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“However, there was one crucial difference between the narrator and myself: the narrator, as you mentioned, stayed true to her beliefs, even when no one would listen to them, and even though her husband did not approve of her writing, she still kept writing all her thoughts about that resting cure in her diary. On the other hand, I always thought I was hopeless, and although I was aware that my desires and my cousin’s and uncle’s desires are polar opposites, I never internally believed that my thoughts were well-justified, like you and the narrator have done. I even had an empty journal with me, and I was tempted to write down all my thoughts, but I felt so ashamed of my own beliefs that I could not write them down at all---another difference between me and the narrator. But now, you gave this lesson for the C.I.L. where the main character stayed true to herself and was unafraid of writing down her thoughts and experiences---she wrote spontaneously and unreluctantly, while I suffered from severe writer’s block.”

FreedomIndependenceSubmissionThe Yellow Wallpaper
Book:The Reformation
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“I used the role of fight-or-flight in human survival as an excuse to justify my addiction to depression and anxiety; I saw them as survival traits, believing that I would perish without them. However, the key here is that fight-or-flight is an automatic physiological reaction, making it often more dependent on instinct, not initiative. When a person starts getting stressed, or when their fight-or-flight response is activated, they don’t carefully evaluate whether or not this is something worth getting anxious about; they just get anxious automatically. Having their brains become numb, their hearts palpitate, and their adrenaline course their veins just happens automatically; you don’t intentionally control that. That is what makes the woman so blank and emotionless—it is her, or my, strict and rigid dependency on fight-or-flight! By being so deeply contingent on an automatic instinct, I had little time for true introspection. It is like the instinct controlled me, instead of the other way around.”

EmotionsMental HealthIntrospectionEmotional IntelligenceFight Or Flight
Book:For the Intellect
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“Well, I think that this is just a question for linguists and lexicographers. Although, as previously mentioned, a person needs to sense another person and needs to think about the person to behave in a certain way, which requires conscious thought, is it possible for a programmed reaction, or a programmed way of behaving, to be defined as behavior? Let me elaborate: if a normal human being is slapped in the face, the person would sense the slap and reflexively think of things such as how painful, unexpected, or annoying it was. Then, the person would say “ow” or maybe try to slap the person back. However, a p-zombie would react by saying “ow,” or by slapping the person back, but it is not doing any of this out of its own will, because without conscious thought, it doesn’t have a will. Something in the p-zombie could cause it to react without having to think, like with a robot; if I were to say “hi” to a robot, it could be programmed to say “hi” back, but it would only do it because it was programmed to do it, not because it senses that a person is saying “hi” and thinks of it as a friendly greeting. If it is possible for a being to be programmed like that, it could do such things, but determining whether or not actions like this are forms of behavior still depends on how society defines behavior. When a person behaves a certain way, he/she provides a reaction for a person. When a robot says “hi” to a person who just said “hi”, it is reacting to that person, so this could be viewed as a behavior, but the dictionary definition is a bit ambiguous, because it doesn’t specify whether the way one acts has to be conscious (like with a normal human being) or unconscious (like with a robot), so linguists and lexicographers need to establish that parameter to define behavior. If linguists and lexicographers were to say that behavior, by definition, does not have to be conscious, then a p-zombie could be conceivable.”

ConsciousnessPsychologyBehaviorAmbiguityLinguisticsP Zombie
Book:The Reformation
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“...although confederations are meant to attract and collaborate with allies, the word confederation, although correlated with uniting allies, seems to be more so connected with making enemies. It’s just an elementary math and logic problem---7.9 billion people are in the world population, so it is mathematically supported that it would be improbable for all 7.9 billion people to agree with each other. In addition, “confederation” actually seems to add to division, because confederations are alliances where people with same/similar interests are united and organized, and in order for there to be an alliance of people with same/similar interests, there has to be people with interests that differ from theirs. Otherwise, they should not have made an alliance dedicated to one particular interest. If everyone agreed with them, they wouldn’t need to create an alliance.”

DifferencesDivisionConfederationAlliance
Book:The Reformation
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“At first, I was tempted to try to annihilate the label “Confederation,” because that would mean that there would be no divisions between different groups of people, and I thought that would mean that the beliefs of us INSURGENT LIABILITIES would be sought for, but I reasoned that if I annihilated the label “Confederation,” that would mean that I would have annihilated all confederations, which would exacerbate the situation; if a population lived in a totalitarian environment or any environment that limits citizens’ freedom of speech, then that would mean that the people who were silenced for their opinions officially lost their last mode of communicating their opinions: communication among themselves.”

