophilia is "safe" in a tragically inhuman way.

Yes, we even negotiate with pets in an unspoken, but nevertheless real way. We have learned to read and respond to dogs' body language, from "soulful" eyes to wagging tails - and they have been shown to have facial recognition capability as well (dogs can read us!) Dogs are social animals, like us, and we have an emotional affinity for them, especially since we have bred them for characteristics (including emotional ones) we admire. A severe and profound competition indeed for emotional investment in dogma.

A competition unacceptable to those who want all your emotional investment to be in god, all other priorities rescinded.

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This idea - that religious dogma protects itself - reminded me of Darrel Ray's book The God Virus where he describes religion as an infection of the mind with characteristics of a living organism.  I hope someday a cure is found, or at least a vaccination.

At Home: a Short History of Private Life (Review)

This is the second book I've read by Bill Bryson and he's quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.  What makes his work so enjoyable to read is that it feels more like a friendly conversation than a history lesson.   He sets the scene from his home, an Anglican rectory built in 1851, and takes the reader from room-to-room chapter by chapter, examining the evolution of domestic life.  Granted it's not always a forward march through time - he tends to wander back and forth through the years a bit - but you'll go with him willingly because the meandering bits are interesting and fun.

We start in The Hall of all places, a room we barely think of as a room really.  We learn that this mostly ignored passageway to more important places was actually the entire home at one point, and that it wasn't until after the invention of the chimney that our domicile began to expand and with it was born the concept of privacy.

In the kitchen we learn about the modern history of food preparation, storage and the devious ways in which people adulterated groceries they sold to the public.  "A tea drinker," we learn, "might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep's dung."  Milk was particularly prone to contain "extras" since it was carried through the streets in open pails.  I'll leave that one to your imagination.  This whole chapter is a Gordon Ramsey nightmare.

The Fuse Box chapter, as you may have guessed,  is a meander through interior lighting and the adaption of electricity.  "A candle - a good candle - provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt lightbulb. Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed."  So dark that according to Bryson, James Boswell was able to have sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge in 1763. 

Speaking of sex... The chapter on the bedroom discusses sex through the ages, but spends a lot of time in the Victorian era.  Humorous and sad at the same time, the Victorians really had some hang-ups.  "The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death." 

In addition to the perils of a robust sex life, The Bedroom takes us from the straw sleeping mats most people slept on in the middle ages to the ornate, hand-carved beds of royalty in more modern ages.  It also takes us back to a time when privacy was a different concept than it is today.  It was common for hotel guests to double up in their rooms... with strangers.  "Diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him."

Ewwwww.

 The book takes the reader through many other rooms in the house as well and on every page you'll learn something new.  This is not just for the history buff.  Bryson has a gift for story-telling and making learning fun.