On Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sexism.
Part 1.
Table of Contents
- Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets Introduction.
-"Sexism", an Encyclopedia Article.
- Dennis Mckinsey quote.
- Sexism, Chapter and Verse Examples
- Brahama, an Encyclopedia Article
- Abraham, an Encyclopedia Article
- On Women and Sexism in Christianity.
(Some of the Bibliography for these Article is incomplete, the rest can be found here at this link:
http://critiquesofchristianity.blogspot ... s-and.html
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Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets Introduction.
Thousands of popular fantasies and hidden facts are expounded in this Encyclopedia, where the complex subject of sexism is approached from both the historical and the mythic viewpoints. Standard encyclopedias usually omit such material, or give it ,a brief, uninformative note. There is need for a complete study of the many-faceted process of
transition from female-oriented to male-oriented religions in western civilization.
Our culture has been deeply penetrated by the notion that "man" -not woman-is created in the image of God. This notion persists, despite the likelihood that the creation goes in the other direction: that God is a human projection of the image of man. No known religion, past or present, ever succeeded in establishing a cV.'Tiplady ~;xless deity. Worship was always accorded either a female or a male, bccasionally a sexually united couple or an androgynous symbol of therl'l; _ but deities had a sex just as people have a sex. The ancient Greeks and ethers whose culture accepted homosexuality naturally worshipped homosexual gods. (See Hermes.)
Modern Christians take it for granted that they must revere the figures of a Father and a Son, never perceiving divinity in corresponding Mother and Daughter figures, as the ancients did. Though Catholics still worship the Goddess under some of her old pagan titles, such as Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Blessed Virgin and so on, their theologians refuse to admit that she is the old Goddess in a new disguise, and paradoxically insist on her non-divinity. (See Mary.)
The older concept of the female Holy Trinity ruling all cycles of creation, birth, and death in her Virgin, Mother, and Crone forms, was destroyed by Christians' attacks on her temples, scriptures, rituals, and followers. The church declared from the first that the Great Goddess "whom Asia and all the world worshippeth" must be despised, "and her magnificence destroyed" (Acts 19:27). This is virtually the only Gospel tenet that churches followed through all their centuries with no deviation or contradiction. It seemed necessary to hide the fact that Christianity itself was an offshoot of Middle-Eastern Goddess worship, skewed by the asceticism of Persia and India. (See Jesus Christ.) '
As a salvation cult, early Christianity based its scheme of redemption on the premise of female wickedness. Salvation was needed because there had been a Fall, brought about by archetypal Woman. Without the myth of Eve's defiance, there would have been no sin, hence no need for salvation or savior. (See Eve.) Fathers of the church declared that the original sin was perpetuated through all generations by every woman, through sexual conception and birth-giving. Woman's mysterious, devilish sexual magnetism seduced men into the "concupiscence" that, even within lawful marriage, transmitted the taint of sin to every man. (See Sex.) So said St. Augustine, and the church never
altered his opinion.
Throughout history we find clergymen advocating abuse of women, to express their horror of female sexuality and their conviction that all women deserve punishment for the primordial crime that brought death and damnation to man. Adam, representing all men, was less guilty than Eve, representing all women. St. Paul even regarded Eve as the only guilty one (1 Timothy 2:14). The tradition persisted up to-the present century, when the clergy, -if not advocating
active abuse of women, at least refrained Irom _too i:J1~¢h interference , with it. Some clergymen have been found to b'e \vife-batterers. Many still counsel women to be subservient to men, in accordance with "God's will." (See Sexism.)
Man's and God's attack on women was not usually justifiable as revenge for real injuries. Therefore the mythical injury of the Fall was essential to the early theological scheme. The practical g6ar\vgs J1pt, to prevent women from hurting men, but to prevent ~Qrr;lenJrom acting independently of men: from owning their own property, earning their own money, making their own ~exual choices, or raising their own children without interference. -
Patriarchal religion declared w?:r on pagan societies where motherhood was once considered the only important parental relationship; where women owned the land and governed its cultivation; and sexual attachments were made and unmade at women's discretion. (See Matrilineal Inheritance.) From a biological viewpoint, patriarchal religion denied women the natural rights of every other mammalian female: the right to choose her stud, to control the circumstances of her mating, to occupy and govern her own nest, or to refuse all males when preoccupied with the important business of raising her young. (See Motherhood.)
Such basic biological rights of the female were set aside by patriarchal human societies-although, at the dawn of history, the social role of male begetters was very differently conceived, in a way alien to modern patriarchal thought. (See Kingship.) Today's scholars habitually call all female and male deities of that ancient world "gods," as they also call humanity "man." Yet the supreme deity of that world was usually a Goddess, the creatress or Mother of the gods;
and the very word "man" used to mean "woman," an incarnation of the same lunar Mother, in its original language. (See Man.) Early Christian thinkers rightly perceived that destruction of the women's Goddess would mean a crushing blow to women's pride and confidence, since men's pride depended greatly on their vision of a God like themselves, only better. Women were not called daughters of this God, who gave men their souls. In the sixth century, churchmen
even denied that women had any w.lls.,
Forbidden by Christian conquerors to express their own faith, the women of Europe eventually adopted the men's faith perforce. Sometimes they were lured by specious concessions, which were afterward rescinded. (See Convent.) Sometimes they were coerced by Christianized husbands or overlords. The myths and secrets of women's spiritual past were buried, just as men buried the sheila-nagig figures of semi-pagan Irish churches, hoping they would never be
found. (See Sheila-Na-Gig.)
