Gender Roles In Transhuman Society
The West has been moving away from what the ancients once conceived as "reality." Wisdom used to mean individuals and societies bringing themselves into conformity with God's created order for life on earth while overcoming foolish delusions and misguided ambitions. In the twenty-first century, however, there's no such thing as wisdom. The entire category of wisdom has been dismissed in favor of technical knowledge and virtue signaling. God's creation, once seen as basically immutable, is now just an accident that can be manipulated with the proper application of technology. Ancient virtue is now dismissed as the oppressive moral constructs of the decaying patriarchy, and modern virtue is just signaling in the direction of the latest progressive moral crusade. The virtuous contemporary American isn't a self-disciplined individual who overcomes Satan's temptations, he's just one who talks incessantly about saving the environment, fighting racism, and advancing women's rights, and it doesn't matter whether he actually takes concrete measures to pursue any of those things.
Unfortunately, contemporary virtue signaling isn't about defending or celebrating Christian virtue. It's mostly about seeing how naïve and divorced from reality one can pretend to be. The most virtuous person is the one who can most convincingly pretend to believe the most unnatural conclusions, and it's almost always political (because politics seems to have subsumed all ethical considerations for the Millennial generation). The political Left is the most delusional, but the Right usually catches up pretty quickly.
The ideal man, circa 2020, is a gender non-conformist who can make himself believe individuals are equal despite all the contrary evidence. He’s capable of believing that inviting millions of refugees from the global south will actually make his society more functional. He's capable of believing that his own gender is the violent invention of a sexist society expressly created for the oppression of "female identified" humans for the benefit of a "male identifying" elite.
The political Right is complicit in the Left's worst delusions, but it usually waits twenty years to fully embrace them ("Republicans are just 20 years behind Democrats"). Most of the Church of Christ votes Republican, so we usually experience a couple decades of trying to find a way to avoid the "liberal" worldview until finally discovering it was right all along and the Bible clearly proves it. Racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, until it wasn't, and then it became a damnable sin… all in half a century. But rest assured, the "plain meaning of the Bible" was obvious the whole time, "common sense" should have told those old fogies they were lost in the dark ages.
Fellow Christians, are we really going to travel through this same farcical cycle on the issue of gender? Are we really going to let ourselves jump off this Leftist cliff? Are we going to virtue signal ourselves into believing that gender differences are just relics of a dying oppressive antique society? Are we going to pretend that every civilization in history was wrong about humans being born male and female? Are we going to deconstruct every gender pronoun in the Bible until the holy scriptures have been properly transitioned, pun intended, into another justification for our increasingly transhuman transreality?
I'm writing this in 2019, and I don't really think I need to lay out the scriptural argument for God wanting humans to be male and female and exhibit specific gender roles. That task, regarded for thousands of years as unnecessary, has now been exposited by thousands of blogs and vlogs and sermons and grouchy uncles over Thanksgiving turkey. Currently, there are only two scenarios I can imagine that would justify Christians rejecting the traditional gender binary: (1) God having created humans without gender and then humans dividing into genders, or (2) God creating genders and then asking humans to overcome and erase them as a kind of spiritual exorcise. Both scenarios are biblically and biologically irrelevant. What part of "he created them male and female" have we failed to understand? What part of women having babies have we failed to understand? Did humanity subconsciously eisegesis our traditional conclusions after being brainwashed by the patriarchy? I find that unconvincing.
How is it difficult to imagine that God assigned different genders to different roles in the church and home if we accept that God did, in fact, create different genders? If God wanted two genders to exist so much that he made women, not men, capable of growing babies inside their abdomens then how is it difficult to imagine that he wanted men to lead the church and women to nurture children? God wrote gender differences into our DNA and anatomy, and he even gave men beards and muscles to distinguish them from women, but somehow contemporary Christians will still find a way to "biblically" prove that God wants us to erase gender differences.
Of course, these reformers always vomit up Galatians 3:28, the most mutilated passage in scripture, as undeniable proof that women should be elders and that transsexuals represent the triumph of the Christian ideal. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." This passage, which was obviously not meant to be taken literally, somehow trumps God's creation order and every other explicit passage on the matter. Christian morality, like secular morality, is increasingly unrelated to the Bible or creation. It has devolved into a practice of virtue signaling in which Christians try to pretend they can't understand what God intended. "Yes, God created the genders radically different, and there are multiple verses throughout the Bible confirming his intention for them to be treated socially and religiously different, but let's just pretend we can't understand for the sake of an 'equality' that erases DNA and anatomy and tradition."
I'm not trying to make a specific argument against women participating in the church. There are legitimate disagreements about what roles women should have. Can a woman be a deaconess? Can a woman start a song? Can a woman pray or prophesy with her head covered during the assembly? Can a woman lead if men neglect their responsibility? We have biblical examples of women doing all these things at different times and under different circumstances. We don't know all the details, and these subjects have been debated among orthodox Christians for over a thousand years. In the past, however, these disagreements never devolved into what the church is now facing: the total abandonment and rejection of God's created gender order.
