Peterkin

I'm not 'invoking God' and it's not my argument. When you refer to mythical beings, you are invoking the mythology in which they exist. I am familiar with that myth, and the god who later becomes the Jehovah of Israel in their story featured large in the story of Adam and Eve. My being an atheist has no bearing on the integrity of that story. The logic of that escapes me. How does knowledge of 'tomorrow' require that one cover one's genitals? I should think knowledge of tomorrow would prompt us, as it does the naked animals, to seek out warm caves, build dams and dig burrows, store up body fat, nuts and grains, migrate to sunnier climates, etc. Why would it cause shame? What's it to do with good and evil? The story is about the shift from kinship-based hunting-gathering society to agriculture and civilization: the proverbial loss of innocence. 'They' were not thinking. They did not exist. There is only the story, which was once an oral tradition that changed from telling to telling (Proof: there are two version it, right in that book.) and is now preserved in the book. To do what? Who you are today is not who I am today, and the rest of humanity today is not like either of us; there are many different cultures and mores and attitudes. No argument about ancient peoples and their mythology can be based on "who we are", but the religions of people today are based, more or less, on those ancient stories.

Their 'culture' consisted of wild animals who couldn't care less whether anyone is wearing anything, as long its not their skin, with an occasional visit from God, who didn't want them to know they were naked. It was them covering up that tipped Him off to their having eaten of the forbidden fruit, which was the knowledge of good and evil. And it was forbidden because that knowledge make them godlike. Then they started procreating a culture, all of whose members, from infancy on, were taught to feel guilty, frightened and ashamed.

It makes not a damned bit of difference whether she's naked in a nudist colony or wearing a long white gown at Russian court ball, or a pin-striped suit at a Wall Street board meeting - you're supposed to control yourself among all the women dressed in the normal costume of their normal habitat. If that fine bosom is exposed in the boardroom, that would be as provocative as if a nudist walked out on the beach in a long white gown. It's the exception you notice, not the norm. No, I'm not aware that Middle Eastern women of the time indulged in the shaving of limbs. They may have, but it's not relevant here. Isaiah quite clearly said that her fine clothing would be stripped from the princess, in public, as part of the humiliation ritual inflicted on a noble captive in a brutal war. That's not a nit; it's a flea egg; whole different species. It's a reference to Mother Zion, who brought forth Israel, not to a woman; the breast is nourishing, not lust-inducing. You'd have done better with Solomon - but those lust-inducing breasts are compared to gazelles or hills of moonlit barley or some silly poetical metaphor like that. Supposed.... by some. It's a bunch of legends, dire predictions and curses, nationalistic jingo, retroactive predictions and instructions for how to pamper the priestly caste and serve the landowners. And some really terrible examples of how to behave when you're a guest in a foreign country. What would it be an allegory for? It's perfectly believable. How many men have killed a rival and taken his wife? Another day, another Claudius.... They're stories and legends from a long cultural tradition: some based on real events, some wholesale fiction, some carried over from other tribes' stories, some old and retold and embroidered over time. Like the one about Abraham and Sarah and the badger game. That's recycled; the second time, she'd be about 90 years old when the king of someplace fell head-over-heels. (too late at night to look it up) The stories accrued and evolved over centuries, maybe a millennium, largely without documentation. The New Testament is an entirely different matter. Those stories were fresh-minted by the chroniclers of a religion in the process of being invented. They are purposeful and directed, written in the space of a few years, then Paul's self-important correspondence, which isn't part of the story, as he wasn't even there, and the ravings of a much later mushroom-head named John and the fake bits that were added by Roman clerics another three centuries on. Is there some point in posting enormous walls of biblical text?

Shame! I hear it makes excellent said leaven to bloat your garden produce.

Sure, but they're not unique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil Modern brides are still doing it! And of course all the various religiously mandated head-coverings for both men and women - you'd think gods just don't like looking down on human hair.