However, what Christian histories rarely_gillnit is that, after more than a thousand years of alternate violence and g\.lik, the western world still was not truly ..Ghris.ti.<lnizci. The ancient faith persisted, because every man was still born of woman and nurtured by woman, despite the theologians' insistence that a father was the only significant parent. (See Paganism.) This was mere verbal learning, as contrasted with the direct experience of infantile dependence on the mother. When it appeared at all, father-love seems to have been a somewhat less satisfactory artificial imitation of mother-love. (See Fatherhood.) ~ions between fathers and children the more dominant em_g.::. ~s fear. M~nFere enjoined from tb..e.pyjpit to instill " the fea of God" into their chilclr.en th oJJg~Lbarsh p!!!,J~nts. ~t of all ~lyJ:ather's P.unishm~ts: a terrible yision of eter@Lt~ebped out of men's fears. The Christian ell was the most sadistic fantasy ever to masquerade as fact. (See Hell.) Churchmen used it, not only to terrify naive congregations into compliance, but also to excuse the torture and burning of witches. Inquisitors said the eternal punishment of such heretics should begin in this life, continuing up to the victim's death. (See Inquisition.) </l
The religion of the Goddess and her sons and lovers, the old gods, came to be called devil worship because these deities were redefined as devils (when they were not ad pted into the Christian canon as P,Seudo-saints_). The link between "woman" and "devil" in the patriarchal mind was as old as the Garden of Eden story. (See Serpent.) It persisted even after the dawn of a more enlightened age brought the decline of organized persecution. However, the rack and stake were
replaced in the 18th and 19th centuries by more subtle abuses. aimed at suppressing women legally, politically, economically, and psychologically.
Clergymen helped by opposing women's education and supporting all physical or legal measures for keeping women "in their place." As Sir Hermann Bondi accurately observed, men made God their primary source for "the common and undisguised contempt for women enshrined in the three great Western religions, the basis for the cruel, inhuman and wasteful sexism still so rampant." Women's feelings of unworthiness and insecurity, even aberrations like masochism
and depression, often may be traced to training in a maleoriented religion, at variance with their own nature.
Recently, some-women have begun to seek better understanding of that feminine nature, buried as it was under western society's proliferation of masculine images and values. One interesting idea to emerge from this new research is, if women's religion had continued, today's world might be less troubled by violence and alienation. Gods, including Yahweh, tended to order their followers to make war; whereas the great mother Goddesses advocated peaceful evolution of civilized skills. Cooperation rather than exploitation was the matriarchal rule. (See War.)
Goddess worship usually entailed frank acceptance of the natural cycles of sexuality, birth, and death; and maternal concern for the welfare of coming generations. Love was not the abstract principle that "love of God" was to become. In the very process of worship it could be directly, intimately, and physically experienced. (See Karuna.) Certainly there was still a strong element of this Oriental-feminist concept in the medieval "heresies" that aroused the ire of the church.
(See Romance.)
, Perhaps the most important part of any religion is the direction it gives to interpersonal behavior patterns. The patterns evolved by women in honor of their ancient Goddess surely deserve close study today. As one of the Goddess's scriptures pointedly said, "What use are grand phrases about the soul on the lips of those who hate and injure one another? . .. Religion is kindness." (See Atheism.)
Traces of the "kind Goddess" are still to be found in a thousand hidden pockets of history and custom: myths, superstitions, fairy tales, folk songs and dances, nursery rhymes, traditional games and holidays, magic symbols, sagas, and scriptures both original and revised, apocryphal and otherwise-in addition to the valuable material recovered by archeologists, orientalists, and other scholars. Patterns emerge from comparative studies, which can be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle is far from complete; but many of its pieces are
here, in this book.
These Myths and Secrets are drawn from more than paganism. Biblical myths are especially significant, not only because they shaped the attitudes of western culture, but also because they were written and rewritten during centuries of transition from matriarchal to patriarchal systems. The later development of Christian myths contributed much to
sexist thinking. ~j)e, sexism was a primary_ product of the __G.hristian church. Patriarchal religions like udaism and Christianity established and upheld the "man's world" largely by an ela ol]k structure oHalsehood. Among the Secrets in this book are many surprising histoncal sec~ets that were covered up, whitewashed, or otherwise falsified through 1500 years when the church maintained a monopoly of literate records, and virtually wrote its own history to its
own order.
Some of the facts concealed by that Christian history have come to light in recent decades. Others are being kept secret even now, by religious organizations still dedicated to preserving a patriarchal society. Laymen and especially women are theoretically forbidden to investigate them. Nevertheless, they can be found out.
Naturally, the secret most deeply concealed by Christianized history was the many-named Goddess, the original Holy Trinity who created and governed the world, gave birth to its Saviors, sent her tablets of divine law to the prophets, and watched over every life from womb to tomb, according to pre-Christian belief. Today she is viewed as "mythic~!," having been' replaced by a God (equally mythical, but more acceptable to a male-dominated culture), who took over most of her attributes. It is not usually understood that the spiritual life of western man, and especially of western woman, was greatly impoverished by her violent suppression.
