The dominant fault is that if men were more suited to one thing and woman to another, that there would be absolutely no reason to have complementarism.

Men are taller than women on average. Do we need to add to our theology that they should be assigned reaching for things on high shelves? "And thus the Lord spaketh, saying unto ye that thou shalt not marry a woman taller than him because it creepeth the Lord the **** outeth."

Men are, by their nature, incapable of carrying a child in their womb. Need a theological rule to cover that?

I don't think this objection holds. Let us presume a deity who designs humans with complementary attributes and intends for them to have complementary roles in society. Would it not be the case that the canonical text for such a deity would speak in some regard about precisely these complementary attributes and roles?

Things like height don't get talked about not because of its complementary nature, but because it is just too trivial. Childbirth is complementary and nontrivial, but there is numerous discussions of childbirth in the bible. So your examples don't seem to substantiate the idea that "if complementarianism in the descriptive sense is true, then it wouldn't be talked about in the bible".

This objection is nonsense, and basically reflects a general rejection of theology, and nothing in particular that resembles a logical reflection of how theology works.

What do you even mean by a "theological rule"?

But setting aside the terminology, your example is horrendous. You have jumped from "men are taller than women on average" to "men are incapable of carrying a child." Trying to draw an analogy using these two examples isn't going to be meaningful.

Gives me a good one then. You can even use the ones from an actual religion.

A good one what? Pointing out the flaws in your presentation doesn't require me to come up with a good one of whatever it is you're looking for.

But the game you're wanting to play is obvious. Any theology I present, you can reject. And you want to take that to mean that anything you reject is good theology.

I am reducing it to absurdity. A deity wouldn't speak to "societal" roles. A person might; a specific religion might. If we are going to resort to worrying about specific societies and the expected roles assigned to each gender, this deity is going to run into a bit of a problem when he meets the deities of other societies.

Huh? Why not? Seems like an entirely reasonable thing for a deity (well the canonical text of a deity) to speak to.

I wasn't actually interested in playing with you specifically, but you threw the ball to me so I tossed it back to be polite.

Next toss: I don't understand what you mean by your last sentence. It can be taken several ways. Please expound on it so I can understand it.

Basically, you're constructing an error akin to affirming the consequent.

"If I give you a theology, you can reject it."

You are basically framing things so that

"If you reject it, it must be theology."

I take your attempt to "reduce to an absurdity" by creating an artificial objection on some artificial basis regarding a potential theology as evidence.

Well, I imagine that the deity would be a bit nervous about publishing a canonical text. The wrong people are bound to see it.

How MightyBooshian.

No. I am keeping things to the goodly and godly roles of men and women.

I am quite fine with a commandment from on down high being correct, or that is just the rules man doesn't matter what you think Brian argument. I think those are reasonable, and there are probably more that haven't ever occurred to me.

That is quite clever of you. The obvious argument against it is that a religion (and the deity behind it) is a living, breathing thing.

I can accept that sort of theology quite easily.

Argument against what? This is the second time in just a few posts that you've hand unreferenced pronouns. It seems to me that you think by doing so, you're actually advancing an argument of some type.

And the part that is specific isn't particularly meaningful. By all means, keep imagining a deity of your specific liking and argue against it.

I don't really agree here. First, I, to a certain extent, don't care if Christians believe that women are secretly lizard people. What I care about are the effects that such a belief would have on people's lives. Thus, the reason I oppose complementarianism is primarily because I think it leads to harmful outcomes on people's lives, not because I think it relies on false or unjustified premises.

Second, I am skeptical that you have the causal direction going in the right direction here. I think it is at least as likely that the descriptive claims about the superiority of men as leaders became commonly accepted because it legitimized the normative claims as the other way around. Anyway, complementarianism is more typically justified in practice by appeal to Scripture than to generalizations about the nature of women and men.

Is not the reason you think it leads to harmful outcomes at least partly the result of you rejecting that woman are secretly lizard people? As in, if you actually believed that women were lizard people, you would likely not object to a societal role for woman in line with their essential lizardness. If it is the case that women are morally inferior, it makes perfect sense to have a societal structure that doesn't play women in positions of moral leadership.

People are tempted to criticize actions they don't like, and leave beliefs somewhat outside of the criticism. But when an action derives from a belief, indeed when the belief almost necessitates the action, to me it seems that it is the belief out to be the dominant criticism. It would be somewhat odd to focus the criticsm on the fact that they take the logical consequences of their belief.

Oh I'm sure the practice is full of all sorts of self serving chauvinism with only superficial justifications being made after the fact and whatever other criticisms one may throw its way. But the above point stands at least pretending to take it seriously for a moment.

I bet if you concentrate REALLY hard, you can figure out what "it" is.

"It" happened to be the booshian argument. Not really sure how you could have thought it to be something other than a reference to your post.

In that last sentence, "it" meant the "it" you couldn't figure out the reference to without the additional help from this post.

"This post" means the post you are reading.

