Administrator:

I am interested in discussing how the various world religions view the matter of being a eunuch. We all know about Matt 19:12 by now and apparently Muhammad when asked was not enthusiastic about a man being a eunuch. Yet, they had the eunuchs in the harems. (The word "haram" means "forbidden" so go figure.)

Where in your view is it most appropriate to initiate religious discussions? I note there is no general topic for this.

By the way, I greatly enjoy this board. Thanks for keeping up the tradition of bboy.

Regards, Glenda J

The cellar would seem the most appropriate place to put this. Religion, philosophy (~~), psychology, and politics all seem like bedfellows and tend to arouse much passion. The cellar has been provided as a place for passions to flower, with little editorial interference, as long as no inquisitions or pogroms are started.... Discuss away....

BTW, I would be very hesitant to start a religion segment on the forums, for rather obvious (I think) reasons. I would hate to monitor it with a flame thrower to start counter-fires...

Kriss,

Afraid you would say that.

I see your point. But, religion has many segments that affect the status of the eunuch.

I will try something there and see how it works out.

Regards,

Good post Glenda as it is something many in here wonder about.As many in here know I am a christian and the religion I follow and the God I love welcomes anyone and loves eunuchs as much as anyone.If a religion dosent accept you for who you are then run dont walk away from this religion.

Not being all that religious personally, I'm not exactly sure how religion effects my status as a eunuch.

the Vertigo Comic called American Virgin (the lead character has been called to be a tv preacher...his strange family exploits him somewhat, but he feels he's called to save souls. He uses his tv pulpit and personal appearances to promote virginity, especially among young unmarried heterosexuals. In the first issue, he receives the news that his missionary fiancee has been brutally killed, and he starts a journey around the world to find her killer. In the process, he learns more about his family than he would like, he meets people of varying sexual orientations and proclivities, learns more of the world's traditions about sex, and is continuously tempted to have sex, but so far, has stuck to his beliefs.) In the latest issue, he's in India with a female friend that he thinks God wants him to perhaps marry, or at least, court. At a wedding ceremony, he witnesses a Hijira blessing the couple. What happens next is interesting.

The comic is interestingly titled. The character is a sexual virgin, true, but his ignorance about gays, lesbians, TGs, and TVs also makes him a virgin in many ways. His ignorance about the customs in the rest of the world also make him a virgin. The writer, of course, is cleverly educating the reader, too, that there's more to the notion of sex than a porn film or a quick bar pickup, or loving sexual activity between married partners of opposite sexes. And the lead also struggles with the rural/protestant religious view of sex as he learns, debating spiritual questions every step of the way.

Oh GOD!

Not THAT again...

A-1 religion is very much a part of our life no matter weather we like it or not and it will be until the end of time.The people who want to distroy our way of life are religious so we better know what they stand for.

Perhaps one third of the world population should be known as the "third gender" and desingnated as so encompassing all those that cannot give birth or else cannot get anyone pregnant to give birth. This to me would be a "eunuch".

This is from a reply I e-mailed to a young man recently graduated by a leading Catholic university (American) about some matters we discussed. I think that is properly belongs here.

I grew up during an interval when popular critics of culture, sociologists, and other theoreticians wrote books that many readers took as “scientific,” but were, in some ways, much more like David Brooks (Bobos in Paradise) and Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) but often without their splendid sense of irony.

These writers included people like David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd), William Whyte (The Organization Man), David Packard (The Hidden Persuaders), Norman O. Brown (Life Against Death), Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization), Rollo May (Man’s Search for Meaning), Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies), Rachel Carson’s (Silent Spring), and eventually the appalling Charles Reich (The Greening of America). Linked with these commentators were people such as Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, and from before them Herbert Mead—writers whom my teachers in Indianapolis considered social scientists. The running comment about Parsons (and some graduate students of Jaroslav Pelikan) was that he wrote as if someone had translated badly from German into English.

These folks propose theories that explained various aspects of economic and social institutions in terms of some broad vision. Marcuse, for example, exploits his readings of Hegel, Marx, and Freud to propose an economic and psychoanalytical reading of Western society. Norman O. Brown interprets Freud in a brilliant literary reading of fundamental texts. Rollo May had been a student of Paul Tillich and mirrors Tillich’s German Romanticism and socialist outlook. Kuhn’s pellucid book emerged from his graduate studies in the history of science. Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints emerged from his graduate studies. These were books fun to read. They nurtured alternative ways of thinking about one’s culture. Reading these works helped to balance a certain limiting ambiance in the pervasive tone of my state university.

I lived in a university world dominated by positivism in philosophy and behaviorism in psychology. The department of political science had a behaviorist and positivist tone. Walls stood between departments—at least on the level of undergraduate studies. We took survey courses outside our majors—perhaps too many survey courses.

Officially, students in psychology did not share seminars or combined classes with in philosophy because philosophers were not scientific (behaviorists) and students in philosophy did not speak with students of psychology because Freudians were not scientific. Ironically, professors on both faculties were friends. I recall when a distinguished professor of psychology committed suicide and my teacher in the history of philosophy Tony Nemetz presented one of the eulogies for his friend. The head of the department of the philosophy was chair of division of social sciences—philosophy was not part of arts program. The university administrators and faculty defined philosophy as a social science, even as a paradigm for doing social science.

For the most part, none of the works by broad theorists became part of the discourse in which we immersed ourselves. I never heard anyone talk about the sort of studies that now dominate the curricula of philosophy departments now. The barriers began to fall shortly after my graduation, but not during the interval I was a student.

