Plato was aware the cultures lie. For the materialists, contrary to what Plato declared, no culture lies. If anyone declares that cultures do lie, they “will never be understood, let alone believed.”  Yet there is not a culture in the world which does not produce what we Americans presently call “Fake News, a term popularized in 2016 during and after the US presidential election. 

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But to expose what Plato called the “lies of culture” aka Fake News, the cultural analyst must start with the proposition set forth by linguist and Nobel Prize nominee Kenneth Pike who stated; “a person may distort innate positive universals into negative particular actions.”  

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When Pike declared that man and society have both the freedom and capacity to “distort innate positives universals into negative particular actions,” he was agreeing with Plato. He was stating the unbelievable, namely, all cultures “lie;” some more than others.

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Depending on existing cultural contexts, the type of “lies” each society promotes will in turn promote “negative particular actions,” actions which are in fundamental to the inherent  meanings attached to “innate positive universals” aka forms common to all. In so doing, they will produce what Plato called “false words."  Peter warned about teachers who “will exploit you with false words.”

 

The Creation of False Words

In understanding how false words are created, we first note that “knowledge,” as Christian philosopher Gordon Clark (1902-1985) pointed out,  “is always a combination of form and content, we cannot know the form without the content."  

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From a top-down, inside-out epistemology, positive universal forms or words like family and father have inherent meanings which are fixed and constant and which sinful cultures are prone to reject and replace with new meanings, meanings which "belong to the people." 

 

In contrast, there exists a bottom-up, outside-in perspective which states:  No universal form has an inherent meaning.  Instead, according to contextualizer Charles Kraft, the meanings of family and father “belong to the people.”  According to Kraft, “the supacultural ideal that lies outside of culture [is] beyond our grasp.”  But if knowledge of the Ideal is “beyond  our grasp,” then whatever meanings a society attaches to the concepts of family and father must be valid, including the belief in fatherless families. 

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Rejecting the bottom-up, outside-in perspective of the contextualizers, a “concept-innatist” insists that  no form common to all has a meaning which “belongs to the people.”  Instead, attached to these universal forms are Divine meanings, meanings which are constant and true and which have been “woven into the fabric of our being” (Romans 2:15).

 

A God fearing society will seek to make such innate, culture-free Principles the norms of their society.  A society which rejects the truth of Romans 2:15 will be actively busy in replacing a positive Universal with a negative particular, a false word. The phenomenon of replacing  “sound words” (II Timothy 1:13) with false words, Pike called ETIC DIVERGENCE.

 

Etic Divergence: Violation of the Structural Law of the Family

Theologian-philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd describes the problem this way.

A sinful family life presupposes a violation of the structural law of the family. God’s law, as manifested in the structural principle of  social relationships, is holy and good, untainted by evil. This implies that the internal unity of the [nuclear] family is a normative unity, and to a large degree it is defectively realized because of sin.  

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Two examples as to how the nuclear family can be transformed into a defective family because of sin is manifested in the belief systems of the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific and the Miccosukee of South Florida.   What constituted a “family” for each of these two matrilineal descent system is aptly illustrated  in the following chart, with the caveat that within the matrilineal descent system there exist variant types of “families.”

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Some attributes of the above defective matrilineal family types “realized by sin” include: 

1. …the restructuring of the nuclear family by both the Trobriand and the Miccosukee. For the Miccosukee of South Florida, restructuring meant replacing the covenantal husband-wife dyad with that of sister-sister.  For Trobriand Islanders it meant replacing the husband-wife dyad  with that  of brother-sister. Rejecting the “one-flesh” principle of husband-wife (Genesis 2:20), “brothers and sisters,”  according to Malinowski, “are of the same flesh, because they come from the same mother” 

2. …the abrogation of father’s right. For both the Trobriand and the Miccosukee no father has the right to discipline the son or daughter he dearly loves.  From the perspective of the Trobriand, biological fathers do not exist.  For the Miccosukee, no father has father’s rights because fathers have been reduced from people having a status position like father or  mother to what Kraft calls “person things,” that  is, status-less “person things.”   Status-less persons who have been reduces to “things” aka sperm donors, have no paternal rights.  

3. …the transfer of father’s rights to one’s wife's brother who had now become the "head of the family. True of both societies. 

