So basically there’s all these restrictions which, if you stay within them, supposedly you’ll live a good and moral life. But if you screw up, either accidentally or on purpose, all you have top do is say “sorry”, ask for forgiveness, and you get a start again.
The person or persons you trespassed against, meanwhile, are permanently “unclean” unless they agree it was their idea too and ask for forgiveness. And even then.
What’s missing, of course, is the concept of making amends. This was a big deal with pre-Christian Europeans (and still us with other people). The idea being that if harm is done, reparations must be made.
Historically these reparations were often a second attack on the victim (forced to marry their rapist etc.). But they didn’t have to be, and at least there was some sense of consequences.
From what I remember from being a Catholic, you were supposed to do all of that: make amends to God (through prayer), make amends to the person you wronged, and repent from the sin (commit to not doing it again).
I’m not saying it always worked that way (as a kid I thought the concept was you just paid off the sins by saying a few Hail Marys), but it has always left me flabbergasted by Protestants who seem to believe that they have carte blanche access to do anything with the expectation it’ll be instantly forgiven.
Not only that, but the system of private confession – while rightly criticised for protecting offenders – helped to prevent scenes like this where the victim has to watch a public spectacle and be shamed if they don’t comply with forgiveness. Under Catholic doctrine, forgiveness is sought from God, this victim shaming is less systemically built in.
Not only that, but in the old days, a dozen Hail Marys was no easy task, but rather something more akin to physical torture (stone floors versus pews with padded kneeling bars) – it wasn’t necessarily an easy way out. The more you had to say, the more it hurt. Penance meant something… at least it was intended to.
Mind you, I am about as far away from Catholic as I could be, but I see where it was never intended as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. What it became could be arguable as another story. But in this way, at least, the victims aren’t spotlighted and humiliated like in the Evangelical public confession system.
And it drives me absolutely batty that Evangelicals seem absolutely oblivious about coerced forgiveness not being forgiveness at all. As is true for many organised religions, it’s just about playing a game, going through the motions.
Bah. I’m out of practice, and I just timed a Hail Mary in under eight seconds. Even on a hard floor, a dozen shouldn’t be any particular imposition.
Although, I do suppose that saying the words at absolute top speed, rather than actually contemplating them, goes against the spirit of the penance. However, again, that’s the habit I learned as a kid.
There’s no limit to what straight identified men can get away with in that culture, while women are taught after one act they’re “chewed gum,” and LGBT people are taught even a committed relationship is a “sinful lifestyle.”
There’s another form of justice where the community gets together and listens to everyone’s concerns and then decide together on appropriate restoration. In this way, the offender can be reintegrated back into the community and those who were hurt can be included in deciding how they are repaid. For many people, it’s about having the person who hurt them acknowledge the pain they caused.
I heard a some talk about that when Jacob Appelbaum was in the news. With TOR being a largely anarchist community, that was how they expected disputes of that nature to be settled, and a lot of people were upset that the women went both to the police and to the court of public opinion with their grievances.
Thinking of Appelbaum, though, reminds me of the following essay series, which also belongs here:
True Love Waits, except when a powerful man needs his dick sucked. Then, it can’t even wait through the drive home.
And yeah, plotting this whole thing out, then crying crocodile tears, and then not owning up to it until it has become public record, is not exactly something a moral person would do.
On my screen your comment wrapped as I have it above. I thought you were going to say “it can’t even wait through the drive through.” But the smile ends there. It’s terrible that so many people are finding this behavior exhibited by self-declared religious types acceptable, even when they admit it. It’s worse than the people who voted for Roy Moore because they didn’t believe 9 women (at least one can imagine that some of them did).
This story just boils my blood. This guy is supposed to be a moral leader, not whatever the fuck he thinks he is. For him to rail on about divorce, homosexuality, pornography, and “sexual atheism”*, to basically get all up in everybody’s sex life, and then have something like this in his background? What, was it like Ell Oh Ell, true love waits but I just needed a blowjob, or was his outlook on sexuality completely destroyed by his religious beliefs? Probably some mixture.
*No clue, but I’m imagining someone crying out “OH NONEXISTENT DEITY” in bed.
Fortunately there’s an easy fix. Expose creeps like this for who they really are. Then expose sex-negativity for the societally backward morally repugnant practice it is. It is designed to keep people in the dark, to the point where they don’t know the proper names for their sex organs, how to use them properly, or even what their purposes are. It’s a way of controlling people and making them ashamed of their natural impulses. Otherwise, what’s the harm in teaching people about reproductive and non-reproductive sex? The vast majority of people will have sex, so they should learn how to do it properly while minimizing abuse, disease, and unplanned pregnancies.
I don’t know about you guys, but I have never mistakenly had sex with anyone. These aren’t mistakes, they’re conscious decisions made as the result of having a fucked up moral compass. They should own it, then figure out why their morality is guiding them to do very immoral things, then address the issue.
Then again, this comes from being introspective, rather than relying on a book written in a very different time and place to supply the unambiguous answers to any and all of one’s moral conundrums.
Yeah, I know that English is a dynamic language, but “mistake,” to me, primarily implies an error made out of ignorance, or perception, or execution. For instance: I thought that this was my stop, but I was mistaken. I thought I had caught all of the typos, but I was mistaken. I thought that I knew you from somewhere, but I was mistaken. You did something wrong, but only because you didn’t do exactly what you were intending to do.
An error in judgement or from a moral failing isn’t a “mistake.” You’re doing exactly what you intend to do; it’s just the wrong thing to do.
Again, that’s a rather prescriptivist use of the word, and I’m trying to stop holding others to my standards of what words mean (especially when their meaning comes across), but I agree with you that consciously using the word “mistake,” instead of something indicating moral culpability, is probably an effort to reduce the failure in the audience’s mind from a moral one to a simple matter of ignorance.
Before we actually started listening to women, before monsters were being held accountable for their actions, we had the whisper network, informal private washroom conversations between women at events warning each other to stay away from certain persons, see The Missing Stair for details (http://pervocracy.blogspot.ca/2012/06/missing-stair.html)
Several years ago one woman put together a spreadsheet of this whisper network and sent it to her friends in media, she called it the Shitty Men in Media list. Her friends filled in blanks, and sent it to their friends who filled in more blanks, and so on and so on. It went viral. The list got reported on. It went offline. And all the women who participated went into hiding. Because five years ago outing abusers got women fired, doxxed, driven from their home, threatened, and so on.
Harpers is about to publish an article by Katie Rophie outing the progenitor of the list.
This is an article by the original author of the list, because fuck Katie Rophie and fuck Harpers.
But the smile ends there. It’s terrible that so many people are finding this behavior exhibited by self-declared religious types acceptable, even when they admit it. It’s worse than the people who voted for Roy Moore because they didn’t believe 9 women (at least one can imagine that some of them did).