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When Things Change


People read the Bible and try to tell us how women should behave, or whether people today should have as many, or fewer, wives than Abraham.  Or King David.  Or Muhammed.  Or Mickey Rooney.

My mother was ten years old before women in this country were allowed to vote.  

 Slavery was permitted in the US until 150 years ago.  It was declared to end, not by our Constitution, but by a war, and a war declaration.  
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 During World War II, a German theologian, puttering with his books while the war went on, published a little study that asserted that Biblical writings were really framed by an outmoded world view; a three-storied universe, with Heaven above, and Hell below, the earth, with beliefs about demons causing epilepsy, and handkerchiefs healing diseases, and earth a testing-ground for eternal hell or heavenly happiness.  

 I gave up trying to be a clergyman because it was evident that most people in the Church thought that to be a Christian one had to live in that three-storied universe, complete with angels and demons and gods and heaven and hell.  

 Our Constitution, which is a very good one, indeed!--was written by white men who did not think that Black men were as human as they themselves, who did not think that women should be allowed to vote, and who thought that only the House--not the Senate--should initiate spending proposals.  They knew that they needed a federal government because they believed we were a nation, but they did not trust it, even specifying that the States should keep an armed militia in case the federal government should slip into tyranny.  (They did not specify that every school teacher should keep a gun in the teacher's desk.)  
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 It is a terrible mistake to think that any document, or any idea from the past, can or ought to bind us and how we think and act, forever.  
Some ideas and institutions are, in fact, very good, and endure the times well, but none of them is forever good and true.  

 We need to use our brains, or as Lincoln said it, "As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves. . . ."  

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