The unremitting warfare of the church against followers of the Goddess is a large part of what feminists now call our hidden history. Even though Christianity itself grew out of the once-universal religion of the Goddess, it was a matricidal son whose bigotry tinged every thought and feelif\g with woman-hatred. In the end it produced a society in which members of one sex invariably oppressed members of the other, and both came to regard this inequity as a natural state of affairs, ordained by a male "Creator." Matters were otherwise in the pre-Christian world where the "Creator" was more often a "Creatress." Through making God in his own image, man has almost forgotten that woman once made the Goddess in hers. This is the deep secret of all mythologies, and the fundamental secret of this book.
B.G.W.
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Sexism, an Encyclopedia Article from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker
The Catholic Encyclopedia Declares, " The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul."(1) This is a somewhat modified version of the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas, who insisted that every woman is birth-defective, an imperfect male begotten because her father happened to be ill, weakened, or in a state of sin at the time of her conception.(2) Knowing nothing of the human ovum, the church taught the doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas that a mother contributes nothing to her child's genetic inheritance, but acts only as "soil" for the male soul-bearing seed.3 Nevertheless, churchmen claimed the birth of a true freak was not the father's fault, but the result of "the heated and obstinate imagination of the mother during sexual intercourse.4
Fathers of the church were earnest woman-haters. St. John Chrysostom said men suffer "a thousand evils" from having to look at women; "the beauty of women is the greatest snare." St. Odo of Cluny refused to be ensnared; he said, "How should we desire to embrace what is no more than a sack of dung!" According to Waltar map, "Even the very good woman, who is rarer than the phoenix, cannot be loved without the loathesome bitterness of fear and worry and constant unhappiness." A 19th-century Anglican churchman said women are"intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and nature, weak in body, inconstant in mind, and imperfect and infirm in character."5 In the 1890s, the president of a leading theological seminary declared, "My Bible commands the subjection of women forever."6
So it did. Through teh centuries, the Bible supported sexist sentiments which were echoed by all churchmen. St. paul said: "The head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man" (1 Corinthians 11:3). St. Peter said in the Gospel of Thomas: "Women are not worthy of life."7 Clement of Alexandria quoted the words of Christ from the Gospel According to the Egyptians: "I have come to destroy the works of the female."8 He added: "Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman."9
Up to the modern era, clergy men continued to appeal to biblical authority to maintain the political subjection of women. "The clergy were often in the forefront of the fight against suffrage, dredging up quotations from the bible to prove that the natural order of things was female obedience to man.." Simone de beauvoir says: "For the Jews,Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine right, the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female." As late as 1971 an Episcopalian bishop confirmed these views: "The sexuality of Christ is no accident nor is his masculinity incidental. This is divine choice." Feminists believe that even if the churches should destroy themselves in the effort, they will cling to their notion of male supremacy to the very end, for this was their primary foundation in the beginning.10 Theology's entire conceptual system was invented by men to serve the interests of men--and, not incidentally, to restrict and suppress the interests of women.11
Church fathers long ago laid down the principle of woman's guilt for the existence of death and sin. Augustine blamed the perpetuation of original sin on the "concupiscence" that united male bodies with female ones under any circumstances, including marriage.12 Christianity was the first religion to announce that it was sinful just to be alive, on account of having been sexually conceived and born of a woman.13 St. John Chrysostom commanded every Christian father to instill into his son " a resolute spirit against womankind. . . . Let him have no converse with any woman save only his mother. Let him see no woman."14
Sometimes the writings of Christian men revealed an almost hysterical fear of woman. her very glance could "infect, entice, bewitch." her eyes "poison and intoxicate the mind: yea, her company induceth impudency, corrupteth virginity, confoundeth and consumeth the bodies, athe goods, and the very souls of men. And finally her body destroyeth and rotteth the very flesh and bones of man's body." Vairus said women become witches because "they have such an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally. . . . And they are so troubled with evil humors, that out go their venomous exhalations, engendered through their illfavored diet, and increased by means of their pernicious excrements, which they expel."15
John Aylmer labeled all women "tale-bearers, eavesdroppers, rumor raisers, evil tongued, worse minded, and in every wise doltified with the dregs of the Devil's dung hill."16 Similar opinions have been offered by modern woman-abusers, such as the rapist: "I thought women were trashy, low down and scummy because that's what i had been taught."17
Andrew the Chaplain said woman is "by nature a miser, envious, a slanderer . . . Greedy, a slave to her belly, inconstant, fickle. . . . disobedient and impatient of restraint, spotted with the sin of pride and desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of secrets, notice ttoo much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never loving any man in her heart."18
John Scotus Erigena taught that human beings were once without sin and without sexuality but after they disobeyed god,, they were divided into two sexes. The sinless part was embodied in man, the sinful part in woman.19 Other theologians said woman was "the Churhe's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the devil's decoy"20 Official church literature said:
All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. . . . [T]he natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.21
Curiously enough, modern genetic research indicates that the truth may be something like the reverse of this view. The XY chromosome that produces a male is physiologically an "incomplete" female chromosome. Some individuals are born with an XYY chromosome abnormality, making them genetic super-males. They are said to be tall, below average in intelligence, and strongly disposed to criminal behavior.22
Tis would have surprised men like Orestes Brownson, who insisted that woman's "ambition and natural love of power" must be subject to masculine control, otherwise "she is out of her element, and a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, excepting thorugh a woman's influence.23 Such men never bothered to notice that their denunciations of women were self-contradictory; as in this case, for instance, if woman's love of power was "natural," then in exercising it she would be in her element, not out of it.