ResistanceFreedom Of SpeechConfederation
Book:The Reformation
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“Also, in Joel 2:16, it says, “Gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the aged, gather the children…” This was a command meant to gather the people in Zion to fast and repent. It would not make sense for the women of the “congregation” to solely be sanctified through childbirth, because women who were still pregnant, had babies that were still developing, or were unmarried would not be able to be “sanctified,” since it is highly improbable for a woman to immediately give birth at the beginning of the assembly. If women had to be sanctified through childbirth, then the entire “congregation” would not be sanctified, as was commanded, because not all women could give birth right when the assembly began.”

AssemblySanctificationContextualization
Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“I constantly repeated these notions to myself, spending hours stroking and probing the cube. The outcomes? I still had not succeeded in solving the rubik’s cube! I did not even solve a single side! I was not at all able to find a feasible method to deal with simultaneous permutations of combinations, nor find ways to lead my hands into dexterous motions... Nonetheless, for another hour, I persisted in repeating these notions, hoping I might be able to solve the cube.”

EducationFrustrationProblem SolvingRubik S CubeFruitless
Book:For the Intellect
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“Yes, questions continue, since the notions I used only represented the what’s instead of the how’s, the why’s, the when’s, etc. Like what happened in the lectures, the facts were enforced, but nothing was done to dive deeper into them. Finally, I was eventually able to solve one side of the rubik’s cube, now realizing that I had inadvertently taught myself the same way I had been lectured. I realized how even the Rubik’s cube can generate rudimentary and superficial knowledge in a user.”

EducationKnowledgeIgnoranceDiscoveryCommentaryRubik S Cube
Book:For the Intellect
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“The umbrellas that I came up with were intended to preserve the taxonomic organization of the skills while showing how each skill overlaps, through the “shadows” they cast. The “apply” skill is directly dependent on the “understand” skill, for instance. The “understand” skill casted its shadow on the “apply” skill. The “remember” skill, as the biggest and uppermost umbrella, casted its shadow on all of the umbrellas, showing that understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing was impacted by the way a person remembers stuff. So, it pretty much was meant to be more accurate at the technical level.”

EducationSkillsModellingBloom S Taxonomy
Book:The Reformation
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“A parabola opens at a certain direction, allowing for infinitely many points to reside inside the area from which it opens. As a student, I do not like to specialize in a single discipline; specialization seems unfulfilling in my own mind. Hence, the graph of a straight line is not an appropriate analogy to the depths of my curiosity. A line only goes in one direction, and unlike a parabola, a line cannot encase that infinite amount of white space on a coordinate plane—it can only pass through it. Rather than being like a rigid line, I try to be more open to a wider variety of academic subjects. I do admit—a parabola still opens in a certain direction, and of course, my interests are still skewed toward particular subjects. However, the open curve of the parabola can still encompass infinitely many points as the graph extends, the same way my curiosity can still expand to multiple different subjects. This is why I see myself more in the curvaceous parabola than the rigid line.”

PhilosophyEducationMathSelf ReflectionParabolaGraph
Book:For the Intellect
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“What about ‘Just-ification,’ but with a hyphen? Just-hyphen-ification?” Michael asked. “What inspired you to come up with this idea?” I inquired. “Well, if you hyphenate the word justification, it separates the term just from ication. The term just means to be fair and equitable, and since you told us that you wanted to advocate for tolerance between Reformists and Capacianists, I found that justness would be especially relevant to our new movement. Plus, writing that name on paper may intrigue more people, so the movement could become more widespread and well-known. And if you consider the word just and the word justification and put the ideas behind the words together, you would pretty much be saying that you would be using what is just as a justification to the new movement.”

CleverJustificationWord PlayJustness
Book:The Reformation
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“I mean, time may seem boundless and infinite, but the boundlessness and infinity only reinforces the limitations of time, because it shows our limited ability to reach the unlimitedness of time. Because of our mortality and the need for punctuality, we have no other choice but to be limited by time. I am limited by time. I don’t have infinite amounts of time to write this essay, let alone write every essay I want to write in the future, which ultimately can simplify to: “I don’t have infinite amounts of time to live.”

