How American Christian Culture Destroys Motherhood and Kidnaps Children of Single Moms
Modern day America is largely defined by Western Christian and Jewish values, and those of us who grew up in this culture and read the Bible, will naturally tend to read and understand the Bible from our own Western cultural values. However, the inspired authors of the literature contained in the Bible did not write from a Western cultural perspective, but from a Middle Eastern culture perspective, especially the Old Testament. To be sure, during the New Testament period, the Roman culture, which grew out of the Greek culture and is the foundation of "Western" culture, was transitioning to become the dominant culture in the world. But the Jewish writers of the New Testament still largely lived their lives based on Middle Eastern culture, and Middle Eastern cultural values. As an American, I have been very fortunate to live a significant portion of my adult life outside the United States, including many years in Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and 1990s, where Middle Eastern culture and Middle Eastern cultural values were still the dominant force shaping their societal values. Most of the modern English translations of the Bible, as well as the English commentaries on the Bible, including the "older" commentaries, some of which were written in German during the Reformation period in Europe and then later translated into English, are all written by Westerners with Western cultural values. One of the most damaging effects of using Christian and Jewish Western cultural values to translate and interpret the Bible, is how the modern definition of "orphans" and "widows" is used today. It's easy for me to sum up the Western cultural view of "widows" and "orphans" today as defined and practiced in the United States in one sentence: Grab the "orphans" and turn them over to the Government's lucrative child trafficking system called "foster care" and "adoption" and let the widows fend for themselves after they lose their children.