Martin Luther claimed the physical differences between men and women demonstrated God's plan for sexism. "Men have broad and large chests and small and narrow hips and more understanding than women who hae but small and narrow chests and broad hips, to the end that they should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring up children."24 But if their bearing and bringing up children wore them out, it was no matter, Luther said: "If women get tired and die of bearing, there is no harm in that; let them die as long as they bear; they were made for that."25
Schopenhauer, who detested women, found nothing likeable about their physical appearance: "It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race. . . . [T]he sympathies that exist between them and men are skin-deep only, and do not touch the mind or the feelings or the character."26 Hartley tends to agree that thanks to Christian tradition, "An extreme outward sex-attraction has come to veil but thinly a deep inward sex-antipathy, until it seems almost impossible that women and men can ever really understand one another."27
Those few Renaissance men who would speak on behalf of women were outside the church, and usually suspected of heresy, like Agrippa von Nettesheim, who wrote that women "are treated by the men as conquered by the conquerors,, but be any divine neccecsity, for any reason, but according to custom, education, fortune, and the tyrant's opportunity."
The tyranny of men prevailing over divine right and the laws of nature, slays by law the liberty of woman, abolishes it by use and custom, and extinguishes it by education. For the woman, as soon as she is born, is from her earliest years detained at home in idleness, and as if destitute of capacity for higher occupations, is permitted to conceive of nothing beyond needle and thread. Then when she has attained years of puberty she is delivered over to the jealous empire of a man, or shut up forever in a shop of vestals. the law also forbids her to fill public offices. no prudence entitles her to plead in open court.28
There was sex discrimination even in the penalties imposed for witchcraft. Female witches were more severely punished than male witches. A law of 1683 said that for the crime of causing death by witchcraft, a man may be hanged, but a woman must be burned at the stake. Men could with impunity kill their wives (e.g.., by beating) in the 1650s, but women were burned for killing their husbands, a crime defined as "petty treason."29
A self-perpetuating belief in woman's inferior intellect was fostered by the almost universal custom of keeping women out of schools, all but a few aristocratic ladies who could receive an expensive private education. Queen Elizabeth I of England was unsexed by several historians who thought she was too clever to be female. They claimed she died in infancy, and a boy was secretly raised in her place. The small minority of educated women were seldom accepted as such. On one occasion a learned lady was prsented as a curiosity to King James I, and he was told she was fluent in latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He only inquired, "But can she spin?"30
The church controlled most schools, and the church would have no truck with women unless it was unavoidable. St. Columkille made a rule that no woman could even be buried in the vicinity of a Christian church, alleging that this was the custom from Christianity's beginings. County Tyrone in Ireland still has a relig-na-man, "cemetery of women," located a half -mile from the church where only men were buried in the churchyard.31 Some churchmen opined that women didn't even have any souls to save. Ockham claimed women did have souls, and on that account should be allowed to vote in church councils. The pope instantly condemned this as heresy.32
Josaphine K. Henry castigated the churches for their consistently anti-female atiutueds over the centuries:
Has the Church ever issued an edict that women must be equal with man before the canon or the civil law, that her thoughts should be incorporated in creed or code, that she should own her ow body and property in marriage, or have legal claim to her children born in wedlock which Christianity claims is a "sacrament" and one of the "holy mysteries"? . . . No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and gives her nothing in return. the history of the Church does not contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman. . . . Through Tyranny and falsehood alone is Christianity Able to hold woman in subjection.33
Indeed, women were better served by pre-Christian laws nearly everywhere. Under the ancient byzantine code, inheritance laws made no distinction between heirs on the basis of their sex; and although centuries of Christian revision, the laws freely allowed men to commit adulterer, though their wives could be imprisoned or beaten to death for it. until 1857, no English woman could obtain a divorce on any grounds without a special Act of Parliament, which meant only upper-class women with plenty of politcial leverage could even hope for a divorce.35
In 1835, a Mrs. CarolineNorton left her husband after he repeatedly subjected her to beatings, mental abuse, and infidelity. He kept his mistress in the same house with her. A court ruled that the wife need not return to the house, but the husband was give their three children because the wife had "condoned his actions" by staying with him through all his cruelties. in 1839, the Infants' Custody Act introduced a slight modification. At his own discretion, a judge in equity could allow separated mothers to keep children under seven years of age, or to have visiting rights to older children, provided the mother was not guilty of adultery.36 father suffered no such restriction, of course.