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Book:The Reformation
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“Because my life would amount to nothing! It’s just gonna be pleasure without purpose! Okay, so you said that one of the things that would be in my version of a utopian world would be the termination of the gender and racial gap in STEM. You are right. That would be a part of a utopia! However, entering the simulation would not change the gap in real life, so I would merely be living in a whimsical illusion, not a pragmatic and realistic view of how things actually are. Plus, going into the simulation would sort of imply that I surrender to the racial and gender stereotypes. By entering the simulation and not choosing to face my fears of being stereotyped based on race and gender, I am merely showing that I am too scared to live in the world as it truly is and too scared to make a change in the real world. “You also said that fame for intellectual discoveries was part of my version of a utopia, and that is also true, but if I made all of my discoveries in the fantasy world, then my goal to be well-known in the world for intellectual discoveries would technically not be accomplished, because no one in real life would know my name. Some programmed beings would, but I would just be another human being in the real world. I wouldn’t be contributing to anything in real life!” Dad nodded in interest. “You’d rather be helpful than happy.” “Absolutely!”

HappinessPurposeMeaning Of LifeStimulationHelpfulnessThought Experiment
Book:The Reformation
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“Suppose there is a group of friends who create a club where the rule is to “not follow any rules.” However, “do not follow any rules” is a rule. If the friends followed the rule, then they are breaking the rule at the same time, but if they try to break the rule, they would be following rules, which is forbidden. What a paradox! What should the friends do, without changing the rule?”

ParadoxThought Experiment
Book:The Reformation
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“Suppose some organism, let’s just say a chicken, hatched from an abandoned nest; there were no other eggs in that nest, so it couldn’t see its fellow chicken siblings, and since the nest was abandoned, the chicken couldn’t see its mother. There were no other chickens surrounding it. There were also no reflective surfaces in the area, so the chicken couldn’t see what it looked like and a few moments later, it became blind, so it could not look down at its feet or see its own feathers. Because of these factors, the chicken didn’t know that it was a chicken. Is it possible for the chicken to realize that it is a chicken? If so, what circumstances could lead the chicken to realize that it is a chicken, or is akin to any groups of chickens it may encounter?”

ChickensThought Experiment
Book:The Reformation
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“Anyways, I am not very sure if anything like hypnosis or thought control would make a philosophical zombie. Trying to “program” an already-conscious person does not seem conducive to making a being like a philosophical zombie, because of the freewill in thinking that I discussed while talking about reality and anti-realities. Because a person is free to think, he or she would have to choose whether or not they should be convinced by someone, or submit to hypnosis/programming, in this case. By making this decision, a person would have to sense what they could submit to, and think about it in order to make a decision as to whether or not they should let themselves act based on some kind of programming. These actions require conscious thought, even just a few seconds of it. As of right now, I believe that creating a philosophical zombie, although possibly conceivable depending on what lexicographers and linguists do, may not be possible in real life.”

ThinkingFreewillConceivableP Zombie
Book:The Reformation
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“Right now, images from 3055 show that Earth’s tectonic plates have shifted to the point in which all the continents are close to becoming just one continent! Pangaea is being recreated! If there is a time when the continents actually do come together, it might be harder to identify individual continents when they are all forged together in a single mass, so a person may attempt to redraw lines between the continents to help students continue to be able to identify them, which is beneficial to the community, because it supports the continuation of geographical education; people could distinguish continents, which is beneficial to analyzing each continent. However, suppose the person who made the lines believed that a certain religious group were terrorists. Suppose that person made the lines, because he/she wants to divide the continent the religious group is located in and the continent he/she lives in. That way, there could be a boundary between the continent where the religious group lives and the continent where the person lives. One may consider this to be religious intolerance, and hence believe it to be immoral, which exemplifies that a person’s intentions must also be considered in discussions about morality.”

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Book:The Reformation
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“What is considered to be “right” is kindness, love, and charity, and what is considered to be “wrong” is hatred, fighting, and selfishness. These things seem to be right and wrong in religious texts like the Bible and in many cultures. From what I perceive, a common theme in righteousness and wrongness is human interaction. Specifically, how a person is treated. Doing something with one of the “right” traits is considered to be a good intention, because it has the benefit of others in mind. Kindness, love, and charity are meant to aid people; those who express these traits have the benefit of the recipient in mind. So, in morality, there is a benefit-intention duality. That is what standards for morality comprise; a benefit-intention duality, which is my own neologism that describes that actions are considered moral through the consideration of the benefit of others. So, the benefit is important, but in morality, a person must intend to be doing something for the benefit of others.”

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Book:The Reformation
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“Suppose every life was written as a storybook; assuming this was true, the only storybook each person would completely know is their own. I know my own story, as I own my own thoughts and my own consciousness. Hence, I have not finished reading the books of other lives, because I am still writing my own. Therefore, since I live in and am the main character of my own book, I appear to be at the center of life itself. From my vantage point, I’m at the center of the world—I have not finished the stories of others, because I’m at the center of my own. This is why I compare myself to the midpoint formula: the midpoint does not begin a line nor end the line, but rather becomes a part of it—from an individualistic vantage point, I am a part of or even at the center of life itself.”

