"Father" is a genial Meme, featuring in the human culture for thousands of years. In monotheistic religions, this ancient idea is based on the belief in one god, creator of all, who is male and paternal. In the bible God has the role of the supreme father, our father in heaven. According to the biblical myth, god created the universe, created man, and then gave the males the role of the father in the human family. The father of the Hebrews (אברהםאבינו) , "Av-Raham Avinu", received a role with significant importance. His name includes double stressing of the name and title. The supreme father of the Jews was duplicated and enhanced in Catholic Christianity. The Catholics added to god, who has the title of "the heavenly father", a new earthly representative, which is the Pope who became the spiritual father of all Christians. The Pope is a monk who never experienced real parenthood (hence, his title is biologically wrong) but this fact does not lessen his authority as the supreme adjudicator. The Pope is the head of the "Holly See" and he is in charge of all family laws and the ethics of hundreds of millions of Catholic believers.
Why is the importance of the father idea repeatedly stressed in the ancient human cultures?
A father expropriates the children from the exclusive responsibility of the mother.
He becomes her husband (בעל) "Baal" in Hebrew. This word "Baal" has few other well known meanings, like in the sense of inseminator (having intercourse) and owner (master).
The biblical family was the place where the maid servants (שפחות) "shefachot" were raised and multiplied, from this comes the Hebrew name (משפחה) "mishpacha" for the human family.
The ancient family cell resembled the Sultan's Harem. In those days, the male rulers used the "divide and rule" method. They have exchanged girls between them (the young maid salves) and kept only the young boys for themselves, so that the later will grow and become the successors of their spiritual way. Like any new Meme that starts to duplicate, our ancestors passed the message to their sons, and the sons became fathers and passed the message to their sons… This is how the ancient Meme moved from one generation to another and survived successfully to this day.
The importance of the Meme "father" for increasing fertility was clear to our ancestors, even if today this fact is forgotten. The ancient farmers increased the cattle herds using a similar trick. They locked the nursing calves and kids in closed bullpens and separate them from their mothers. The farmers wean the offspring from mother milk and break the Prolactin succession that prevents new heat (as detailed in pages 24-25), hence the cows and sheep are quickly in heat again.
Until 200 years ago most people lived as right less slaves (land leaser). In those times, young women were sought-after goods. Those women could give birth to a new generation of slaves at no cost.
In order to increase their expected profit, all the rulers wanted to increase the birth rates and this is probably the original reason why the rigid moral rules were invented. These rules were originally meant to commit women to maximal fertility.
Thus, without knowing anything about the existence of hormones and how they work, our ancestral fathers were wise enough to notice that sharing the motherly exclusivity of babies, with the dominant males, potentially increase the women fertility.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the reviver of the Hebrew language, has chosen the Assyrian alphabet as the basis for developing the modern Israeli script. Thanks to the revived Hebrew writing, an inner symmetry of the word decorates another fundamental cultural idea. It is not symmetry in pronunciation but rather writing symmetry, this word has the most perfect symmetry in our current script – זוג (couple, pair). We have adopted the pattern of a pair as our way of life, but living in monogamous marriage system is in contradiction with our real nature. The very act of forcing monogamy using moral laws, backed up by heavy penalization, indicates that this is a late cultural development, that has replaced an ancient natural behavior different from it. In the following chapters we will further investigate the cultural ideas perpetuated in the biblical stories and find out how and why they dictate today the sanctity of the idea of a two-parent family. |
