Good Morning,
As mentioned in my latest blog in Robin's Rural Rides, the Christian church has a curious prejudice against goats, while capriciously (pun intended) favoring sheep. Why would the church have such a bias in its opinions of two types of domestic animals?
Sheep and goats belong to separate genera but to the same sub-family (Caprinae). Anatomically, they're very similar. Both are quadrupeds with cloven hooves of course (for some reason associated with the devil) and generally speaking they both have horns (although domestication has affected that). Sheep have something of a hare lip, too, which you might expect to justify the kind of arbitrary discrimination that we find in organized religion.
There are perhaps three other significant differences between sheep and goats: smell, male lactation and sociability. Goats use smell in mating. Apparently, the nannie goats just love the billie goat's smell (which we find to be powerful and very unpleasant). Goats also can experience male lactation (religion would surely consider this behavior to be deviant). But I think the real difference that religion wants us to note is the difference in sociability. Goats tend to be more individual, while sheep are more comfortable in a flock. That's an ideal characteristic, according to religious leaders, whose comfort and power depend on the proletariat not questioning their authority, but just following along like sheep.
Human societies have typically evolved to have two interdependent and parallel hierarchies: one supported intrinsically, that's to say it is based on physical power and leadership (Kings); the other is based on intellectual superiority (religious leaders). Most of the time, these two hierarchies rely on each other for mutual support. When a King is new (without any reputation) or is physically weak, he relies on the church to "crown" him and generally to justify his existence. At other times, the religious leaders look to the King to protect them, both legally and militarily, from the masses. Occasionally, the system breaks down, as happened with England's King Henry II and Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Prior to the 15th century, the church was able to maintain its position of privilege largely because of ignorance. Most of the peasant class couldn't read and there wasn't much for them to read in any case. However, the church suffered a huge setback with the invention of the printing press and, as people became more enlightened over the subsequent centuries, the prestige and influence of the church waned. But the system is apparently so fundamental, that here in the United States of America, where the founding fathers explicitly sidelined the church via the constitution, we are experiencing a rebirth of the dual hierarchy. The influence of the church, in all three branches of government, was at an all-time high during the recent Bush years. Curiously, the internet has had an almost opposite effect to the printing press. The costs involved with publishing a book were sufficiently high to limit writing to all but the best-funded or determined authors. Thus, books tended to be reviewed by sufficient other people that their contents were likely (not guaranteed of course) to be accurate and authoritative, as opposed to mere gossip, speculation or plain lies.
Not so with the internet. It doesn't cost anything to write a blog. No reviewers are required. If you're a religious zealot, you can develop quite a following by writing on the internet. This, I believe, is partly what is at the root of this resurgence of the dual hierarchy in the U.S. I, and millions like me, don't have to prove any of the facts or opinions asserted in our blogs. That's both a boon and a disgrace at the same time. And, moreover, we don't have to use spell-check so we can spell as badly as we lyke. I really wonder about the education and world understanding of the new generations of humans who get so much of their "information" from the internet.
From a crazy world,
Phasmid