Okay. I didn't realize that was the central issue of nudity. I didn't cite anything biblical about breasts; in fact there are very few mentions of any kind of undress, except the explicitly sexual ones I mentioned and the covering of Noah's genitals. The comments about toplessness in the desert in general and ancient Israel in particular was an opinion, not a shot on goal. The covering of Adam and Eve's nakedness with fig leaves is not at all clear as to extent, but very clear on the shame of 'nakedness'; the religious painters all agreed on genitals only. Later, God makes them leather tunics, which would cover both of them from shoulders to knees. Modern Christians, even the most prudish don't have a problem with men's chests but do with women's, because they consider the female breast sexual, rather than nourishing. Extreme Protestants are terrified of anything sexual, especially female sexuality. Solomon liked them - or whoever wrote those songs; much of it seem in a female voice. Lots of pastoral imagery, too, which doesn't seem the obvious choice for a king. The early Christians made a great to-do about the "image of God" question, whether it was a physical likeness or a spiritual one; whether the human body was sacred or profane. By the middle ages, they seem to have settled on preserving the "mystery of the body" for holy matrimony. But they had communal baths - off an on, place to place, co-ed or segregated or brothel - from the advent of the Roman empire into Europe until the Reformation. Different mores for different cultures, classes and periods, as well as body parts and degree and occasion of undress.

Must have been a lot of sunburned women in those days. That doesn't seem to include Judea; i.e. bible-country. Isaiah was pretty clear about what it means to have your head and legs uncovered in public: it's a degradation reserved for captured slave women. He didn't mention breasts. In fact, nobody in the Bible talked about breasts, it was genitals they worried about, and menstruation, and incest. Jesus didn't seem to mention how to dress - other not to worry about it, because lilies don't need clothes. His logic was a little eccentric sometimes. Paul did mention modesty, but only the sense of not showing off or drawing attention to oneself. Christianity only began to object universally and vehemently after the Reformation - though some popes and monastic big-wigs were more prudish than others. Of course, that's pretty much all pornographic and takes place in the bedchamber. But his mother had some rotten luck, when Kind David caught an accidental glimpse of her in the bath, had her husband murdered, married her whether she liked it or not, and got her first baby killed by God in revenge for his wrongdoing. I doubt he'd have gone mad with lust if he was accustomed to seeing her topless. Yes, people have and did have some pretty weird notions about the human body. You know that was pornographic, right? Not respectable women in public, but a particularly self-indulgent king's harem at home. His mother's story was lesson in humility from the prophet kidnapped

There is no single or monolithic Christian tradition. Jesus had very little to say about modesty or chastity - in fact, I can't member a single sermon where those things featured. In Rome, both the costumes and customs were different from the Levant, where a number of Christian sects all went by different interpretations of scripture. The Romanized Christian church made further adjustments in each of their conquered territories, in accordance with local mores. After the fall of the empire, Eastern and Western Catholicism were split and later, the Reformation fundamentalist factions that were far more prohibitive - and misogynist. The whole modestly fetish comes out of a misreading of one of Paul's many, many instructions regarding methods of worship. He was persuading not to show off wealth and status. It wasn't even about specific naughty parts.

Did they? I don't recall any biblical references. Lots of bared breasts in Renaissance art - from a period in Europe when it certainly would have been shocking if a real woman walked down the street topless, but they would most likely feed their babies, under a cloak or veil, wherever they happened to be. Different mores applied then, as now, to different forms and degrees of exposure for different people. In biblical times, slave women may have been lightly or selectively covered, and dancing girls, concubines and harlots might wear very little, but 'respectable' women were supposed to cover themselves, particularly their hair and thighs, which the prophets found most provocative. Besides, desert-dwellers cover every inch of skin they can, to protect it from the scorching sun. But the OT god's peculiar problem seemed to be with uncovering people for the purpose of intercourse; all of Leviticus 18 is about carnal knowledge, with a long preamble about the nakedness of close kin, then more prohibitions about sex outside the home. The onus is on the one who sees the body parts, not on the owner of the parts. Curiously, the Noah-Ham story predates the commandments, so the proscription abut patriarch's genitalia must be coming from an older culture. That wasn't a huge effort, but farther from zero than Doctor Derp's efforts to make his case.

Oh, that's all right then. A lot of issues will have been decided by then.

So, have they? By now, there should be an ordinary Sumatran tiger mother with a couple of bouncing Tasmanian cubs at her teats. Perhaps when they're old enough, they could be released into the wild to find mates. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/02/study-suggests-tasmanian-tiger-survived-into-the-21st-century/

Speaking of, I notice you haven't refuted my biblical references. Ooooh! Direct hit! On the latrines. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to serious numbers. Not a lot to do with nudity, nakedness or the uncovering of limbs, but at least its contextually void.