Women who refused to submit to the 'discipline" of marriage, but instead played the dangerous game of promising without delivering were known as jilts. Such women aroused the most violent outbursts of sexist sentiment, according to an old pamphlet:
Their tricks and devices are numberless, and not be paralleled by anything but their Ingratitude and Inhumanity; there indeed they exceed themselves; nothing in Nature being so perfectly brutish and cruel as one of these kind [sic] of Creatures . . . a Vermin so ravenous and malicious, and withal so sbtle and designing, so formally caste and hypocritically virtuous, and yet so scandalously common and impudently lewd, so proud, and yet so mercenary, and above all, so insolently ill natured, that in the short character of a Jilt, are comprehended all the Vices, Follies and Impertinences of the whole Sex. . . . In short, I cannot but fancy them a colony of Hell-Cats, planted here by the Devil, as a mischief to mankind.37
Noting that women often refused to play fair in the game for which men made all the rules, even Freud failed to transcend the sexist attitudes of his time. he wrote: " One cannot resist the thought that the level of normal morality is different for women. Their superego never becomes so unshakeable, so impersonal, so independent of its affective origins, as we demand it of a man. Critics since time immemorial have reproached women of certain character traits: that they exhibit less of a sense of justice than men do; that they are less prepared to submit to the great necessities of life." Since Freud regarded male domination as one of the great necessities of life, he should hardly have been surprised to find women resisting it. Simone de Beauvoir said every woman knows that "masculine morality, as it converns her, is a vast hoax. man pompously thunders forth his code of virtue and honer; but in secret he invites her to disobey it, and he even counts on her disobedience; without it, all that splendid facade behind which he takes cover would collapse."38
Since women weren't told the rules of the game, many of them became losers while they were still too young to figure it out for themselves. commenting on oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial, W.T. stead remarked, "If Oscar Wilde, instead of indulging in dirty tricks of indecent famiarity with boys and men, had ruined the lives of half a dozen innocent simpletons of girls, or had broken up the home of his friend by corrupting his friend's wife, no one could have laid a finger on him. the male is sacrosanct: the female is fair game."39
Though women were scorned for being "simpletons," they were even more violently scorned when they tried to develop their minds. Florence Nightingale's popularity inspired many women to seek educations in medicine, but male students ganged up on them. In 1870 a group of student doctors formed lines to prevent five women from entering classes in Surgeons' hall in London. medical examiners tried to embarrass female students with indecent questions. when women received high marks in examinations, they were passed over, and scholarships were awarded to the men immediately below their level.
It was the same in other professions. in 1879, Birmingham schoolmasters barred women from employment as teachers of small boys, on the ground that it would encourage 'immorality." Lawyers denied women admission to the Indds of Court. determined femenist efforts brought about admission of some women to classes at Queen's College in 1848; but the Bishop of London excluded women from Wheatstone's classes on electricity, because they had "congregated too abundantly" in Sir Charles Lyell's geology classes, keeping more deserving students (i.e. men) from finding places in the classroom. In the field of religion, the Church of england found it "unthinkable" that women should ever be admitted to the ministry.40
The basic fallacy of sexism in employment or education was pointed out by Christine Pierce: "We need not fear that women will do what they cannot do."41 If women were really unable to learn medicine, law, theology, science, or any other field of endeavor, ti would hardly have been necessary for men to exert such efforts to keep began to reved from view when women managed to receive education. But many men still clung to the belief that women must be less able to think than men.
In 1913 T.E. Reed wrote a book called Sex, Its Origin and Determination, to prove "scientifically" that women were biologically inferior to men. the author said cotus during an incoming tide always conceived boys, while cotus during an outgoing tide conceived girls--proving that the female was weaker, born of "waning" energy. Despite the fact that incoming and outgoing tides differed on every one of the world's coastlines, and infants conceived inland couldn't be identified withy any tide, the theory proved popular.42
In many ways, sexist thinkers have tried to pretend male dominance is "natural" or is a divinely ordained biological mandate. yet as other mamalian species demonstrate, such an arrangement could serve no biological purpose.
Any animal species in which males were biologically programmed to attack and injure the females would be at a disadvantage in terms of species survival, since mammalian young can't grow to maturity without healthy, competent mothers43 Thus it is found that, in most species, males are biologically inhibited from attacking females, even under strong provocation. And the one virtually unbreakable male animal taboo is any kind of interference between a female and the young she protects.
Karen Horney suggested that men's antagonism may have developed as a result of sexual envy: "The male is sexually dependent on the female to a higher degree than the woman is on him, because in women part of the sexual energy is linked to generative processes. Could it be that men, therefore, have a vital interest in keeping women dependent on them?"44 Judith Antonelli says, "Patriarchy is based on the 'phallacy' that the male is creator. Man's original awe and revrence of woman becomes, under patriarchy, resentment and hostility. The only way man can possess female power is through woman, and so he colonizes her, suppressing her sexuality so that it serves him rather than being the source of her power. . . . Patriarchy is indeed a male neurosis."45
Bibliography [NOT POSTED YET]
1. Evans, N.H.N., 180
2. de Riencourt. 227.
3. Rees, 227.
4. Shumaker, 95.
5. Bullough, 98, 187, 203.
6. Stanton, 194.
7. Malvern, 1.
8. Stone, 194.
9. Lederer, 162.
10. Stone, 236- 38.
11. Daly, 4.
12. Bullough, 117.
13. H.Smith, 250.
14. Laistner, 112.
15. Scot, 227.
16. Bullough, 202.
17. Goldstein & Kant, 85.
18. Murstein, 160.
19. de Riencourt, 227.
20. Tuchman, 211.
21. Kramer & Sprenger, 44.
22. Torrey, 178.
23. Bullough, 309.
24. de Lys, 179.
25. de Riecourt, 258.
26. Murstein, 261.
27. Hartley, 266.
28. Agrippa, 271.
29. Robbins, 165, 209.
30. Bullough, 223.
31. Joyce 3, 374
32. Coulton, 227.
33. Stanton, 205-7.
34. Soisson, 43.
35. Crow, 147.
36. Crow, 40-41.
37. de Vries & Fryer, 11-13.
