by Diest 39 Replies latest watchtower bible
I was hit by this topic after doing reaserch in the Old Testament. There are eleven different sexual relationships that are directly condemed in the old testament. Strikingly your daugher and your niece are not listed. Is this a factor of it being somewhat OK back 3000 years ago? It seems to me to be more proof that the bible is a book writen by man.
Here is a copy of a spreadsheet showing what relationships were directly mentioned.
Here is a Wikipedia article on it.
Guess thats how Lot skated on that whole father-daughter (well both daughters) thing....
Well, there is that dirty old man by the name of Lot...
And I don't buy that flimsy excuse of "Well, my DAUGHTERS MADE ME GET DRUNK, and then had their way with me!!"
Talk to any social services caseworker who's worked with men who've sexually molested their daughters, and you'll find that "but I was drunk; I didn't know what I was doing!" and "well, SHE seduced ME!!!" are contemptible forms of vicious male-chauvinism used by such scum to avoid responsibility for their predatory behavior...
Zid
Major "EWWWW"!!!!! And "oh hell no!" just reading it....
But, as u say lends to the "written by man" dialoge
Lot had relations with both his daughters and had children from both, while Abraham married his niece Sarai (Sarah) and later had Issac. In both cases, it was implied that both situations sprang from a serious shortage of suitable partners. Abraham was in pagan Ur, and Lot... well, was from Sodom. I'd venture to say that if you took the implication offered, it's OK only in extreme situations. The only suitable partner for Abraham happened to be his brother's daughter, while the only other righteous family around in the time of Lot was Abraham's, at which time he did not have any daughters to offer him.
Incest was not made a law until the law was given to Moses...then the God of the bible detailed what was not allowed. After all Moses' own mother was his father's aunt and Abraham married his half-sister.
Judah had sex with a temple prostitute (who turned out to be his daughter-in-law) but the WTS excuses him by saying there was no law against it yet....remember though the WTS holds out Judah's half-brother Joseph of being so morally pure because he did not commit adultery (although there was no law).
I'm confused. My aunt was a pioneer (not JW) nurse, doing psychiatric nursing. There are isolated communities (Jackson Whites) in the mountains. She said the number of very severe deformities from interbreeding was very sad. A lot of human monstrosities. Yet someone else remarked that the Pharoahs married their sisters for thousands of years with no recorded catastropes that were over the top.
Is incest a taboo to encourage trade partners, creating alliances with the outside world, or is it a taboo b/c offspring are deformed.
Both seem to be true.
When women share, I am always amazed at the seemingly great incidence for forced incest. It seems to be a legalist taboo but not a practical social one.
Does anyone have ideas?
I dont buy the Lot story. If the old man had the stamina to (excuse my frankness) blow his load twice in an evening, he coudnt have been that drunk. At least not so drunk he couldnt realize who he was having drunken dirty sex with. I think its a good case of biblical redaction.
it would be interesting to see some sort of computer calculation that tells us how the dna is affected when you start interbreeding.
like what is really affected when you start interbreeding and which blood relatives interbreeding would produce a offspring mutant verses a acceptable human.
like if you were the last family on earth, which of your family should leave each other alone and which ones need to repopulate?
"Incest was not made a law until the law was given to Moses..." Blondie
Well, only among the ISRAELITES....
Among many so-called "primitive" tribal groups, incest is AGAINST THEIR LAWS - and they DIDN'T HAVE some Johnny-come-lately Middle-Eastern nomadic male volcano "god" to tell them this, also!!!
From this website (bold emphasis is mine...):
http://www.tru.ca/faculty/jmclaughlin/students/phil224/cm/ethics2.htm
"Among humans, there exists a universal taboo against incest. It is hard to describe incest, as it is hard to put a bead on what it is about incest that we, as humans, dislike. The existence of the taboo stems from many properties of incest that instil fear in humans. Although the rules and views on incest vary between cultures, incest is prohibited in probably every human culture. We can infer from this that the avoidance of incest is embedded into human nature. So natural is the avoidance of incest, in fact, that we see similar traits in our closest primate relatives from the animal kingdom. ..."
Very interesting.....
And this website ALSO mentions the taboo against incest amongst the higher primates... (Bold, hi-liting and bulleting is mine...)
http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-whats-wrong-with-incest.html
"Edward Westermarck elaborated Darwin's reasoning for the biological evolution of the incest taboo in his book The History of Human Marriage (first published in 1889). Westermarck's theory can be summarized in three propositions.
First, inbreeding tends to produce physical and mental deficiencies that lower Darwinian fitness.
Second, as a consequence, natural selection has favored an emotional disposition to feel a sexual aversion to those with whom one has been raised in early childhood.
Third, this natural aversion to incest creates moral disapproval that is expressed as an incest taboo.
This put Westermarck in conflict with Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory of human psychology and culture, because Freud insisted that the inclincation to incest was natural to human beings, and that the taboo against incest arose as a purely cultural construction that human beings created to repress their natural desires for incest, this cultural repression of human nature being necessary for civilization. ..... By contrast, Westermarck believed that morality was a cultivation of natural human emotions, so that the incest taboo was a cultural expression of a natural human disposition shaped in human evolutionary history.
Over the past century, the evidence for Westermarck against Freud has grown. Arthur Wolf's study of "minor marriages" in China is one line of evidence. A traditional form of Chinese marriage was for parents to give their infant daughter to another family to be raised with the family's infant son, so that when the boy and girl reached maturity, they would be married. Wolf showed that these marriages were generally unsuccessful, because children raised together as siblings developed a sexual aversion to one another.
Another line of evidence came from the experience of the Israeli kibbutzim. [Highly ironic, considering that we're discussing one of their amcient myths... ] In the attempt to create a fully socialist community, the kibbutz would have infant children taken from their families and put in the "children's house," where they would be raised together communally. When they reached sexual maturity, the children were encouraged to find marriage partners among those with whom they had been raised.But the children resisted this, because even though they were not biological relatives, they felt as if they were siblings and thus felt revulsion at the thought of sexual mating with one another.
So it seems that these children in China and in the kibbutzim were manifesting the "Westermarck effect": as a result of an innate disposition shaped by evolutionary history, they developed a sexual aversion to the children with whom they had been raised, even though they were not actually biological siblings.
Another kind of evidence for Westermarck's theory is that it now seems that many primates show incest avoidance. While Freud thought that incest was common among nonhuman animals, we now know that this is not true. For most primate species, males leave their native troop when they reach sexual maturity, which seems to be a mechanism for avoiding excessive inbreeding. For chimpanzees, the females leave at maturity to join another troop. This means that chimp mothers will be in the same troop with their sons. And their sons often do attempt to mount their mothers and sisters, but when the males reach sexual maturity, their mothers and sisters generally push them away. This is what Westermarck's theory would predict. The human incest taboo is humanly unique as a legal and moral norm, but it expresses a natural emotional disposition that can be found in primate evolutionary history. ..."
And from the second website above, I think that this comment is most fitting for my post...
"But Darwin rejects the belief "that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience." ....
It is MOST SIGNIFICANT that the Israelites didn't write laws against incest until MUCH later in their history....
Which says a GREAT deal about their attitudes towards women...
Moral superiority, my arse!!!
Zid