You wouldn't know accuracy if it ran you over with a Sherman tank.

Normalized? What options were available? But that's nothing to do with nudity. Nursing mothers are not nude or naked; they have one uncovered breast concealed by a baby's head. Nothing extreme about that! Sounds a like a self-fulfilling necessity. Anyway, they didn't marry those foreign captured women; they just used them as servants and whatever. But they had practised polygamy long before the wars, or the establishment of Israel. Read Genesis 29-30, where Jacob marries two of his cousins and also has children by both of their maids. But he never went outside the tent without his loincloth.

Have you counted the ants? There are lots now, but there were way more - the ant are working their way up the evolutionary chain. Or maybe a lot of pigeons and humans have no souls.

What utter balderdash! Adam and Eve were not showing off - who was around to envy them? They didn't know that God had a bugaboo about genitals; He never told them about sex. They didn't even know they were naked until they ate of the knowledge of good from evil. Then, suddenly, their natural state was perceived as evil - though they don't copulate till the next chapter. It's the son who happened to catch an accidental glimpse of the apparatus that engendered him that was punished, and the old man lolling about in a drunken stupor, leaving his withered loins uncovered, who pronounced the curse on him. Name three instances of moderation in the OT. Eh? Parse that sentence, slowly.... And then correlate the three nouns in it to anything in the OT.

We're keeping a wary eye on the developing situation. We're also continuing to shun our fellow humans and wear our masks when we do go out, but the Health Officer in our house has recently liberalized the rules; I can now go into a hardware store and actually handle a tool I consider buying rather than trust amazon feedback - a privilege I've missed greatly. For our wedding anniversary, we ordered a pick-up meal, which was vastly overpriced and underwhelming, so that's not going to happen again, but the containers make dandy reusable microwave dishes. We have received our four doses of vaccine. The vaccination rate in our area is fairly high - which occasions a lot of discarded syringes and swabs and nurses' gear - but of course, we have no idea from one week to the next how effective they are.

We don't see much of that in our town; you're more likely to get stuck behind an acquaintance of the cashier who needs to impart urgent gossip than an irate customer. There is an elevated level rudeness in summer, but the vacationers are gone now. However, we have lost over 30 health-care workers to Covid and I don't know how many to burnout, in a rural area with a chronic shortage of doctors. Now, nurses, too.

I forgot about The Red Pony. We did read LotF, though a little later, 15-ish. They didn't give us any fantasy, either, so L'Engle and C.s. Lewis were off the table - but it seems to me Welles and Verne would have been just about right for kids of that age, and presented enough issues for discussion.

13 is far too young for Steinbeck, or Shakespeare, for that matter. I'm trying to think what literature would work for middle school. Not many: those novels generally have adult content. I don't mean 'adult' in the popular sens of sex&gore; I mean complex ideas that require some mature experience and knowledge to appreciate. The Outsiders might be appropriate, Robinson Crusoe, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Wrong Box.... I can think of lots of science fiction students that age might understand, like and learn from. We never read any SF in school - wonder why.

They certainly seem to be doing so where I live. Indeed, the number of new cases is well down from the spike in July and the expected fall surge hasn't shown up - yet. Only a few people, customers or staff, at the stores where I shop are wearing masks anymore, though the plexiglass barriers are still up to protect cashiers. I don't expect those ever to thrown away, until the store itself is demolished of remodelled. Everyone stopped wearing rubber gloves quite early on, which was a relief. They were rather appalling: one person I know discarded three pairs at each outing. I don't see a lot of those flimsy blue surgical masks in the gutter anymore, either. I've kept a few with viable elastic for mixing peat moss into my potting soil or sanding wood; in public, I have been wearing N95 with fabric over the front - my current favourite is a parrot beak; small children are amused by it. They're durable and washable. Nevertheless, a lot of people have continued to work from home, which tends to reduce waste overall - with inflation, crazy gas prices and rent hikes, they simply can't afford so much takeout. But they do order things from amazon rather than buy them in person, which tends to increase waste. We've bought a number of items that way and I faithfully kept the cardboard boxes, packing paper, plastic bags and bubble envelopes. It's only the last I haven't been able to repurpose. I used one to hold dead batteries for the recycle bin. At this rate, I need to live another 25 years to use them all.