38. Lederer, 93-95.
39. Pearsall, N.B.A., 231.
40. Pearsall, N.B.A., 43-45.
41. Gornick & Moran, 252.
42. Montagu, S.M.S., 92.
43. Fromm, 192.
44. Roszak, 110.
45. Spretnak, 401.
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"Status assigned to women in the bible is somewhere between that of household servant, and an outright slave. How any woman could defend the bible and even remotely support it is beyond me. The book is horribly male chavanistic and sexist" Dennis Mckinsey
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Chapter and Verse Examples of Sexism,
1st Timmothy 2:11-13:
Let a woman learn in silence, with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then eve.
1st Corinthians 14:34:
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission as the law says. If they want to enquire about something they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives submit to your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is the head of the church... therefore just as the church is subject to christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Genesis 3: 16 God said to the woman: Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall RULE over thee.
Eve was made from Adams rib.
1st Corinthians 11:9 : Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman was created for the man.
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Brahma, an Encyclopedia Article, from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.
India's patriarchal god, whose priests tried to establish wholly male dominated society and eliminate the Mother Goddess--who, nevertheless, remained the parent of Brahma as she was of the other gods. Though some of Brahma's scriptures tried to dissociate him from the Mother by calling him "the Birthless," yet the same scriptures incongruously referred to him as the Goddess's "Firstborn."(1)
The older dharma (holy law) said the worst of crimes was killing a woman or female child, because it meant killing unborn generations.(2) However, like most patriarchal systems, Brahmanism lifted the taboo on male aggression against females, and claimed that it was better to kill women than to insult Brahmans: "To revile and calumniate a worshipper of the Supreme Brahman is a sin ten million times worse than that of killing a woman."(3)
Like the medieval Christian church, Brahman priests made rules for rigid control of wives, and made their deity say any other kind of marriage was a sin that made the wife a whore and the children illegitimate, disqualified for religious observances.
Brahman marriage reversed the old system of matrilineal inheritance, insisting that property must pass from father to son. A widow without male children was entitled to inherit only if she "lives under the control of the relations of her husband, and in their absence under the control of her father's relations" ---that is, male relations---"this she entitled to inherit. the woman who is even likely to go astray is not entitled to inherit then only is she entitled to inherit. The woman who is even likely to go astray is not entitled to inherit the husband's property."(5) In practice of course, any or all of these male groups could easily declare the widow unfit to inherit and divide the property among themselves.
Brahmanism was essentially paternal ancestor-worship, possibly the root of similar paternal ancestor-worship instituted in israel by the legendary Abraham, whose name meant "Father Brahm." These was the same obsession with record-kepping. At every brahman wedding, long lists of paternal ancestors were recited, like the biblical lists of "begats." Brahman sons were taught to recite: "My father is my highest dharma. . . . My father is my Heaven. On my father being satisfied, the whole Universe is satisfied." Brahma also displayed the patriarchal god's usual insistence on exclusivity: "those who are averse to My doctrine are unbelievers and sinners, as great as those who slay a Brahman."(6)
It is clear that jewish patriarchy owed a debt to Brahman precedent. From the Far East came the legend of the golden Age of righteousness, when men were free from sin, had great longevity, and grew to gigantic size.(7) Comparable were the long-lived biblical patriarchs of the antediluvian age when there were "giants in the earth" (Genesis 6:4). The story of Cain and Abel was Indo-Iranian. Vedic poets used to beg their god to accept their sacrifices, and reject those of other arya (men).(8)
The legend of Jonah was prefigured by the Indian tale of Candrgomin, who endangered the ship he sailed on because a rival magician caused a storm and took the form of a sea beast to swallow him. (9)
Talmudic tradition adopted the typical Oriental belief in transmigration of souls; Adam's soul passed by transmigration into david, than into the Messiah.(10) Brahmanic revelation seemed to be part of the Messianic promise also. The Katha Upanishad said Brahma is realized in one's own soul dimly, as if seen in a mirror; but in the heaven of Brahma he is realized clearly, "as one distinguishes light from darkness."(11) The New Testament repeats the same message copied almost word for word: "For now we see through a glass (i.e. mirror) darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Brahman doctrine that a thousand years is one day of Brahma is repeated in Psalms 90: 4, and again in the First Book of Adam and Eve, where God explains that "five days and a half' for him means 5,500 years for men.(12)
Brahma is no longer popular in his own land. he is described as a theologian's god, whose worship never struck vital roots in the popular folk soil." He was used mainly to support the caste system. "Today Brahma is so relatively unimportant that only one or two temples in all India are reserved for his exclusive worship."(13)
Bibliography:
1. Upanishads, New York: mentor Books, New American Library, 1957. Page: 22.
2. O'Flaherty Wendy Doniger. Hindu Myths. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin books Ltd., 1975. Page: 293
3 Mhanirvanatantra, (Sir John Woodroffe, trans.). New York: Dover Publications, 1972. Page: 45
4. Ibid., 45, 58.
5. Ibid., 283.
6. Ibid., 215, 236, 16, 242.
7. Ibid., xlvii.
8. Dumezil, Georges. Archaic Roman Religion (2 vols.) Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 435
9. Tatz. Mark and Kent, Jody. Rebirth. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Co., 1969. Tacitus. Complete Works. New York: Modern Library, 1942. page: 146.
