ATI Wisdom Booklet 24: Fallen Empires - Greece

Had a lovely surprise from the endocrinologist.  My endocrine system is completely normal! 

His best guess of what happened (and it happens a lot) is that my PCP ordered a slate of tests that included one for the amount of free T4 in my blood (e.g. it measures the amount of thyroxine circulating in my blood)   The issue is that that free T4 test is known to be inaccurate frequently - and my values were just below the normal floor. 

At the same time, she ordered a test for the thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) that is highly accurate.  TSH is the hormone that the pituitary gland sends to tell the thyroid how much hormone to make.  If my body was consistently under producing T4, my pituitary gland would be sending out higher and higher levels of TSH to try and get the thyroid to do something.  My levels were smack-dab in the normal range and had been for several years so it was unlikely that there was anything wrong with my thyroid or pituitary.  Doubly so since my PCP had ordered an ultrasound of the thyroid and checked for Hashimoto's and everything looked fine.

In terms of the fatigue, the endocrinologist looked at my medical and social history I filled out.  He asked me some questions about my stress level which ranks at "ridiculously high" between two health scares for me, one severely ill child leading to medical and developmental complications, my husband leaving a business, struggling to find a new career, and me both leaving and re-entering the workforce.

Without missing a beat, he paused for a few seconds and said very gently, "With the amount of stress you've had over the last few years, you are allowed to be exhausted."

I felt relieved that I was simply exhausted because I had not been looking forward to trying to manage a wonky thyroid gland on top of everything else in my life.

In celebration of working endocrine glands, let's take a whack at the next section in the ATI Wisdom Booklet 24 on "Fallen Empires".  Now, I had planned to get all high-and-mighty about how much more detail that the authors spent on Greece (and presumably Rome) compared to Native American empires.  The joke's on me, though!   The authors do an equally horrible job on covering Greece's cultural highlights and spend an inordinate amount of time talking about male-male sex and the failure of Greece to conform to middle-class nuclear family standards from the 1950's USA.

CP/QF theology is based on a primitivist derivation of Calvin's work where all people are able to read the Bible directly and find God's meaning for how we are all supposed to live.  This is held to be true because the Bible is believed to be the exact Word of God transcribed without error through human instruments.  In that context, the author's blanket statement about the linguistic excellent of koine Greek reaffirms the Bible as the Word of God unsullied.

Now, I come from the Catholic/Orthodox/Mainstream Protestant line of thinking when it comes to the Bible.  In these religions, we believe that God inspired the various authors of the Bible to produce holy writings - but that the Bible is not inerrant or perfect. 

I also come from a religious tradition that frowns on proclaiming that we totally understand the Mind of God - and that's the bit that troubles me about the last sentence.  We mortals have no idea why God picked the time and place to be Incarnated - and I get nervy around people who do know.

The historically funny bit from this quote is that the first sentence about "many languages" is one of 2-3 cryptic references to the fact that Greece was not a cultural or linguistic monolith.  Greece was a group of city-states that had their own traditions, their own gods and often their own languages.  We know much more about certain areas like Athens because their literary works survived.  We know about other city-states like Sparta because they were described second-hand in surviving works from Athens.  There were other city-states that we just plain don't know much about at all - but you wouldn't get that impression from the Wisdom Booklets.

This fun little interlude of historical fiction was brought to you by the Christian Reconstructionists of Bill Gothard's cult Institutes of Basic Life Principles! 

Christian Reconstructionists can be described as people who want no form of secular or church government that impinges on their right to do as they see fit while using secular and church governance to oppress anyone who disagrees with them. 

What do (most) Christian Reconstructionists want?  They want a return to the fictional 'Good Ol' Days' when everyone spoke English, worshiped as good primitivist Calvinists, lived in nuclear families where the husband supported his family in manual labor while his wife raised a huge family at home, and everyone was white.  Psst!  This time period never existed - but Christian Reconstructionists will tie themselves into knots to try and show how it almost happened.