Well, I suppose you get credit for trying. Everybody gets a ribbon and nobody gets below a 50%.

This is partially right I think. That is, what we think counts as a harm can depend to a certain extent on our background beliefs. Insofar as that is what is holding back the disagreement about whether particular practices lead to actual harms, then I would agree with you that we should focus primarily on those beliefs. However, I typically try a different strategy, which is to identify effects that everyone can agree is a harm.

For instance, in this thread, most of my argument against complementarianism has focused on effects that everyone can agree are harms, such as promoting inequality of opportunity (notice how important it is to complementarians to claim that these roles are both of equal moral value, even if they are not of equal power), or that it empowers abusive men, and so on rather than more controversial goals, such as the autonomy of women.

However, I think of this as more a matter of rhetoric--what is the best way to affect the beliefs and practices of your listeners rather than of identifying the main area of disagreement. Most of my RGT discussions are primarily directed by these pragmatic considerations rather than purely philosophical ones.

Huh. I have the opposite view, that people are too quick to criticize beliefs rather than actions. This is because I think that beliefs, especially relatively esoteric theological beliefs, generally have much less impact on people's behavior than is often thought (see Jason Slone's book Theological Incorrectness for a useful discussion of this).

I also think it is very rare that a single belief necessitates a particular action or social structure, and I certainly don't think this is such a case. Let's say it was true that men were smarter and better able to lead than women. Would it necessarily follow that society should adopt a family structure that gives men authority over women? No. As the saying goes, power corrupts. That is, I might think that if we must have a single ruler over the family that the man would do a better job, but think that it would be better still to not have a single ruler--that power is best distributed equally amongst the two (whether because I think concentrated power is more likely to be abused, or that self-rule (autonomy) is an inherent good). Those considerations would be enough to reject the complementarian viewpoint, even if you accept the descriptive claim here.

If you want to take this view seriously as following from its premises, I would suggest focusing on the Scriptural argument for complementarianism rather than some nebulous claims about whether men are more natural leaders than women. In my experience, the former are much more central to the arguments made by Christians in support of their views.

I find this argument to be a bit confused and only successful arguing against the "strong complementarian" position. If you assume that men are better leaders, then it can be argued that men "ought" to lead. This is different from a moral mandate that "men must lead (in all possible situations)."

There are plenty of complemetarians who believe that men should lead, but when men fail to lead successfully that women can step into that leadership capacity, and not find that this arrangement violates any theological principles.

This seems misdirected as a criticism. I'll grant you the point that you can argue from the premise that if men are naturally better leaders then they ought to lead. However, my point was that as part of this argument you'll have to show why other considerations, such as those about autonomy and domination, aren't important enough to lead someone to accept egalitarianism. Thus, it doesn't follow necessarily (or almost necessarily) from the descriptive claim that men are naturally better leaders to the claim that we should adopt patriarchal social structures. This is not to say that these considerations are enough to reject patriarchialism (although I think they are), just that they are enough to defeat uke_master's point about where we should direct our criticism.

I'm sure this moderate complementarianism is in principle possible, and I suspect that a lot of people who call themselves complementarians adopt this view as a kind of compromise position, but honestly, I don't see many theologians and pastors defending it. Mostly what I see are denominations that are either formally egalitarian in their theology, or who don't allow women to be ordained as pastors (maybe I'm wrong here though--point me to some counterexamples?). Alternatively, I mostly see family theologies that says that a couple should always work towards the man taking the leadership role, if not now, then eventually.

However, even though most of my arguments in this thread have not been directed against that more moderate version of complementarianism, I do still disagree with that view and would be willing to argue against it.

Lol. At least put some effort into it. You are embarrassing the other trolls.

I'm not arguing the stronger case that one should accept complemetarianism. I'm merely pointing out that your argument against it seems to be premised on a particularly strong form of complementarianism.

The "if not now, then eventually" is certainly applicable. The claim of complementarianism does include a claim that things ought to be a certain way. But in any given moment, things may not be how they ought to be, so that a restrictive sense that claims women should never be in such-and-such a position is inapprorpriate as a criticism (again, except in extreme manifestations of it).

Most of the commentary on the matter is pointing out the failure of men to lead, but not what to do in the interim. However, there are some resources such as this:

https://www.reviveourhearts.com/stor...dont-lead-cds/

I searched around for a while to try to find an explicit affirmation of complementarianism, but was unable to do so. However, there does seem to be a clear sense of "womanhood" and that concept is a pretty strong indicator.

As an egalitarian, I don't really have much interest in arguing in favor of complementarianism. Well... that's not true. But I don't have the time.

Complementarism and similar nice names for religously supressing women typically worke by removing choice and right to protest removal of choice; typically disguising it as something nice.

My favorite was a local church which held a democratic election to remove the rights of women to speak in congregation. It is so magnificently manipulative, that it might even sound fair. Untill you realize the removal of choice was just named choice. Or to put it in simpler terms: It's like voting for what free speech to ban.

Well that is what an illiberal democracy is