In another thread, a theist was talking about surrendering one's desire to understand, surrendering one's unbridled drive and demand for explanations, surrendering one's resistance to God. This got me thinking about Christianity and the role it plays in creating and maintaining victims of abuse.

In August 2009, well-known Calvinist preacher, John Piper, answered a question about what a Christian woman's submission should look like if she's married to an abuser. The video is very strange. When Piper first read the question, he giggled and said, "Oh my." It was almost as if he felt that someone was playing a trick on him by making him answer a question about a topic that shouldn't be spoken about in public.

Later in the video, Piper modelled, in an incredibly sickening voice, what he thought a woman should sound like when she was responding to a command from her husband that she partake in group sex. It made me wonder if that is what Piper's own wife sounds like when he makes unreasonable demands on her.

Piper instructs women that if their husbands smack them, they should just "take it" for a night. He doesn't mention calling the police. Instead, he tells the woman to endure the abuse "for a season" and then to call (not the police) but the church in the morning.

Here's the link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OkUPc2NLrM

Excerpts from the transcript appear below, with my own comments in brackets.

What should a wife's submission to her husband look like if he's an abuser. :::giggle::: Oh my.

Part of that answer is clearly going to depend on what kind of abuse we’re dealing with here, how serious this is. Is her life in danger? Or is this verbal unkindness? I’m not sure what the person who asked the question had in mind. So let me just talk about different kinds.

A woman’s submission to her husband is rooted in the word of God, calling her to be—for the Lord’s sake, for the Lord’s sake—submissive to him. Which means she always has a higher allegiance, namely to Christ.

Therefore Christ’s word governs her life. And Christ has many words besides “Be submissive.” “Be submissive” is not an absolute, because her Lord has other things to tell her, so that if the husband tells her something that contradicts what the Lord tells her, then she’s got a crisis of, “To whom do I submit now?” And clearly she submits to Jesus above the lord, I mean---her husband. The reason she is submitting to her husband is because of her prior superior submission to the Lord.

So if this man, for example, is calling her to engage in abusive acts willingly (group sex or something really weird, bizarre, harmful, that clearly would be sin), then the way she submits—and I really think this is possible, though it’s kind of paradoxical—is that she’s not going to go there. I’m saying, “No, she’s not going to do what Jesus would disapprove even though the husband is asking her to do it.”

She’s going to say, however, something like, “Honey, I want so much to follow you as my leader. God calls me to do that, and I would love to do that. It would be sweet to me if I could enjoy your leadership. But if you ask me to do this, require this of me, then I can’t go there.” [Take note of the tone of voice Piper adopts when he's modelling how the woman should say this. It's quite amusing.]

Now that’s one kind of situation. Just a word on the other kind. If it’s not requiring her to sin but simply hurting her, [as if being hurt by one's husband is a trivial thing] then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, and she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church. [That is, if she's still alive to do so.]

Every time I deal with somebody in this, I find the ultimate solution under God in the church. In other words, this man should be disciplined, and she should have a safe place in a body of Christ where she goes and then the people in the church deal with him. She can’t deal with him by herself. [Notice that in this situation, Piper it assumes that it is the CHURCH's role to "discipline" the wife-beater. He acts as if our society's laws and law enforcement system does not even exist! And in his mind, maybe it doesn't.]

So the short answer, I think, is that the church is really crucial here to step in, be her strength, say to this man, “You can’t do this. You cannot do this! That’s not what we allow. That’s not what Christ calls you to be.” [Again--of course the man can't do this! But it's not because the Church says he can't. It's because the LAW says that he can't. To think that a pastor of a church would actually advise a woman to stay home and be smacked around for a night really demonstrates a certain the perversity of thought that is created by Christian doctrines.]

This logic is the reason why I feel the need to be outspoken about religion. I can't believe he actually said/believes this.

Tbickle wrote:This logic is the reason why I feel the need to be outspoken about religion. I can't believe he actually said/believes this.

Exactly. I've heard Christians argue that it shouldn't matter to non-Christians if they believe things that are untrue. They'll argue that if they, personally, find peace and happiness in their beliefs, then those beliefs shouldn't be questioned or criticized by others. However, many Christian doctrines and teachings do, in fact, have a very negative influence on society as a whole, and aside from the fact that truth matters (or at least it matters to me and to many other people), the negative and destructive influence that Christian doctrines can have on our society and on the well-being of individuals in our society needs to be revealed.

If only someone had told Paul of Tarsus that future generations would treat his scribbling as holy writ, he might have taken a bit more care over it. Or might have shouted, "Whoopie!", and written even worse stuff than the sin-obsessed authoritarianism we got lumped with.

The thread should really be "John Piper and domestic violence", since a great many Christians would find his views as repugnant as posters here. Whether they ought to according to their faith, well, depends how far you head down the Biblical inerrancy road.

This is the problem when you have a set of insane ramblings which can be used to defend any act possible, including the most heinous acts of perversion. You will get all the possible variants of the nonsense and this can clearly be seen in the christian cults, 30-40,000 different cults, each with their own reading of the bible, their own ideas of what must be taken serious and what is drivel. All of them disagreeing with each other. The have their own ideas of what god and jesus is supposed to be. Do you really need more evidence for the claims that religions is nothing but utter arse gravy?

