Monday, March 22, 2010

Feminism, Islam, and the erotic

I have been wondering about the importance of someone's marital status for their worth lately. Does it make sense that having a partner should make someone better or worse, more able to speak on valid erotic experience or disapprove violence and conflict? Does it give people credibility or does it make them look like they know more? Does it make someone have more of a grasp of how people work and what makes someone choose loyalty to their wife or loyalty to their mistress?

I think there is a certain amount of social hierarchy set up on who has an intact marraige and who doesn't. Does this just reinforce false beliefes about one person's superiority over another, and who is better than who?

Is the belief that your marriage makes you more valuable or less valuable just the result of insecurity and an inability to find independent value in the arts, or God, or philosophy?

It is absurd to think that one person is more satisfied with life than another based on their marital status. All that belief represents is a mindset that is dependent on external appearances and standards of worth that have no bearing on someone's true value.

What should we judge someone by then? On the Day of Judgement what will matter? Only a person's piety. There is nothing that will make someone more or less valuable to God than their piety and their good conduct. Your marriage won't make much of a difference. What do Muslims give as the most valid reason for divorce? A spouse who is bad for your religion.

What is this in process terminology. How can we conceptualize the actual event of the Day of Judgement, the Hour of Judgement within the words of Alfred North Whitehead? What would marriage look like within this schema.

The Day of Judgement is a day whose prehension occurs in each individual event of piety, the nexus of feelings which prehend the conclusion of time.

So then, what is piety in Process Thought?

It is the good the beautiful. A measurement of the sufficiently broad and not too narrow assessment of each event in order to prehend the satisfaction of the Universe most beautifully. Maybe piety would be the satisfaction of the indivdual'ss experience of God for each individual occcasion. Maybe piety is God's satisfaction. Maybe piety is satisfaction itself.

Marriage then would only be useful in the ways that it allowed each actual event to ccroncresce and realize its owwn a satisfaction. In other words in the ways that marriage allowed life and experience to become more full and complete marriage wwould be useful in time and in the satisfaction of this world.

1 comment:

Sarah Huxtable Mohr said...

What does this have to do with the erotic or marraige? Because a healthy erotic ethic would originate in piety and piety would be intended to be the measure of worth of relationships. Not status. >