4. … the existence of “people who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18).  The Trobriand “suppressed the truth” by promoting the lie that the first woman “gave birth to children without the intervention of a husband or any other male counterpart.”  For the Trobriand, every child  is a virgin birth. “There is no room for any sort of physical paternity.”  The Miccosukee suppressed the truth of FATHERHOOD by reducing fathers to “persons things” aka sperm donors.  Miccosukee culture decrees that the children do not belong to them.  

5. … the Trobriand lie was that the concept of FATHERHOOD structured in the unconscious mind could be protected from being triggered” and brought to consciousness. They no doubt thought that such a firewall could be created. The firewall they created was simple.  Eliminate the needed context in which the universal could be triggered and brought to consciousness.  Simply create a context which pretends and supports the lie that fathers do not exist.  This was done by making sure the term for father was never expressed in the household. Replace the term father with a teknonym. 

 

Teknonym, the replacement of one status position with another

In order to prevent the concept of FATHERHOOD from being “triggered” and brought to consciousness, at an early age Trobriand children are taught to never address their biological fathers who lived in the same house with their mothers using the word tama, which means “father.” Instead of addressing their biological fathers as tama, they were instructed to address them with the teknonym "husband of my mother."

 

Now the function of the teknonym was to prevent the linking together of the concept of FATHERHOOD “woven into the very fabric of their existence” (Romans 2:15) with the spoken symbol for father which existed in the language.  That word was tama.  By compelling every child to address the biological fathers who lived in the same dwelling as their mothers as “husbands of our mothers,” they removed the needed linguistic context where linkage between the symbol and the universal could occur. The strategy worked. But the creation of  a firewall which prevented the concept of FATHERHOOD from being triggered left the Trobriand with  another problem.​

 

The problem? How could they survive as a culture without a sperm donor?  Their solution?  They decreed that every birth is a virgin birth brought about by baloma, a ‘spirit.’  Rejecting the dual role of father in the nuclear family, they created a new kind of family, a fatherless family type which not only replaced the covenantal dyad of husband-wife with that of brother-sister, but also one which attempted to suppress and keep back the concept of FATHERHOOD which existed in the unconscious mind from being "triggered" and brought to consciousness.  The result was the creation of a new family type, a type which rejected the universal concept of FATHERHOOD.   

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The Lie of Culture Exposed

When it came to the passing down of wealth, both Trobriand and Miccosukee fathers have violated an inheritance rule which decrees that wealth be kept within the “family.”  Culturally, a husband’s wealth should be passed down to their sister’s children. Both Miccosukee and Trobriand fathers, however, are guilty of passing down valuable property to their biological children. 

 

Such actions demonstrate that the psychological firewall they created to prevent “husbands of mothers” from acting like fathers had failed.  As the apostle Paul declared: ” their actions give visible proof of commandments written not on stone but upon the tables of the heart” (Romans 2:15).

 

Contrary to what  their  cultures decree, "a [Trobriand] father [still] tries to give his son as many advantages as he can.”  Trobriand fathers secretly passed on to their sons as much of their estate as they could possible do.  But in so doing they were merely doing what was natural.  They innately knew the rights to one's inheritance did not belong to one's sister's children but to theirs. But in so doing, they were rebelling against a cultural “lie” that declared fathers have no role in life, either biologically or socially.  

 

The same pattern of behavior manifested itself among the Miccosukee. When cattle were acquired by the Miccosukee, it was natural for fathers who owned cattle to have their adult children help them in the business of ranching rather than their nephews and nieces who lived in another camp. In ranching societies it is sons and daughters that normally inherit the father’s assets. Through working together, father-child relationships within the nuclear family strengthen at the expense of matrilineal descent group. 

 

Convictions:

1. The Trobriand and Miccosukee designs for the family had replaced the Universal, namely, that "membership is absolutely restricted to the parents and their offspring  in the first degree." 

2. Such sinful behavior has psychologically not only maimed husbands and fathers but also every member of Trobriand and Miccosukee society. 

3. One cultural “lie” being told over and over again throughout the ages, and which is well alive today is: There exists no "inner structural law of the family" …whose "membership is absolutely restricted to the parents and their offspring  in the first degree.”

4. Contextualization demands that The Parable  of the Prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-31) be converted to The Story of the Prodigal Husband Who Thought He Was A Father.

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