Oddly, in philosophy, two of my teachers had been students of Charles Hartshorne. Even though Hartshorne visited our campus a couple of times, I never heard his name mentioned in any of my classes. One of those two teachers, however, did build from Hartshorne’s work. Hartshorne said that student was his most lucid student. He was my most coherent teacher and he wrote a lucid description of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. None of my teachers in philosophy ever mentioned Kierkegaard except in a derogatory way. They referred to Heidegger with utter disdain, but I think that some of my classmates in philosophy did read Hegel (in German) and Marx (in German) and they did discuss him among themselves.

I tended to read the broad theorists for amusement—the way I once read popular novels in high school. I read social theory almost as diversion. The books were like often-splendid glosses on texts, but in their own way, glosses on society itself as a text.

At university, brilliant students surrounded me in my department. In a sense, I learned more from them than from my teachers. I recall that my friend[deleted], now dying from cancer, kidding me about reading Whitehead from his senile period. My girlfriend was in the honors program as were other friends. I read what their teachers assigned them to read. I read Paul Goodman, Alfred North Whitehead, and others on education because my teacher Nemetz assigned them to Carol for her reading assignments. I recall that Nemetz did branch out in his history classes to recommend Eric Fromm, Marshall McLuhan, and other such writers, but that was an exception to the general rule. One older friend took his major in physics. He tried to introduce me to fundamental problems in the philosophy of science. That is how I discovered Heisenberg’s popular book but not his deep books on philosophy and science. That is how I discovered important notions from Niels Bohr. Bohr read Kierkegaard and he was a Mensch.

Eugene Odum, one of the two key founders of modern ecology, was a professor at my university. One of his graduate students took part in and financially supported our common life at Westminster House. That made us aware of the centrality of the ecological movement from the early sixties.

The outcome of all this reading was to realize that a rabbi in campus ministry at my university was on target when he reminded one of my Presbyterian pastors, “Of the making of books there is no end; of their wisdom there is no beginning.”

Still, I realize that I have to take Foucault seriously because my friend [delted] Cooey takes him seriously. I trust her sufficiently to take seriously anyone she recommends that I read. That the philosopher Herbert Dreyfus and the literary critic Judith Butler take Foucault seriously is another reason for me to read him. Still, I have not read much beyond the interviews about power.

Foucault’s life in San Francisco and Berkley is something of a mystery to me. I am not certain about anything that I once thought about his life during the seventies and early eighties. The source for my negative views of his personal life came from claims that James Miller made in his biography of Foucault. I did not read the biography; I am aware that come critics of the book take issue with sensational claims made by Miller. Anyway, Foucault died in 1984 long before anyone knew much about HIV/AIDS.

Conservative by nature but not by reputation (my siblings think that I have always been an ardent communist), I tend to like writers who write elegant prose (or poetry). Plato said that the man who refuses to speak beautifully creates a disease of soul. Therefore, I tend to prefer reading Elaine Scary to reading Judith Butler, reading Charles Taylor to reading most French political theorists. . . .

I don’t much enjoy reading many contemporary Catholic polemical essays. Linking the right of reproductive choice to a culture of death gravely distorts Christian ethical reflection. However, Catholic theologians such as David Tracy do write beautifully. Karl Rahner celebrated a sense of wonder congruent with that of the most gifted child. Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy never lost their sense of wonder or their conservative Catholicism, yet they never seem to preach—exactly. I recently realized that Hazel Mote has a mote in his eye. Ted the reader is the one with the log in his eye.

I don’t recall Levi-Strauss writing about “prerogative.” It is hard for me to link him to the neo-conservatives, but I simply don’t know. I am not altogether negative about neoconservative writers. I am a great fan of Donald Kagan. I have read two of his four graceful and wise volumes on the Peloponnesian War and his recently published one volume history of that interval in our common Western past. I like Leo Strauss more than I once did because I have begun to grasp (after reading a fine commentary on his work) what he seemed to intend in his work.

I had never heard of Roger Haight. I think reading him might be useful. Orbis publishes important books. I recall one title Correct Ideas Don’t Fall from Heaven. I remember thinking that the Holy Father won’t like that! I think that Jean-Paul Deux was the pope when I found the title. During the seventies, liberation theologies shaped the understanding of Catholicism that lighted the path of my liberal Catholic friends in Portland, Oregon. I even knew a fine young and very poor priest who was both a Marxist and an ordained priest. I had copies of books by some of the liberation theologians, but I cannot recall that I ever read any of them. I did read Robert McAfee Brown’s books about them. Richard Shaull, one of Paul Lehmann’s students and simultaneously a classmate of my mentor [mentor], wrote about liberation themes from a Protestant point-of-view name. Shaull wrote a book with a radical writer turned conspiracy theorist named Carl Oglesby. By the way, the Disciples theologian David Ray Griffin has become a conspiracy theorist approved by John Cobb! Shubert Ogden wrote about liberationist themes in his late works.

For myself, my entire grasp of Christianity is changing radically and along with it my notion of God and my sense of what the symbol of Jesus might mean. In a way, this is my return to what first motivated me away from focusing on one of the sciences to thinking about theology. The threat of nuclear war motivated that transformation. Simultaneously, my love of field biology never went way when I began thinking about theology. Questions about ecology and nuclear weapons lie behind much of my theological quest; they have just come to the fore again in recent years.

Of course, consumerism, penology, distribution of wealth and responsibility, and many other concerns fit into where I am in my theological journey. I have never thought about God since I was fifteen-years-old in supernatural terms or even of Jesus as God in any supernatural sense of the symbol. I recall reading weighty but inspired and fascinating volumes by Edward Schillebeeckx—especially his books Jesus and Christ. He writes about high and low Christologies. His work is suffused with insights gained from reading members of the Frankfurt School and reading Ernst Bloch. It is weird and wonderful stuff.