It didn't occur to me. I just cited the article, to give some credence to the continued existence of slavery and one modern example. According to the Wall Street Journal it's 1.4% . I didn't check the figures for Afghanistan or Congo, and forgot what they were for the ones I did look up.

As it is currently thriving in the East. https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/bonded-labour/ India is supposedly an up-and-coming modern democracy, because it's embraced the ideals and practices of capitalism and western technology. It also has the highest number of debt-slaves in the world - far more people than were enslaved in the Americas. https://scroll.in/article/898862/india-is-home-to-the-worlds-largest-slave-population-yes-slavery-still-exists

I was comparing it to the US. Passing laws of major reform is always the result of lengthy political contention, and usually done piecemeal over time, but the usual alternative is revolution and civil war. I don't think Britain was really confronted by that option - the abolitionists were unlikely to arm and overthrow the government. But the British establishment did have some reason to fear its own lower classes, so many of whom were displaced by steam and impoverished, they may have thought to mollify the working class - and its increasingly articulate and influential progressive advocates - by removing another perceived rival for their jobs. That was my criterion for 'neat' vs 'messy'. Well, that certainly played a major role in France's decision at the time. Yet, the uprising in Saint-Dominique had little effect on England (or, indeed, Haiti, which practices legal child slavery today), but the republican government did abolish slavery in France three years later, which more than likely encouraged the abolitionist factions (and insurgency) in British and Hispanic colonies. Eventually the British government moved on the issue, and the Spanish and Portuguese followed. Meanwhile In France, the restored monarch struck down that law only 8 year later, and France didn't choose the 'neat' option again until 1848, the year of Nationalist revolutions all across Europe. Of course there are contributing causes for every major change, some of which go back centuries, others born out of unexpectedly erupting events. The definition of institutions also changes with various influences, political and economic trends, shifts in power between interest groups. But there is a thread of truth-in-practice underlying human social structures that doesn't change when a new label is stuck on it. You can restrict a discussion to "slavery as represented by the European trafficking, marketing and exploitation of African captives across the Atlantic" , but you can't restrict the concept of "slavery" to that single slice of it or discuss the ending of just that aspect with the ending of slavery itself. Nor do I. All kinds of people have been and are enslaved by all kinds of other people in all kinds of legal and illegal forms.

If the actual question is "What caused the ending of slavery?", then it's already much broader than the type and location of the slavery in question - it's rather about the causes of a significant social change over a significant portion of the globe. In Britain (and consequently all British colonies), it was done neatly, through an act of Parliament, as a political expedient. After the French Revolution, all kinds of uprisings and riots broke out; slavery was becoming just too dangerous and expensive; plus there was increasing pressure from religious factions. Britain itself was not heavily invested in slavery: they had plenty of cheap native labour as well as increasing mechanization. There was plenty of other cargo for its shipping trade. The Other European slave trading and imperial nations were in a similar situation; they all abolished slavery by simply passing laws. In the US, the situation was different. In the US, that was certainly a factor in dividing North and South. The constitution had already done that: the slave-owning part developed a completely different economy and culture based on work-intensive agriculture and a severely segregated caste system, while the northern cities charged into the industrial age, with rapid urban growth, enthusiastic enterprise and cheap immigrant and child labour. The progressive half had already begun to eclipse the feudal half in economic and political clout. In the US, the conflict was not over the institution of slavery itself, but the future of newly opened territories, and which kind of state they would become. The Confederacy was aggressively pushing its own way of life onto the west - which would have made it the far larger, more powerful faction. It wasn't about "states rights", so much as who has a right to impose its social structure on new states. The issue was contested in a hugely destructive civil war, but never resolved. The abolition side won the war and passed an amendment and a handful of laws ... which were not widely enforced or obeyed, so that another series of violent confrontations were needed to put them into effect 100 years later - confrontations that continue to this day. I deleted the luck reference, because I took this to mean: Was the institution of slavery a historical phenomenon with a predetermined life-span; was the ending of it an inevitable step in social development? To that, I would have to say no. It shifts shape and changes colouring, but it lives on.