Well, if you do need more evidence, all I have to say, the chances of finding this gadget in your house is staggeringly high:



or maybe this is your idea of Jesus:


or maybe this may help you chose your Jesus?

Dr. Kwaltz wrote:This is the problem when you have a set of insane ramblings which can be used to defend any act possible, including the most heinous acts of perversion.

The Bible's no worse than Plato, who jacks off over a dictatorship run by philosophers; or Aristotle, who defends slavery, so long as it's not his sort who end up in bondage. That's some plenty bad arse gravy.

The problem lies not in the Bible, but in treating it as inerrant.

Byron wrote:

[url=http://www.rational-skepticism.org/viewtopic.php?p=178766#p178766]Dr. Kwaltz[/url] wrote:This is the problem when you have a set of insane ramblings which can be used to defend any act possible, including the most heinous acts of perversion.

The Bible's no worse than Plato, who jacks off over a dictatorship run by philosophers; or Aristotle, who defends slavery, so long as it's not his sort who end up in bondage. That's some plenty bad arse gravy.

The problem lies not in the Bible, but in treating it as inerrant.

Once you can show me someone who wants me to live my life by laws based upon it, I'll start to care but until such a time, I couldn't care less what they said.

The problem is not what the bible says, the problem is that there are human beings who takes this shit seriously and want to impose this nonsense upon ME. If you went into your own home, closed the door and bothered nobody, I couldn't give a rats ass if you think the bible is inerrant. But when you start bringing this insane nonsense to the public and start to demand everyone else live their lives based upon this garbage, it becomes a "Huston, we have a problem." situation.

Dr. Kwaltz wrote:Once you can show me someone who wants me to live my life by laws based upon it, I'll start to care but until such a time, I couldn't care less what they said.

Aristotle was used by slaveholders for a good long while, but you're right, we don't base our legal code on him. Inerrancy is the thing, not the text it attaches to. Oddly, some degree of inerrancy attached to Aristotle from the Catholic church, who, after some stutters, revered his teaching (the same went for Galen's junk anatomy, which held back medicine for years).

The problem is not what the bible says, the problem is that there are human beings who takes this shit seriously and want to impose this nonsense upon ME. If you went into your own home, closed the door and bothered nobody, I couldn't give a rats ass if you think the bible is inerrant. But when you start bringing this insane nonsense to the public and start to demand everyone else live their lives based upon this garbage, it becomes a "Huston, we have a problem." situation.

Personally, I don't think any book written by men and women is inerrant. I find the concept absurd. But many Christians (which I'm not) don't dig inerrancy, either, although their hesitant in saying so, as a rule. They deserve support in overturning the concept. Just as it's been overturned for the writings of dead Greeks and Romans.

Byron wrote:
Personally, I don't think any book written by men and women is inerrant. I find the concept absurd. But many Christians (which I'm not) don't dig inerrancy, either, although their hesitant in saying so, as a rule. They deserve support in overturning the concept. Just as it's been overturned for the writings of dead Greeks and Romans.

In the United States, we have President Barack Obama, a Christian who does not believe in the infallibility of scripture. Obama certainly has taken criticism for this view, particularly from religious zealots such as James Dobson and John MacArthur. However, the fact that Obama was voted into office at all, in spite of the fact that his opponent nominated a fundamentalist Christian (Sarah Palin) as his running-mate, was something that I found to be very encouraging.

Just a few years ago in the United States, the religious right held enormous power and sway in the political arena. The 2008 presidential election, however, seemed to indicate that the religious right has taken some serious hits and may no longer be the dominant force it once was. This to me, is a hopeful sign. Americans seem to be increasingly aware of and less tolerant of the sort of blatant religious hypocrisy that has run rampant in our country for too long. (Last month, the Pentagon even disinvited the son of Billy Graham from its National Day of Prayer event because of derogatory public comments Graham made about Islam.) While we still have a long way to go (the fact that we have a National Day of Prayer at all, for example, is somewhat of an embarrassment I think) at least we seem to be making some progress.

Even if religious superstition will not be entirely erased in the United States any time soon, it is heartening to see signs that we could be moving in that direction with a first step being that a smarter, gentler brand of Christianity, such as the kind of Christianity embraced by Barack Obama, becoming more and more acceptable. If this trend continues and if infallibility of the Bible is openly questioned by more and more Christians, I think that sermons and "Bible-based teachings," such as the sermon linked to in this thread by John Piper, will become nothing more than shameful relics of a part of our history from which the majority of Americans are happy to distance themselves.

In my opinion, the best case scenario would be one in which the majority of Americans value truth over superstition and identify themselves as being without a religion. (According to a recent Religious Identification Survey, the number of Americans who do just that is on the rise.) However, even reaching a point at which the majority of Americans continue to identify themselves as Christians but do not believe in the infallibility of scripture would be a giant step forward in the right direction.