Twenty-first century Christians face an unprecedented historical situation. For the first time, our technology and prosperity is moving us into an era in which humanity's traditional understanding of sexuality is on the verge of becoming obsolete. The advent of transsexual operations, hormone replacement therapy, genetic engineering, surrogate mothers, cloning, human-animal hybrids, and the end of traditional manual work and warfare will allow humanity to increasingly ignore gender differences on the practical levels of functionality and efficiency. "God is dead," and man seeks to usurp and manipulate his creation. Man seeks to "improve" upon God's original design by changing it into something unrecognizable to all the civilizations of humanity's past. We're transitioning into the post-human, where "human" is defined as the creature God called "good." Satan has promised us something better than "oppressive gender binaries," and modern Christians are increasingly coming to accept his degraded but technologically savvy upgrade ideas.
Unfortunately, contemporary virtue signaling isn't about defending or celebrating Christian virtue. It's mostly about seeing how naïve and divorced from reality one can pretend to be. The most virtuous person is the one who can most convincingly pretend to believe the most unnatural conclusions, and it's almost always political (because politics seems to have subsumed all ethical considerations for the Millennial generation). The political Left is the most delusional, but the Right usually catches up pretty quickly.
The ideal man, circa 2020, is a gender non-conformist who can make himself believe individuals are equal despite all the contrary evidence. He’s capable of believing that inviting millions of refugees from the global south will actually make his society more functional. He's capable of believing that his own gender is the violent invention of a sexist society expressly created for the oppression of "female identified" humans for the benefit of a "male identifying" elite.
The political Right is complicit in the Left's worst delusions, but it usually waits twenty years to fully embrace them ("Republicans are just 20 years behind Democrats"). Most of the Church of Christ votes Republican, so we usually experience a couple decades of trying to find a way to avoid the "liberal" worldview until finally discovering it was right all along and the Bible clearly proves it. Racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, until it wasn't, and then it became a damnable sin… all in half a century. But rest assured, the "plain meaning of the Bible" was obvious the whole time, "common sense" should have told those old fogies they were lost in the dark ages.
Fellow Christians, are we really going to travel through this same farcical cycle on the issue of gender? Are we really going to let ourselves jump off this Leftist cliff? Are we going to virtue signal ourselves into believing that gender differences are just relics of a dying oppressive antique society? Are we going to pretend that every civilization in history was wrong about humans being born male and female? Are we going to deconstruct every gender pronoun in the Bible until the holy scriptures have been properly transitioned, pun intended, into another justification for our increasingly transhuman transreality?
I'm writing this in 2019, and I don't really think I need to lay out the scriptural argument for God wanting humans to be male and female and exhibit specific gender roles. That task, regarded for thousands of years as unnecessary, has now been exposited by thousands of blogs and vlogs and sermons and grouchy uncles over Thanksgiving turkey. Currently, there are only two scenarios I can imagine that would justify Christians rejecting the traditional gender binary: (1) God having created humans without gender and then humans dividing into genders, or (2) God creating genders and then asking humans to overcome and erase them as a kind of spiritual exorcise. Both scenarios are biblically and biologically irrelevant. What part of "he created them male and female" have we failed to understand? What part of women having babies have we failed to understand? Did humanity subconsciously eisegesis our traditional conclusions after being brainwashed by the patriarchy? I find that unconvincing.
How is it difficult to imagine that God assigned different genders to different roles in the church and home if we accept that God did, in fact, create different genders? If God wanted two genders to exist so much that he made women, not men, capable of growing babies inside their abdomens then how is it difficult to imagine that he wanted men to lead the church and women to nurture children? God wrote gender differences into our DNA and anatomy, and he even gave men beards and muscles to distinguish them from women, but somehow contemporary Christians will still find a way to "biblically" prove that God wants us to erase gender differences.
Of course, these reformers always vomit up Galatians 3:28, the most mutilated passage in scripture, as undeniable proof that women should be elders and that transsexuals represent the triumph of the Christian ideal. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." This passage, which was obviously not meant to be taken literally, somehow trumps God's creation order and every other explicit passage on the matter. Christian morality, like secular morality, is increasingly unrelated to the Bible or creation. It has devolved into a practice of virtue signaling in which Christians try to pretend they can't understand what God intended. "Yes, God created the genders radically different, and there are multiple verses throughout the Bible confirming his intention for them to be treated socially and religiously different, but let's just pretend we can't understand for the sake of an 'equality' that erases DNA and anatomy and tradition."
I'm not trying to make a specific argument against women participating in the church. There are legitimate disagreements about what roles women should have. Can a woman be a deaconess? Can a woman start a song? Can a woman pray or prophesy with her head covered during the assembly? Can a woman lead if men neglect their responsibility? We have biblical examples of women doing all these things at different times and under different circumstances. We don't know all the details, and these subjects have been debated among orthodox Christians for over a thousand years. In the past, however, these disagreements never devolved into what the church is now facing: the total abandonment and rejection of God's created gender order.
Twenty-first century Christians face an unprecedented historical situation. For the first time, our technology and prosperity is moving us into an era in which humanity's traditional understanding of sexuality is on the verge of becoming obsolete. The advent of transsexual operations, hormone replacement therapy, genetic engineering, surrogate mothers, cloning, human-animal hybrids, and the end of traditional manual work and warfare will allow humanity to increasingly ignore gender differences on the practical levels of functionality and efficiency. "God is dead," and man seeks to usurp and manipulate his creation. Man seeks to "improve" upon God's original design by changing it into something unrecognizable to all the civilizations of humanity's past. We're transitioning into the post-human, where "human" is defined as the creature God called "good." Satan has promised us something better than "oppressive gender binaries," and modern Christians are increasingly coming to accept his degraded but technologically savvy upgrade ideas.