10. Waddell, L. Austine. Tibetan Buddhism. New York; Dover Publications, 1972. Page: 226
11. Upanishads, New York: mentor Books, New American Library, 1957. Page: 23.
12. Forgotten Books of Eden. New York: Bell Publishing Co., 1980. Page: 6
13. Ross, Nancy Wilson. Three Ways of Asian Wisdom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. page: 57.
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2- Abraham, an Encyclopedia Article from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker
The name meaning "Father Brahm" seems to have been a Semitic version of India's patriarchal god Brahma; he was also the Islamic Abrama, founder of Mecca. But Islamic legends say Abraham was a late intruder into the shrine of the Kaaba. He bought it from priestesses of its original Goddess.1 Sarah, "the Queen," was one of the Godess's titles, which became a name of Abraham's biblical "wife."2 Old Testament writers pretended Sarah's alliances with Egyptian princes were only love-affairs arranged by Abraham for his own profit---which unfortuantely presented him as a pimp (Genesis 12:16) as well as a would-be murderer of his son (Genesis 22:10).
In the tale of Isaac"s near-killing, Abraham assumed the role of sacrificial priest in the druidic style,, to wash Jehovah's sacred trees with the Blood of the Son: an ancient custom, of which the sacrifice of Jesus was only a late variant. Jehovah first appeared to Abraham at the sacred oak of Shechem, where Abraham built his altar. Later Abraham built an altar to the oak god of Mamre at Hebron. Even in the 4th century A.D., Constantine said Abraham's home at the oak of Mamre was still a pagan shrine: "It is reported that most damnable idols are set up beside it, and that an altar stands hard by, and that unclean sacrifices are constantly offered."3
Bibliography:
1. Briffault, Robert. The Mothers (3 vols.). New York: Macmillian, 1927. Page: 3, 80.
2. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Vintage Gooks, 1958. Page: 163.
3. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Page: 335.
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Segment from the book, God is not Great, How Religion poisons everything, by Christopher Hitchens, pg. 54-55.
On Women and Sexism
A consistent proof that religion is man-made and anthropomorphic can also be found in the fact that it is usually "man" made, in the sense of masculine, as well. The holy book in the longest continuous usethe Talmudcommands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman. (This raises again the insistent question: who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him?) The Old Testament, as Christians condescendingly call it, has woman cloned from man for his use and comfort. The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the female. Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half the human race
is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of the female form and of female reproductive functions? And there may be someone who can explain the sexual and other cruelties of the religious without any reference to the obsession with celibacy, but that someone will not be me.
I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come: it is like seeing through the "let's pretend" of a child, but without the indulgence that comes from watching the innocent at play. The homicidal lunaticsrehearsing to be genocidal lunaticsof 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate
that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without ever having had a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradiseindeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at allbut it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.
Part 1.
Table of Contents
- Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets Introduction.
-"Sexism", an Encyclopedia Article.
- Dennis Mckinsey quote.
- Sexism, Chapter and Verse Examples
- Brahama, an Encyclopedia Article
- Abraham, an Encyclopedia Article
- On Women and Sexism in Christianity.
(Some of the Bibliography for these Article is incomplete, the rest can be found here at this link:
http://critiquesofchristianity.blogspot ... s-and.html
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Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets Introduction.
Thousands of popular fantasies and hidden facts are expounded in this Encyclopedia, where the complex subject of sexism is approached from both the historical and the mythic viewpoints. Standard encyclopedias usually omit such material, or give it ,a brief, uninformative note. There is need for a complete study of the many-faceted process of
transition from female-oriented to male-oriented religions in western civilization.
Our culture has been deeply penetrated by the notion that "man" -not woman-is created in the image of God. This notion persists, despite the likelihood that the creation goes in the other direction: that God is a human projection of the image of man. No known religion, past or present, ever succeeded in establishing a cV.'Tiplady ~;xless deity. Worship was always accorded either a female or a male, bccasionally a sexually united couple or an androgynous symbol of therl'l; _ but deities had a sex just as people have a sex. The ancient Greeks and ethers whose culture accepted homosexuality naturally worshipped homosexual gods. (See Hermes.)
Modern Christians take it for granted that they must revere the figures of a Father and a Son, never perceiving divinity in corresponding Mother and Daughter figures, as the ancients did. Though Catholics still worship the Goddess under some of her old pagan titles, such as Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Blessed Virgin and so on, their theologians refuse to admit that she is the old Goddess in a new disguise, and paradoxically insist on her non-divinity. (See Mary.)
The older concept of the female Holy Trinity ruling all cycles of creation, birth, and death in her Virgin, Mother, and Crone forms, was destroyed by Christians' attacks on her temples, scriptures, rituals, and followers. The church declared from the first that the Great Goddess "whom Asia and all the world worshippeth" must be despised, "and her magnificence destroyed" (Acts 19:27). This is virtually the only Gospel tenet that churches followed through all their centuries with no deviation or contradiction. It seemed necessary to hide the fact that Christianity itself was an offshoot of Middle-Eastern Goddess worship, skewed by the asceticism of Persia and India. (See Jesus Christ.) '
As a salvation cult, early Christianity based its scheme of redemption on the premise of female wickedness. Salvation was needed because there had been a Fall, brought about by archetypal Woman. Without the myth of Eve's defiance, there would have been no sin, hence no need for salvation or savior. (See Eve.) Fathers of the church declared that the original sin was perpetuated through all generations by every woman, through sexual conception and birth-giving. Woman's mysterious, devilish sexual magnetism seduced men into the "concupiscence" that, even within lawful marriage, transmitted the taint of sin to every man. (See Sex.) So said St. Augustine, and the church never
altered his opinion.
