"Caligirl" - for a second my eyes deceived me and it looked perilously close to "callgirl."
You brought up a number of interesting subjects. I think I will tackle the head covering thing first. I don't quite see the point in what Dr. McGee has to say about the Nazirites in relation to men having short hair and women having long hair. I think the whole point was to be different - visibly different, to go outside the norm, so that in a sense, everyone knew you had made a vow to God. But if that was the meaning of it, to purposefully humiliate yourself for God, why is Paul against it?
It isn't any different from what the Hutterites and Amish practise in terms of dress. They also dress in a way that makes them visibly different as an expression of their faith. Are you saying that because the idea of shorn hair on a woman was tied to prostitution what Paul has to say about it isn't valid for today's Christians?
I haven't been to church for many years and I don't really feel any sort of calling to return. I have never been baptised and the head covering that was common among women in my denomination of the Mennonite church forty and more years ago was exclusively for baptised women.
But even then, aside from the very (to my childish eyes) ancient crones occupying the first two or three rows at the front of the church, who always, as I remember it, wore black shawls over their hair, not unlike that of Muslim women, the younger women, the ones who were not widows, seemed to prefer fashionable hats that would not have been out of place on any non-Mennonite woman at that time. Hats were in fashion back then and not something that only Mennonite women wore in church.
I think that one has to understand the original religious reasons for head covering in order to understand what Paul meant exactly. Orthodox Jewish women also cover their heads - and in some cases of the ultra Orthodox, some also shave their heads, then cover themselves with a wig. If Jewish women were covering their heads or shaving their heads before they came into contact with Greek culture, the association between Greek temple prostitutes and shorn hair that Dr. McGee makes would be too recent to account for it.
Head covering among Jews, as with other cultures of the time, predate the Greek empire. I am not sure however, whether shaven heads among Jewish women predates Greek culture. Although I think it is odd that if the Jews associated a shaved head on a woman with pagan temple prostitution, that shaven heads, albeit covered with wigs, would ever have become part of orthodox Judaism. So I think that either Dr. McGee is wrong in his explanation, or Paul, being a Hellenized Jew, was part of a Jewish culture that associated shaved heads on women with temple prostitutes. In which case, Paul's ideas about that would have been cultural/regional rather than religious.
As far as kneeling to pray in church, I have no idea if it is still done this way, but when I was a girl in church, at least two prayers that were part of the service were done with the whole congregation kneeling. I can certainly see the purpose of it, in that it seems or feels to me that one is consciously humbling one's self before God. I am not usually a kneeler though, mostly because there is always someone around. But I do kneel sometimes, when I want to earnestly connect with God, and I have a moment of privacy. And when I do, I do feel that I am very deliberately humbling myself before Him and kneeling is the physical manifestation of it.
There are so many more thoughts to address, that I will have to give it some more thought before I respond to the rest of them.
Layla