LifePhilosophyCreativeMathAnalogyMidpoint
Book:For the Intellect
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“To summarize, the model I created was a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Usually, in the 2000’s, it was common for people to use a pyramid to represent Bloom’s Taxonomy, with “remember” at the base, and “synthesize” at the shortest part, or the top. This was a good model for determining the attainability of each skill and the levels each skill is at, but I decided to use the umbrellas to add stronger emphasis on how each skill depended on and impacted one another. I did not think that the pyramid modeled this dependency and impact well, because it did not visually show how each skill overlapped one another; it merely showed the levels of each skill, not how each skill depended on and impacted one another.”

EducationCritical ThinkingNerdyBloom S Taxonomy
Book:The Reformation
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“That’s what I love about what-am-I riddles or more open-ended riddles: there are always a certain set of traditional answers to those riddles, like with other riddles, but their answers are determined by whether or not they fit the criteria the riddle has, not just whether or not they fit the answer; it’s kind of like an evidence-based answer versus a multiple choice question. If I, for example, presented you with this riddle: “What is an impulse yet helps you think” (I just made that riddle up, actually), there is the traditional answer I thought of: nerve impulses. However, there are still other possibilities. For instance, a person could be all philosophical and say, ‘any impulse helps you think. Although you think recklessly, you technically are still thinking.’ With a multiple choice question, there would only be one answer, so you are very limited with riddles like that.”

RiddlesOpen EndedWhat Am I
Book:The Reformation
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“Also,” said one of the INSURGENT slaves, “many anti-racism activists have tried to use Capacianism to try to prevent racism by exposing what it looked like in the past. However, Capacianism is centered around recreating the past, not analyzing the past to move forward into the present, as Michael observed, so it is difficult to use Capacianism for anti-racism campaigns. In addition, I think it actually hinders current anti-racism movements, because although racism has its roots in the past, civil rights Capacianists only acknowledge the impacts of racism in the past, but they fail to acknowledge its impacts TODAY, making Michael’s observation even more relevant. We could learn from history, sure, and prevent mistakes made in history, but what about the mistakes made in the present?”

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Book:The Reformation
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“Plus, I figured that if I were lucid dreaming, then my environment would have been momentarily shaken, due to the fact that I was at optimum awareness, or getting close to optimum awakeness. My environment had not been shaken, so my diary, in reality, really did contain an entry labeled A Philosophical Aspect. Furthermore, in dreaming, my reasoning and cognitive abilities tend to be very limited, because I’m hardly awake, but I was actually thinking about verifying that my perception was a perception of reality. I also realized that I maintained this thought process for extended periods of time, which meant that I had not been dreaming. The thought process, if I were dreaming, should have been short, because utilizing reflective thinking and reasoning, in my case, was in the closest proximity to being awake. When I reflectively think and reason in a dream, I start waking up, so any deep thinking in a dream would immediately end due to the fact that it would be interrupted while I am waking up. If I weren’t dreaming, I would continue my deep thinking instead of stopping to wake up. My cognitive abilities were obviously too strong and long-lasting to imply that I was dreaming.”

RealityDreamsPerceptionPhilosophizingCognitive Abilities
Book:The Reformation
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“And another thing can be a sensory misinterpretation of reality. For example, I used to make a lot of art projects when I was younger, so I had a stash of colored pencils. I would often look for a black colored pencil to outline everything, but it would take longer for me to find a black colored pencil, because a lot of the pencils would look dark, so I would assume they were black until I picked them out and saw the label; a colored pencil that I could mistaken to be black can be dark purple or dark brown instead of black. During those incidents, I was misinterpreting the reality of those colored pencils. That’s why one might say, ‘I thought this pencil was black, but in REALITY, it was purple.’ I suppose the other five senses might also work. For example, the human ear cannot hear at very low frequencies nor very high frequencies, and if a person is isolated in a room with no sound except for a sound that is being played at a very low or very high frequency, then that person will think that there is no sound, but in REALITY, there is. This type of misinterpretation of reality can be known as a sensory anti-reality.”

