Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 84
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE
1. Material necessity founded marriage, sex hunger embellished it, religion sanctioned and exalted it, the state demanded and regulated it, while in later times evolving love is beginning to justify and glorify marriage as the ancestor and creator of civilization's most useful and sublime institution, the home. And home building should be the center and essence of all educational effort.
2. Marriage was not founded on sex relations ...no direct biologic urge led man into marriageÑ much less held him in. It was not love that made marriage attractive to man, but food hunger which first attracted savage man to woman and the primitive shelter shared by her children.
3. Many early peoples associated ghosts with the sea; hence virgins were greatly restricted in their bathing practices; young women were far more afraid of bathing in the sea at high tide than of having sex relations.
4. Mother love is instinctive... The mother and child relation is natural, strong, and instinctiveÉThis compelling mother love is the handicapping emotion which has always placed woman at such a tremendous disadvantage in all her struggles with man.
5. The primitive family, growing out of the instinctive biologic blood bond of mother and child, was inevitably a mother‑familyÉThe mother‑family was natural and biologic; the father‑family is social, economic, and political. The persistence of the mother-family among the North American red men is one of the chief reasons why the otherwise progressive Iroquois never became a real state.
6. All society, whether national or familial, passed through the stage of the autocratic authority of a patriarchal order ...Woman, being the weaker, therefore became the more tactful; she early learned to trade upon her sex charms. She became more alert and conservative than man, though slightly less profound. Man was womanÕs superior on the battlefield and in the hunt; but at home woman has usually outgeneraled even the most primitive of men.
7. Woman has always had to work; at least right up to modern times the female has been a real producer...Woman's first liberation came when man consented to till the soil, consented to do what had theretofore been regarded as woman's work... In hunting and war man had learned the value of organization, and he introduced these techniques into industry and later, when taking over much of woman's work, greatly improved on her loose methods of labor.
8. Woman's status has always been a social paradox; she has always been a shrewd manager of men; she has always capitalized man's stronger sex urge for her own interests and to her own advancement. By trading subtly upon her sex charms, she has often been able to exercise dominant power over man, even when held by him in abject slavery.
9. The sexes have had great difficulty in understanding each other. Man found it hard to understand woman, regarding her with a strange mixture of ignorant mistrust and fearful fascination., if not with suspicion and contempt. Many tribal and racial traditions relegate trouble to Eve, Pandora, or some other representative of womankind ...and all this indicates the one‑time universal distrust of woman ...Men have long regarded women as peculiar, even abnormal. They have even believed that women did not have souls.
10. Childbearing was once generally looked upon as rendering a woman dangerous and unclean... Among the unmixed tribes, childbirth was comparatively easy, occupying only two or three hours; it is seldom so easy among the mixed races.
11. The so‑called modesty of women respecting their clothing and the exposure of the person grew out of the deadly fear of being observed at the time of a menstrual period. To be thus detected was a grievous sin...Under the mores of olden times, every woman was subjected to complete family and social quarantine one full week each month.
12. The modern idea of sex equality is beautiful and worthy of an expanding civilization, but it is not found in nature. When might is right, man lords it over woman; when more justice, peace, and fairness prevail, she gradually emerges from slavery and obscurity. Woman's social position has generally varied inversely with the degree of militarism in any nation or age...Slowly but surely the mores change so as to provide for those social adjustments which are a part of the persistent evolution of civilization.
13. Science, not religion, really emancipated woman; it was the modern factory which largely set her free from the confines of the home. Man's physical abilities became no longer a vital essential in the new maintenance mechanism; science so changed the conditions of living that man power was no longer so superior to woman power ...And again has evolution succeeded in doing what even revelation failed to accomplish.
14. In the ideals of pair marriage, woman has finally won recognition, dignity, independence, equality, and education; but will she prove worthy of all this new and unprecedented accomplishment? Will modern woman respond to this great achievement of social liberation with idleness, indifference, barrenness, and infidelity? Today, in the twentieth century, woman is undergoing the crucial test of her long world existence!