Did I make it clear that the Christian Reconstructionists are a slightly cleaned-up version of the KKK before?  The first paragraph in this quote pretty much drives home the three classes of people allowed in Christian Reconstructionists: 1) white citizens descended from the right kind of white people, 2) people of color who are also held in chattel slavery, 3) white people who are the 'wrong' kind of people.   For people who follow the hijinks of semi-famous members of CP/QF, the Duggars were the wrong kind of whites because of too little income and education prior to their windfall of television fame.  The Rodrigues family is the wrong kind of white people because they are of Mediterranean descent rather than Northern or Western Europe and poor. 

This leads to an interesting thought experiment: can money overcome being descended from people from the 'wrong' part of the world?  Jasmine Holmes found that she was always excluded and experienced racist sexism in spite of coming from parents who had more education and money than the average CP/QF family because they were black.  Would the Rodrigues be more acceptable if they had a pot of cash because they are white-ish?

Yes, Ancient Greeks left unwanted children outside while accepting wanted children as members of the household.  Having a noticeable disability at birth was a quick way to be exposed - as was being a higher-order daughter in a well-to-do family - or a son born of a slave or prostitute.  Truthfully, many cultures practiced infanticide and Greeks seemed to feel a bit morally conflicted about it.  After all, babies were left out by the roadside where they could (theoretically) be rescued by childless couples, someone who wanted a slave or the Gods rather than killing the infant quickly inside the home which leaves some room for parents to tell themselves that the baby turned out fine somewhere else.

ATI's history writers missed a chance to spout an anti-government slogan, now that I think about it.  In most of Hellenic areas, the male head of the family decided whether to accept a newborn or to have it exposed.  In Sparta, on the other hand, children belonged to the city-state rather than their parents.  This means that a committee of elders decided whether a newborn should live or be killed immediately.    I'm sure CP/QF folk could make some kind of parallel between Obamacare or Planned Parenthood or Common Core and neonaticide in ancient Sparta.

ATI is scolding the ancient Greeks for not valuing intellectual pursuits. *hoots with laughter* That's ironic since ATI pretty much endorses keeping women of all ages at home, reproducing rapidly and avoiding public discourse.

Well, my internet searches are going to look pretty darn interesting now that I've looked into the homosexual history of Greece.  In the interest of fairness, I need to clarify that the ancient Greeks did not approve of anal sex between men also known as sodomy.  In one of those strange parallels, ancient Greeks agreed with many CP/QF preachers that the defining gender actions during sex were that men penetrated while women received penetration.  Freeborn Greek men, then, would be viewed as unnatural and womanly if they were penetrated during anal sex.   Hand-jobs and ejaculation between a partner's thighs were permitted, though.

Why did Greeks think male-male relationships were more meaningful and valuable than male-female relationships?   Well, women were educated differently than men as children, kept isolated in their homes before and after marriage, and were married by their fathers to men they never spent time alone with prior to being legally married.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? :-P

There are two super-obvious rebuttals to the daft idea that Greeks could care less about purity.

Rebuttal One: English doesn't have a single word that is the equivalent to the German phrase "schadenfreude" - but English-speakers recognize the feeling of happiness that comes from seeing the misfortune of someone else.  Likewise, ancient Greeks may not have had one word for chastity - but they certainly made distinctions in acceptable behaviors between virgins, wives, concubines and slaves for women along with freeborn citizen vs slave or male prostitute for men

Rebuttal Two: Ancient Greeks behaved as if women were expected to be chaste even if men not.  Families that could afford to kept their wives and daughters indoors or accompanied by loyal slaves at all times to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

A slightly more technical rebuttal involves the issues with reconstructing languages.  See, koine Greek is a dead language that survives in a variety of manuscripts, tablets and sculptures.  Because of that, scholars only have a subset of language that was 1) written down and 2) survived years of decay and destruction.   Ayala Fader found a far more recent example while doing linguistic anthropology work among Hasidic Jews.  In her book "Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up The Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn", she recorded a conversation between two school-aged girls and a teacher about what the word for the color "peach" was in Yiddish.  Neither the girls nor the teacher knew what the word was and it was not found in the Yiddish-English dictionary.  Upon discussing the lack of a word as a group, the teacher  decided that the more holy women in the old country must not have been as worried about worldly things like having the right color colors.   Dr. Fader, on the other hand, postulated that Yiddish had a word for peach prior to the Holocaust, but the word was lost due to the genocide of the majority of native Yiddish speakers along with the fragmentation and defensive assimilation of the surviving speakers.   The decline of koine Greek was far slower - but the intervening time scale is much longer, too.

