Let me begin my acknowledging and accepting Ann's apology. Thank you, Ann, for your apology.
Now for the new stuff.
Ann wrote:
As you can see, we are told that Midianite or Moabite women seduce Israeli men and make them engage in pagan worship and immoral sexuality. God unleashes his fury on Israel in retaliation, and 24,000 Israelis are killed. This is the kind of story that teaches us that unchecked female sexuality brings disaster and multiple deaths.
I would write "You've got to be kidding" except I know you're not kidding.
You are
way off the reservation on this one, Ann. The deaths of the 24,000 Hebrew men was because they had deliberately disobeyed the Mosaic Law by marrying pagan women. And it was not the sexuality of the women which was an issue, it was the worship of false gods which was the problem.
You also wrote, to introduce this section of your post:
One message that is repeated again and again in the Bible is that the sexuality of women is horribly dangerous and can wreak havoc.
I am one of the first ones to agree that women have power over men, and that part of that power involves sex. But the implicit corollary of your statement is that women aren't supposed to be sexual creatures, and that somehow sex is presented in the Bible as a bad thing.
That couldn't be farther from the truth. The first thing God told Adam and Eve in Eden was to be fruitful and multiply. Humans can't do that without having sex.
In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is personified several times as a female character, one whose value exceeds that of any precious metal or any gemstone. And she's quite beautiful, or in today's parlance, smokin' hot.
The entire Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs, as some translations title it) is about sex. It isn't a sex manual like the Kama Sutra, of course, but it does make plain that sex between a husband and wife is a really,
really good thing.
With apologies to the Catholic readers on the boards, we can also see that Joseph was told by the angel Gabriel that he was not to have sex with his pregnant wife until after she delivered her first child. If sex were anything close to being a bad thing, Mary the mother of Jesus would not have engaged in such a behavior.
Hebrews 13:4 (KJV) says that "Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled." This verse is among a series of short, general admonitions to good behavior, and I take it to mean that whatever a husband and wife want to do with each other if more than okay with God.
My point is that your point is invalid. God doesn't get mad at wives who enjoy sex with their husbands. He never has. He never will. The problem is that quite often, all we men can see in a woman is the sex part, and we forget that she's got a brain and the will to use it. When we guys (I'm speaking of men in general now, not specifically and certainly not autobiographically) see a beautiful woman, we sometimes stop thinking about right and wrong and just react to the moment. That's what those Hebrew men did with the Moabite women. They looked, they saw, their tongues fell out of their mouths and they decided not to think past the fulfillment of their sexual desires.
Shall we talk about American men who make us look like idiots? Let's see, there's John Edwards, former candidate for the Presidency who fathered a child by one of his staffers and denied it for years. There's Albert Haynesworth, pro football player who accepted $21 million to remain with his team and then skipped a number of required practices and has made himself a problem with the other players. There's Donald Trump, the very image of conspicuous and rampant and out-of-control capitalism. There's actor-director-producer Quentin Tarantino, whose violent and bloody movies shock even the jaded public in the US.
I think I've made my point that I don't blame women for 9/11. In fact, I don't blame the men I just mentioned either. As I recall, it was the fault of about two or three dozen evil men who ended up killing about three thousand innocent people on one day and disrupting our nation for years.
Let me make one more point. I never said that Dr. Falwell or Mr. D'Souza or I wanted the US to live under Biblical law. I said that if the US were to live under Biblical
principles, things would be better overall in our country. I do not advocate a return to the Mosaic law, and I am not acquainted with anyone who does (except Pat Robertson, and even I find it hard to take him seriously at times). Law and principles are not the same thing. Law is enforced on a society. Principles are adhered to voluntarily by society. I would prefer the latter.
You can insist on your conclusion all you wish, Ann, but you are refuting a point I have never made.
