@Cedric
A very thoughtful and deep post, as usual.
The genderless, androgynous, hermaphrodite angles were things I was trying to touch on. Thank you for shining more light.
From the biblical perspective, in the beginning, there were no kings. The people murmured and complained and so they were given a king and that king became corrupt.
So then... what do we say? Is a king unnatural? We CHOSE to have them. And for better (Selassie) or worse (most others) the results are mixed. Because the kings themselves were not a monolith. So it really depended on the person and we praise Haile Selassie I because he was worthy of that title because he was able to shoulder all the responsibility that went with it while loving his people.
So let's go back to the bible's genesis. Because we're talking about man and woman as if that was the original creation. According to the bible, it was not. According to the bible "Adam", the name given to humanity was created alone without a helpmeet. And just like the people complained about not having a king, Adam saw pairs in nature and desired a partner.
We can infer from this that Adam was originally androgynous/hermaphroditic.
Why? Why not genderless? We know, biblically speaking, Jah is genderless because that would assume Jah had a physical body engineered by someone to reproduce sexually. The bible doesn't say this though. Because how would Jah procreate without a partner?
And yet we regard Jah as a MALE gender even though he doesn't have male sexual organs. And Adam saw other species that had males and females. Perhaps he did not see the animals who did not have separate genders. But did they exist? Of course, they did.
Now, according to the bible, Adam was created in the image of Jah. So this explains why he did not originally have a female in his species. The story matches science in that the division came later.
And in that story (and yes, a lot is happening in these first 2 chapters) Adam is put to sleep and operated on. Adam, in this sleep, is assigned to a physical gender while at the same time, a woman was created from that removed aspect of him.
Most English speakers accept the translation of "rib" from Hebrew. But in actuality, 'rib' is probably not the best translation. I believe the best translation is "side" but you can understand the confusion. Bible readers often try to read the bible literally when it is a mixture of literal, figurative, and metaphorical because that is how we speak in all languages. The literal just doesn't cover every idea.
So again... Adam had physical features of both genders. If he started completely genderless he would be a blank slate and there would be no reason to give him nipples or a woman a clitoris. No, they were SEPARATED from each other like siamese twins.
Siamese twins are something that happens between 1 in 49k to 1 in 189k births. It's rare but it happens. There is no denying that it happens. And it isn't useful to say that Siamese twins "chose" to be so. No one would choose that. And if you want to say nature sometimes makes mistakes, that's fine, but once the mistake has been made why blame the organism affected by the error?
And the thing is that mistakes are natural. We all make mistakes. In nature, mistakes are mutations. Mutations are older than us. If you say "well I don't have a tail so no one else should have a tail" that's a natural and understandable thought to have. But some people are born with tails. It's a medical condition. There are many medical conditions; too many to name them all. Because nature doesn't REPRODUCE perfectly. If it did, we likely wouldn't get old. We would grow to our mature adult 21-30 yr old form and maintain it forever. But when the cells divide there are errors in the replication of DNA/RNA. Therefore our bodies break down.
Some breaks are more severe than others, but it is undeniable that these errors are part of nature; that aging is part of nature. And yet...
According to the bible, Adam was originally 'perfect' ("complete" is another translation), and originally immortal. Most likely the reason for the patriarchal system is that men blamed women for their condition and tried to subjugate them, and their "feminine side", not realizing that without balance masculinity is toxic. And we can see the negative effects when athletes sometimes turn to steroid use and jack up their testosterone levels; making them more aggressive.
When I was young, any sensitivity in boys was chastized and people were calling everyone gay that expressed what they deemed to be a more "feminine" side. And what often happens when you push something down? In the balance, it comes back stronger, harder, but they got the message masculine society was sending. That if being sensitive made them gay then they would rather be gay than not be true to themselves; wherever they were on the spectrum between masculine and feminine. It's not a binary switch but a spectrum.
So again... the new thing isn't asexual reproduction. The new thing isn't androgyny or hermaphrodite. These things are ancient and perhaps more natural than what we now consider normal because sexual reproduction was "naturally selected". But when evolution selects a feature that doesn't mean that the species absolutely will reproduce that same feature with perfect duplication every single time.
Now Jah, being without physical gender, would not have a biological imperative to reproduce, creating a "sex drive". But this biological directive is programmed into humans. It releases dopamine and oxytocin which is how the body/nature rewards behavior. However, that doesn't make it right or moral. Because that's relative. The body needs sugar, for example. That's how it creates energy for all of your cells. But you can consume too much. Fear is natural. But again, too much fear (extreme) causes extreme behaviors that can be toxic or dangerous to others.
And if you don't have a tail you can't know how that feels. Can you really blame the person for wanting to have their tail removed? What about cleft palates? Should people with cleft palates believe themselves to be "cursed" and take no restorative actions? In my mind, homosexuals are no different although I don't think all homosexuals are running off the same motivation. Some of it is nature and some of it is nurture. But the idea that Adam was originally just like us is simply not the case. We are not the original. We are all "shaped in iniquity". So according to the bible abnormalities are, in fact, natural. And so why hate someone who is only trying to deal with their abnormality in a way that they can still be happy. After all, that's what gay means. Happy.
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