15. Woman cannot thrive on man's rights any more than man can prosper on woman's rights. Each sex has its own distinctive sphere of existence, together with its own rights within that sphere ...Forever each sex will remain supreme in its own domain, domains determined by biologic differentiation and by mental dissimilarity. Each sex will always have its own special sphere, albeit they will ever and anon overlap. Only socially will men and women compete on equal terms.
16. Male and female are, practically regarded, two distinct varieties of the same species living in close and intimate association. Their viewpoints and entire life reactions are essentially different; they are wholly incapable of full and real comprehension of each other. Complete understanding between the sexes is not attainable.
17. Women seem to have more intuition than men, but they also appear to be somewhat less logical. Woman, however, has always been the moral standard‑bearer and the spiritual leader of mankind. The hand that rocks the cradle still fraternizes with destiny.
18. Men and women need each other in their morontia and spiritual as well as in their mortal careers. The differences in viewpoint between male and female persist even beyond the first life and throughout the local and superuniverse ascensions. And even in Havona, the pilgrims who were once men and women will still be aiding each other in the Paradise ascent. Never, even in the Corps of the Finality, will the creature metamorphose so far as to obliterate the personality trends that humans call male and female...always will they be mutually dependent on co‑operation in the solution of perplexing universe problems and in the overcoming of manifold cosmic difficulties.
19. New mores are emerging designed to stabilize the marriage‑home institution:
1. The new role of religion-- the teaching that parental experience is essential, the idea of procreating cosmic citizens.
2. The new role of science--procreation is becoming more and more voluntary.
3. The new function of pleasure lures.
4. The enhancement of parental instinct. Each generation now tends to eliminate those individuals in whom parental instinct is insufficiently strong to insure the procreation of children.
20. The animals love their children; man -- civilized man -- loves his children's children. The higher the civilization, the greater the joy of parents in the children's advancement and success; thus the new and higher realization of name pride comes into existence.
21. Modern problems of child culture are rendered increasingly difficult by:
1. The large degree of race mixture.
2. Artificial and superficial education.
3. Inability of the child to gain culture by imitating parents--the parents are absent from the family picture so much of the time.
22. Marriage, with children and consequent family life, is simulative of the highest potentials in human nature and simultaneously provides the ideal avenue for the expression of these quickened attributes of mortal personality...Human society would be greatly improved if the civilized races would more generally return to the family council practices of the Andites.
23. The great threat against family life is the menacing rising tide of self‑gratification, the modern pleasure mania. The prime incentive to marriage used to be economic; sex attraction was secondary. Marriage., founded on self‑maintenance, led to self-perpetuation and concomitantly provided one of the most desirable forms of self-gratification. It is the only institution of human society which embraces all three of the great incentives for living.
24. It was there in measure in the Sangiks and Andonites, but the Adamic strain elevated this primitive propensity into the potential of pleasure, a new and glorified form of self‑gratification ...There is real danger in the combination of restlessness, curiosity, adventure, and pleasure‑abandon characteristic of the post‑Andite races. The hunger of the soul cannot be satisfied with physical pleasures.
25. All efforts to obtain wholesome diversion and to engage in uplifting play are sound; refreshing sleep, rest, recreation, and all pastimes which prevent the boredom of monotony are worth while.
26. Let man enjoy himself; let the human race find pleasure in a thousand and one ways; let evolutionary mankind explore all forms of legitimate self‑gratification, the fruits of the long upward biologic struggle. Man has well earned some of his present‑day joys and pleasures. But look you well to the goal of destiny! Pleasures are indeed suicidal if they succeed in destroying property, which has become the institution of self-maintenance; and self‑gratifications have indeed cost a fatal price if they bring about the collapse of marriage, the decadence of family life, and the destruction of the homeÑman's supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization's only hope of survival.
Discussion Questions
1. Is home schooling more effective than public schooling?
2. What is the best way to lessen the antagonistic cooperation between men and women?
3. Do women still outgeneral men in the home?
4. What are the greatest obstacles to establishing equality of men and women?
5. How well do men and women understand each other? What are the mental dissimilarities of mean and women?
6. What is the difference between menÕs rights and womenÕs rights?
7. Is the pleasure motive undermining the stability of the home?
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