Yeah, there’s probably something in that.
I was just reading Rory Stewart’s account of his walk across Afghanistan. There is no doubt that the oppressively pervasive variant of Islam that exists there is completely incompatible with what a Westerner would understand as “freedom”, and the locals were downright suspicious of that sort of thing.
Stewart excoriates the UN and US as hopelessly naive in their assumption that Afghans would not only welcome such nonsense as “gender inclusiveness” but would actually comprehend what it meant.
Yes and no. The OT is a core part of Judaism and Islam, but Jesus’s intent was specifically to sweep away the turgid legalism of the OT. He had to skirt around this a bit with some diplomatic language, but Romans 6 boils it down:
“Sin is no longer your master, for you no longer live under the requirements of the law. Instead, you live under the freedom of God’s grace.”
Paul - I can think of nobody else - had quite a bit to say about the matter of women keeping their place. Paul was a man, a human, expressing his opinions. His opinions can be taken with a grain of salt. One of the main points of departure between Christianity and Catholicism is that Catholics take the word of Saints (eg., Paul) to be on par with the words of Christ. Personally I believe this to be a violation of the First Commandment.
As for why it’s included: I think it’s fairly well accepted that the Gospels may not be completely … um, intact after twenty centuries of translation and transcription. People might have edited them to emphasize things they thought were important at the time.
If you think freedom is a “simple ideal”, you haven’t thought about it much. It’s really, really complicated. All sorts of things restrict your freedom, including religion, and it’s often done for reasons which are justifiable but nevertheless rather arbitrary. Example: the Law restricts your freedom to (say) have sex with 12-year-old boys, even though at certain times and places, other cultures would have seen nothing untoward about that sort of thing. At this time and place, wider society agrees that 12-year-old boys are off-limits, and therefore agrees to restrict and sanction such behaviour. But it’s quite hard to pin down precisely why we do this. We just do.
On a less contentious level, freedoms are sometimes constrained by convention because too much freedom makes people neurotic. Life is complicated enough without having to figure out everything from scratch. Being told that you can do anything and be anything is not helpful if you’re clearly incapable of being a brain surgeon. It just gives people the nagging feeling that they haven’t got what’s rightly theirs. Where it all goes wrong, of course, is when convention becomes too rigid. Someone who actually is capable of being a brain surgeon doesn’t want to be told she can’t because she’s female.
Most people are quite happy with being told what to do as long as being told what to do gives them a reasonable quality of life; that’s why the vast majority of people seek “employment”, and the “benefits” that it brings. Workplace life is highly regimented, as is the routine of getting married, buying a house, and cranking out two-point-four kids. Many people find comfort and a sense of direction/achievement in that.
“Independent”? I’m not so sure about that. Social changes don’t occur in a philosophical vaccuum. All I’m arguing here is that those “independent social processes” were dependent on the ideas that preceded them, and some of those ideas were religious/Christian in nature.
