Most folks don’t get quite what we mean by characterizing Western social mythology as bizarre. It has a thousand bogus and immoral features, but I’ll pick out one that seems to represent the worst of it: one-way attachment.
In Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudalism, all relationships are two-way. This reflects the fundamental nature of Creation. God Himself never makes a demand without a covenant, and all covenants are intensely personal in nature. It’s never “parties” but always persons. God is a person who commits Himself to certain things, even as the Sovereign Creator. That’s how it is supposed to be.
Western society is founded on one-way attachments and they are inherently artificial in demanding what simply cannot be. Never mind how things are bent and perverted by semantic gymnastics, the foundation is Western feudalism and it’s all about property and parties, not persons. Further, the lesser party is always obliged to some measure of one-way attachment, while the reverse is at most a blatant lie. That is, whichever is the superior party cannot be leveraged to return the favor. It matters not what kind of good-hearted charm or sense of conscience the superior possesses, the inherent moral expectation is he/she/it owes you damned little. You can sic a bigger dog on them, but nothing has changed, only the amount of jingle in your pocket, perhaps. The fundamental nature of things rests on some one-way superior making everyone else obey.
Even when we imagine there is some equal partnership, the whole thing ends up utterly devoid of personal involvement. There is no real attachment between the parties, just a one-way duty of attachment to whatever it is standing to enforce the terms of partnership. The sense of personal commitment is never more than imaginary and mythical to Western minds. Competing loyalties still ties you to a one-way attachment that is utterly foreign to the ANE.
In the ANE, people are your treasure, a precious gift on loan from God. In the West, people are property, while even property can become a legal “person.” Contracts are all about material goods and measurable price-valued performance. It’s about as dehumanizing as it gets. Even if you assert your individuality, in Western terms it’s simply loosening the attachment and proclaiming the self a contractual superior in some particulars.
Thus, we have a solid reason for suggesting that family relationships are bizarre in Western social assumptions. Westerners read, for example, the Ten Commandments about “honor your father and mother” and reflexively make it a one-way attachment. Whatever duty we might assume God demands of the parents is a separate matter, you see. The child is presumed to have a shitload of attachment demanded here and has no leverage. The very existence of the leverage concept is itself a symbol of how perverted this is. If the parents don’t have a massive sense of personal loyalty to the child, no amount of leverage will ever fix that problem. Yet we somehow get a bunch of teaching in conservative Christian religious institutions that refuse to make this thing a covenant before God as God revealed it.
On top of that, anything less than “conservative” is either moderate or liberal in Western imagination, and promotes merely shifting the one-way attachment to the big dog of government. What’s missing from all of this is a serious moral awareness. It’s all mired in the lower realm of the fallen flesh and never rises about the emotions and intellect. There is plenty of anger at apparent failures of whatever it is Westerners imagine is “moral,” but no real sense of personal moral loss. That accountability has been shifted into some airy-fairy “eternity” that always seems remote. That’s where God is, too. If something doesn’t work out for the superior party, having the inferior party thrown under the bus is just taking care of business. But let not the inferior dare to presume by taking measures to protect himself from something like that; it’s insulting to the superior party.
God is not like that, nor is His Creation. Western society denies the very close Presence of God’s character by simply clobbering the one human faculty for sensing that Presence. The only redemption possible here is awakening the heart-mind. Not the quasi-emotional damn-all gotta-have-it of the Western “heart” metaphor, but we are talking about the ANE heart of moral consciousness superior to human intellect. Let’s not forget that God personally designed and built the Hebrew society from ANE sources as the single best setting for more clearly revealing Himself. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are His assumptions for what humans need to know. Those assumptions presume a genuine reliance on the heart as a superior sensory organ and as a superior faculty for processing and “reasoning” about ultimate truth. That business of the heart-mind is so essential to Hebrew culture because you simply cannot hear from God personally any other way.
Minus the heart, not a single social structure is right in God’s eyes. The ultimate source of Western morality is a mixture of heathen mythology found in Greco-Roman and Germanic (largely Anglo-Saxon) tribal societies. This is easily the biggest and best-kept secret of everything in Christian religion today. What can we say when those who most vociferously claim Christ are the ones most ferociously crushing the truth of God’s revelation? Okay, so some of them can bandy the words about a heart-led religion, but the moment you try to rise above the cerebral, they throw a hissy-fit because they still agree with the Pharisees that God is accountable to human reason.
