It's not. Even in the Hebrew.*
PS> No face diaper here, period.
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* No, not in the context of "ownership". His "own eyes", "his own land," "his own self," "his own vineyard," etc, even his "own nakedness," are all in there, frequently, 'as translated.' Mostly the possessive form of the Hebrew noun. But not daughter, in the form of 'ownership' as is implied by dancing angels.
Ask any Modern Fascist. 'Authority' and 'ownership' are no longer synonymous. And veto power is not ownership, nor is it license to command in all cases whatsoever. It's a power to say 'no,' in specific situations. And it's an authority that we had better learn to use, because the alternative is not only tyranny, it's death.
Now, every bit of that
is helpful, Mark. I'm in agreement with you that many of those 'own' examples you've cited do not connote ownership (although, "his own land" and "his own vineyard" would, to me, clearly assert ownership, as in, what's the different between something being a man's own land and him owning the land -- same thing with the vineyard -- unless you're asserting some type of Native-American-type or Alexandria Occasional-Cortex religious belief that no one, but perhaps YHWH, ever owns anything). Are you asserting that, no matter what we're talking about, the highest pinnacle of the matter is 'belongs-to' possession and that ownership isn't even a valid concept? If so, I think we're in dangerous semantical waters, because 'ownership' is a mutually-held linguistic construct well-recognized by almost anyone with whom one could speak. It's a legal cliche that "possession is 9/10 of the law," but it is that other 1/10 we're delving into in this stage of this discussion. Most things that "belong to" us may just be a matter of mere temporary possession (setting aside the fact that everything is temporary, given our temporal nature on Earth), but some other things are considered at least in a legal sense to be "owned" by us, and that ownership confers certain well-established responsibilities and privileges on us in relation to them. Furthermore, something else is in play and has been well documented empirically and through general common-sense observation: human beings take far better care of (are better stewards towards) what they have ownership over than what they don't own -- and even than they just have mere temporary possession of.
You and I would probably differ, too, on where the lines of fascism and statism exist between (a) them and (b) individual freedom and autonomy. We often talk about fascists and statists as being those who control us, but they do not do so nearly as much through coercion as through the removal of freedoms and other privileges. They do not
own us (as much as they lust for it and may eventually accomplish ownership if we don't collectively stand up against their manipulations somewhere far shy of running out of all privileges to remove), and they know they don't (perhaps yet) own us and can thus do little to
force us to do their bidding. I therefore observe tyranny to exist far more in being part of a system in which one's leaders predominantly exercise their power through their power to
veto, their power to say, "If you don't meet our approval, then you don't get to do x, y or z." The Patriot Act is a major example of this. All this 'woke' shit falls into that category. "You may continue to live in your house, but if you want to add on to it or get a permit to do anything else, we will deny you permission unless you agree to nonsense that will cost you twice the worth of your home just to expand it by 10%," which leads to people giving up on improving their environments as well as to translating into generalized lessening of geographical mobility.
As I wrote earlier, I too recoil from the spoken concept of
owning one's children, but as their owner I become free to make all decisions for them, which, yes, does depend on the level of my maturity and degree of true forward-thinking love toward them, but, given their nascent states until they're fully grown, that frees me from having to take the path of the tyrant, who pretends with them that they can do whatever they want, giving them the freedom to make poor choices among fewer options rather than just making their choices for them until they are gradually taught to take over that function for themselves.
When we bring that dichotomy back to the macro adult societal level, I believe it would almost be better to be another person's slave than it would be to live within a world in which the leaders have no power to tell me what to do but have every power to take away any or all of my freedoms and other privileges. I had some deep conversations a few decades back with my elderly local state representative in the Georgia state house, whose own parents had been sharecroppers and whose grandparents had been born as plantation slaves. His strong opinion was that he was in the process of watching his own descendants' generations turning themselves back into what his parents and grandparents had struggled with as sharecroppers: his forebears and many they knew around them spent considerable time actually longing for the previous days of slavery, because during slavery almost everyone they knew could count on receiving the necessities of life
because the slave owners generally treated them as investments they didn't want to squander. So they had food, clothes and shelter they could count on, but during Reconstruction they had a little land to work and were allowed to work it or abandon it and go do whatever they wanted, but the "whatever they wanted" was severely limited by Jim Crow and the dearth of freedoms and other privileges that left them at the mercy of the whites who worked the levers of whether they had access to them. My representative asserted that he had supported the Great Society programs as a younger man but knew by the time of our conversations that he would be the last MLK Republican elected to his suburban-Atlanta district, because those social/entitlement programs had molded most of the younger people of his race to return to that shareholder mentality that lusted for a return to de facto slavery without realizing it. (He told me his office hours were now -- this was in the early 1990's -- almost entirely taken up with people showing up with their hands out, insatiably expecting to be taken care of.) That's the tyranny I see being put in place in our country these days.
Bringing it back to the discussion on daughters, I have one on whom, in the context of extraordinary circumstances in the face of my history of insufficient leadership, I basically conferred early emancipation. She lives with us and can do almost anything she wants -- but has to take responsibility for anything she chooses to do, including paying for everything, which includes health care, dental care, car, gas, transportation, etc. I still love her, care for her, and am prepared to step in to provide her with loving, wise support when she requests it. I'm always on the lookout for ways in which I can get both my parenting and her on track, which is why these questions and answers have special significance for me; I know I can't put the horse back in the barn -- another motivation for rejecting simplistic either/or responses -- but I remain committed to minimizing the extent to which I behave like a tyrant. And unless I hear something tremendously persuasive, I'm probably going to continue to consider veto-dependent authority structures to be more tyrannical than ownership. I don't take my cues from Modern Fascists; to me, those folks are nothing but cowardly forward-guard jack-boot terroristic destroyers in the mold of the KKK; they can certainly wreak havoc, but they don't define the meaning of words just because they say so.