The Bible tends to win in terms of numbers of perversions and atrocities compared to most other forms of literature so ATI's objection to sex and violence in Greek/Roman mythology reads as hypocritical.

It's hard to take ATI's authors seriously once you've read the section on how clothing that was frumpy in the 1980's (think bibbed dresses complete with pleated A-line skirts paired with patterned nylons) were deeply sexy because bibs drew eyes to the chest, pleats drew eyes to the groin and patterned nylons drew eyes to the legs.   Similarly, Greek and Roman nude statues were not meant to be sexually arousing; they were demonstrations of the beauty of the human form.

The fact that ATI thinks lesbianism is the only form of female sexual perversion is both quaint and funny as hell.   

These next three are the official reasons (in ATI) why Greece fell.

This section is a hot mess.  When most people want to distill a moral lesson out of history, the author learns about the history before attaching the moral.  But in ATI-land, the history is warped beyond belief to fit the idea that Greece failed because of humanism and lust. 

There's never been a time where humans could live in a community with no limitations placed on them by their culture.  The Greeks were no different.  Greek men were expected to earn a living.  Greek women were expected to bear children.  Greek soldiers fought to protect their homeland, gain renown and increase their income - but risked death or lingering disability prior to any form of government support.  

The first paragraph shows the danger of sloppy logic skills combined with minimal grounding in basic Christian theology.  ATI claims Greeks insulted their Gods by making gods less than divine when their gods acted like humans.  Under that logic, Christians have created a horrifying blasphemy by declaring that God was Incarnated - fully human in all ways but sin.  Becoming a human is far more degrading than acting like a human while keeping all divine powers.

Similarly, the Greek Gods are immoral because they didn't reward their followers or show correct deference to....um....who are the Gods supposed to show deference to?

*waits for the non-answer for a few seconds out of habit*

 Alright, let's drop the idea of authority for a second.  The Greek Gods are immoral because they didn't have any obligations to their followers.  Applied to Christianity, this means that God has obligations to humans - but that's an aberrant theological concept as well.  Christians believe that God creates, preserves and sustains the entire universe.   God created the idea of obligation.  Any obligations that God has offered humans has come from God and is solely reliant on God's Goodness, not some universal law that exists outside of God.  Under that basic theological concept in Christianity, the fact that Greek and Roman Gods often acted capriciously makes sense because they were creations of man and not fully reflective of the Creator God worshiped by Christians.

The weird bit for me is that the author is making the argument that the Greek Gods were real gods but Greeks corrupted them by misattributing human attributes to the real Gods.   That's an heretical stance in all Christian denominations that I know of - and why am I the first person to notice this?

I doubt that the first paragraph would make any sense to Ancient Greeks even if it was translated into perfect koine Greek.   Throughout time, people have been bound by family obligations and community obligations.  There was no path available for a well-born Greek girl to become an orator - even if it would bring her deep satisfaction.  A Greek man couldn't run his home and raise the children while his wife worked regardless of if it made them happy.   A Greek wife couldn't have an affair with her neighbor's husband without risking severe consequences.   There are always rules - and ancient Greece had pretty solid levels of obligation for each person towards their families and communities.

 Positioning 'desire for pleasure' as the root cause of all decay in ancient Greece demonstrates how shoddy the author's understanding of day-to-day life was.  Despite ATI's avowed longing for a return to a simple time, they forget that most wedding wishes for the bride and groom historically fit the formula of  "May you have food.  May you have shelter. May you bear healthy children.  May you live healthily to old age."  The idea of pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure may have been available to the wealthy, but most people were very busy simply trying to survive.

Unfortunately, most CP/QF families are close enough to poverty even today to understand why a parent would wish that their newly married daughter may never know hunger. 

The last section in this series will be on the fall of Rome which is due to......did you guess sexual sins?  You're right!