PhilosophyRealitySensesMisinterpretation
Book:The Reformation
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“Okay, well, if we were to be created in a video game, as Martin pointed out, and there is a creator who has created us and has full control over us because we are merely holograms or animations, then giving credence to this anti-reality would actually be illogical,” I asserted. “As I mentioned earlier, I had to agree with Rene Descartes and the phrase ‘I think. Therefore, I am.’ We have the ability to think, and if we were holograms in the deterministic anti-reality, then we shouldn’t be able to feel, reason, acquire consciousness, or interpret sensory experience, but we do. Living in a deterministic anti-reality like a video game would make us have no control over how we think, but we do have control over how we think, not the creator, so we are not holograms or animations that are controlled by someone, because we have control over our thoughts.” “But what if the creator controls our thoughts?” Martin asked. “That is more proof that we are not living in a deterministic anti-reality. It really reminds me of how Rene Descartes devised the phrase ‘I think. Therefore, I am.’ He reasoned that if there was a devil who came to cause him to THINK that he exists even when he does not, then for him to be able to think that he exists, he has to henceforth exist. Likewise, if our thoughts were to be controlled by a creator, then that would mean we would exist, because for our thoughts to be controlled, we would have to have the ability to think, but since we think, we would have to have had some kind of control over our thoughts at some point of our lives. Once again, a deterministic anti-reality is where we have no control over ourselves, because we are non-real beings created by someone who lives in reality, but since there is no creator who has full control over our thoughts, then we don’t live in a deterministic anti-reality. The closest thing to our thoughts being ‘controlled’ is a change of opinion, like what might happen after being persuaded, but because we have control over our thoughts while we are thinking, our thoughts are not being controlled; WE are just changing them based on our own freewills.”

RealityCreatorFreewill
Book:The Reformation
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“For instance, when I was younger, I thought that the fruit that Adam and Eve ate were apples, so I would always think that every apple was the Forbidden Fruit. I was emotionally dedicated to this theory. So one time, my father was eating an apple, and he was reading this National Geographic Magazine with a picture of a serpent. Even though I read an abridged Bible with my father, and he, as a professor in a seminary, clearly proved that humans were casted out of the Garden of Eden and hence can’t access the fruit, I let my emotions overcome me and kept believing in the theory. When I saw Dad eating the apple and looking at the serpent, I thought that he was transformed into a devil. For three days, I remembered this as an instance where my father was sinning, even though he was not. I kept accusing him of being possessed by a devil. Now I know that this memory, due to the emotional input, is false and the fact that Dad was a devil was just an imagination.”

RealityImaginationBibleForbidden Fruit
Book:The Reformation
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“In the patriarchal societies of ancient Israel, it was considered rewarding and traditional to have multiple wives, just as it was considered rewarding to have honor and wealth, so God, in 2 Samuel 12:7-8, was possibly giving the wives as a reward to David, but not necessarily as a way to permit polygamy. Knowing that God does not change his mind or his original intentions for society [ see Numbers 23:19], we know that God’s emphasis on the oneness of two spouses in Genesis 2:24 was not to be changed, so, even with the way God rewarded David, it does not indicate that God actually approved of David’s polygamy.”

MarriagePolygamySpousesDavid
Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“In fact, in the Bible, the dowry price was used as a sign to show a spouse’s dedication to his wife, not the devaluation of his wife. For example, Jacob paid a dowry price by working for Laban in order to marry Rachel, but he did not do this with any thoughts of exercising property rights over his wife; he was incentivised by his love, as seen in Genesis 29:18: “Jacob was in love with Rachel and said, ‘I’ll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter.”

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Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“Also, in Genesis 2:24, it states, “This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” This verse emphasizes the oneness of two spouses. God’s ideal intention for marriage was for the two spouses to be united into “one,” but if the husband is being united with multiple wives, then that would mean that he would be unable to become “one” with any of the women, since his mind is divided between his multiple wives instead of being fully dedicated and united to a single wife.”

MarriagePolygamyWivesHusbands
Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“In fact, they, by being helpers to humanity, were actually able to guide humanity, not be guided, and they could control and execute decisions, not wait for someone else to control and execute decisions! That same word was used to refer to women; God described women the same way he described himself. Therefore, although wives were commanded to be submissive, wives’ roles as “helpers” elevate them to have control on guidance and decisions, and with guiding her husband/making decisions while “helping” her husband, that would mean that a husband would also have to honor his wife as a “helper” and submit to her guidance under her role as a “helper.”

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Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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“Due to the clarity in which these verses are presented regarding submission, the verses do support wives’ submission. Since these verses are very direct with emphasizing wives’ submission, and this submission is considered “fitting with the Lord,” it is true that God found it to be a biblical value, but, as mentioned in the main claim, husbands’ submission to their wives is also implied to be a biblical value as well.”

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Book:Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics
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