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FINDING JESUS

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Chapter One

"Jesus' message about the kingdom of God, it seems to me, is not that complicated. God's will for the earth, God's passion for this world, is very different from what we see around us. To his hearers he said, "Can you see that?" And he sought to open the eyes of the blind, to set free the captives and oppressed, to proclaim the jubilee of God." – Marcus Borg (1)

We are all acculturated. We can't avoid it. It is so natural and normal that we tend to be unaware that we have been acculturated. We grow up knowing we know the way things are. I grew up in a 98.6% Republican Midwestern suburb and still wonder how Wendell Wilkie lost to FDR.

It's a good thing to be acculturated, allowing us the comfort of belonging, of not being an outsider – a foreigner. Immigrants find comfort in congregating with other immigrants from the same culture until they have become acculturated in their new surroundings. And that takes a while.

Whenever we experience, actually or vicariously, anything counter to what we grew up "knowing", it comes as a bit of a jolt. Little jolts make us less naive, contribute to what we call maturity and a proper perspective. Little jolts can be fun; big ones, however, are something else.

It has taken me a lot more years than it should have to recognize my early assumption that male domination is the way things are and should be. It hurts to admit that when I was first married, I forbade my wife to have a telephone because she would be constantly calling her mother. It is to my wife's credit that she quickly found a peaceful way to adjust my assumption. She was much less surprised than I was when her mother, an aunt, and an uncle arrived unannounced to stay for a visit.

Of course that sort of thing is no longer the way things are. At least not in such bizarre and petty forms. But I fear that the assumption of male dominance is so deeply ingrained in our culture that I won't be able to get you to recognize it as a blind spot that keeps us from seeing what I see as the way Jesus defined and lived out the Will of God, which is the goal of this book.

There's that old story of the lost tourists stopping to ask a local farmer how to get where they wanted to go. You probably remember the farmer's answer. She said, "You can't get there from here. You have to go somewhere else first." [If I tricked you, if "she" surprised you, running contrary to your assumptions, please come with me as I go "somewhere else first."]

WELCOME TO SOMEWHERE ELSE

Jesus said, "The Pharisees and the scholars have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them. They have not entered, nor have they allowed those who want to enter to do so. As for you, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves." – Gospel of Thomas saying #39 Charles Darwin said, "We can explain how the beauty of a butterfly is useful to that butterfly in pursuing its way of life. I can come up with causes for this and it's up to you to believe that God created these things through these causes or not." – quoted (p. 107) in Einstein's God.

It took a long time for anthropologists to accept The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, possibly because he wasn't an anthropologist and what could a biologist know about anthropology? I understand their reaction. If I were a highly trained, committed and hard-working anthropologist, I would have a hard time accepting a theory that runs counter to what over many years I have written in books, taught to my students, and argued through with my colleagues.

I hope I wouldn't have recruited the Church to attack Darwin, as was done back then, and is still going on with parts of the Church to this day. But I certainly would do whatever else I could to defend my professional life. If I could, I would "tweak" his theory, thereby adding to my reputation and bank account. But as widely accepted as Darwin's theory of evolution is today, I'm not dumb enough to risk my professional reputation by trying to overthrow the whole theory.

Besides, if I were an anthropologist, I would know that despite the tons of evidence dug up by archeologists to track our evolutionary progress, plenty of unanswered questions remained for me and my fellow scholars to argue about among ourselves. For example, why did the brand of ape that evolved into us trade in the fur coat that all apes wear, settling for a layer of subcutaneous fat? Or, when the mild and moist Miocene turned into ten million drought–filled Pliocene years, destroying the forests and forcing tree dwellers down into the savannah, why did our ancestors start walking upright when all our ape cousins retained the greater foot speed of quadrupeds? We were a lot slower than the quadrupeds who chased, caught, and ate us.

Or why did we abandon our canine teeth – "natural primate daggers" – in favor of the pebbles that became our first weapons? And where on the savannahs did we find the stones? And if you really want to get nosy, why were we the only evolving apes to take up frontal sex, including becoming the only ones to indulge in that intensely aggressive sex we call "rape"?

Has what you were taught in school about evolution given you convincing answers to these questions? I didn't have a clue until a while ago in my local library when I casually picked up and checked out an old copy of a book originally published in 1972. Exhaustively researched, insightful, carefully reasoned, easy and amusing reading, this book answered for anthropologists all those unanswered questions and more with a "truth ... so simple and obvious that when you hear it you'll be kicking yourselves for not having seen it sooner." And you'll join me in wondering why this book hasn't become a standard in the teaching of human evolution.

The book, in a reference to Darwin's classic, is titled The Descent of Woman, and was written by someone who was not an anthropologist, or even a biologist like Darwin. An avowed feminist and writer for television, Welsh author Elaine Morgan laid no claim to originating her answers. What she did was look at existing evidence without being blinded by eyes that only see through an androcentric (male) focus.

Not blinded by male-centered bias, she was operating on the assumption that the survival and the continuing successful evolution of the human species requires focusing, not just on men, but on all three groups of people needed for continuation of the species – women and children as well as men. She found a theory involving evolutionary changes in the females of our species, a theory not widely accepted by other scholars but one that would explain our surviving the Pliocene difficulties. It also answered several other questions that have had inadequate explanations to the present day. What it took was shifting away from a blinding androcentric worldview.

Why have you anthropologists essentially ignored this book? The law of scholarship requires response – either disprove it or accept it.

I returned my library copy of The Descent of Woman, a 1972 original, after reading it twice. I now own the 2006 sixth paperback reprint of the 1985 revised edition which I have only read once. I recommend it highly. I will even forgive you if you put aside this book (temporarily, of course) to read The...