Throughout history we find clergymen advocating abuse of women, to express their horror of female sexuality and their conviction that all women deserve punishment for the primordial crime that brought death and damnation to man. Adam, representing all men, was less guilty than Eve, representing all women. St. Paul even regarded Eve as the only guilty one (1 Timothy 2:14). The tradition persisted up to-the present century, when the clergy, -if not advocating
active abuse of women, at least refrained Irom _too i:J1~¢h interference , with it. Some clergymen have been found to b'e \vife-batterers. Many still counsel women to be subservient to men, in accordance with "God's will." (See Sexism.)
Man's and God's attack on women was not usually justifiable as revenge for real injuries. Therefore the mythical injury of the Fall was essential to the early theological scheme. The practical g6ar\vgs J1pt, to prevent women from hurting men, but to prevent ~Qrr;lenJrom acting independently of men: from owning their own property, earning their own money, making their own ~exual choices, or raising their own children without interference. -
Patriarchal religion declared w?:r on pagan societies where motherhood was once considered the only important parental relationship; where women owned the land and governed its cultivation; and sexual attachments were made and unmade at women's discretion. (See Matrilineal Inheritance.) From a biological viewpoint, patriarchal religion denied women the natural rights of every other mammalian female: the right to choose her stud, to control the circumstances of her mating, to occupy and govern her own nest, or to refuse all males when preoccupied with the important business of raising her young. (See Motherhood.)
Such basic biological rights of the female were set aside by patriarchal human societies-although, at the dawn of history, the social role of male begetters was very differently conceived, in a way alien to modern patriarchal thought. (See Kingship.) Today's scholars habitually call all female and male deities of that ancient world "gods," as they also call humanity "man." Yet the supreme deity of that world was usually a Goddess, the creatress or Mother of the gods;
and the very word "man" used to mean "woman," an incarnation of the same lunar Mother, in its original language. (See Man.) Early Christian thinkers rightly perceived that destruction of the women's Goddess would mean a crushing blow to women's pride and confidence, since men's pride depended greatly on their vision of a God like themselves, only better. Women were not called daughters of this God, who gave men their souls. In the sixth century, churchmen
even denied that women had any w.lls.,
Forbidden by Christian conquerors to express their own faith, the women of Europe eventually adopted the men's faith perforce. Sometimes they were lured by specious concessions, which were afterward rescinded. (See Convent.) Sometimes they were coerced by Christianized husbands or overlords. The myths and secrets of women's spiritual past were buried, just as men buried the sheila-nagig figures of semi-pagan Irish churches, hoping they would never be
found. (See Sheila-Na-Gig.)
However, what Christian histories rarely_gillnit is that, after more than a thousand years of alternate violence and g\.lik, the western world still was not truly ..Ghris.ti.<lnizci. The ancient faith persisted, because every man was still born of woman and nurtured by woman, despite the theologians' insistence that a father was the only significant parent. (See Paganism.) This was mere verbal learning, as contrasted with the direct experience of infantile dependence on the mother. When it appeared at all, father-love seems to have been a somewhat less satisfactory artificial imitation of mother-love. (See Fatherhood.) ~ions between fathers and children the more dominant em_g.::. ~s fear. M~nFere enjoined from tb..e.pyjpit to instill " the fea of God" into their chilclr.en th oJJg~Lbarsh p!!!,J~nts. ~t of all ~lyJ:ather's P.unishm~ts: a terrible yision of eter@Lt~ebped out of men's fears. The Christian ell was the most sadistic fantasy ever to masquerade as fact. (See Hell.) Churchmen used it, not only to terrify naive congregations into compliance, but also to excuse the torture and burning of witches. Inquisitors said the eternal punishment of such heretics should begin in this life, continuing up to the victim's death. (See Inquisition.) </l
The religion of the Goddess and her sons and lovers, the old gods, came to be called devil worship because these deities were redefined as devils (when they were not ad pted into the Christian canon as P,Seudo-saints_). The link between "woman" and "devil" in the patriarchal mind was as old as the Garden of Eden story. (See Serpent.) It persisted even after the dawn of a more enlightened age brought the decline of organized persecution. However, the rack and stake were
replaced in the 18th and 19th centuries by more subtle abuses. aimed at suppressing women legally, politically, economically, and psychologically.
Clergymen helped by opposing women's education and supporting all physical or legal measures for keeping women "in their place." As Sir Hermann Bondi accurately observed, men made God their primary source for "the common and undisguised contempt for women enshrined in the three great Western religions, the basis for the cruel, inhuman and wasteful sexism still so rampant." Women's feelings of unworthiness and insecurity, even aberrations like masochism
and depression, often may be traced to training in a maleoriented religion, at variance with their own nature.
Recently, some-women have begun to seek better understanding of that feminine nature, buried as it was under western society's proliferation of masculine images and values. One interesting idea to emerge from this new research is, if women's religion had continued, today's world might be less troubled by violence and alienation. Gods, including Yahweh, tended to order their followers to make war; whereas the great mother Goddesses advocated peaceful evolution of civilized skills. Cooperation rather than exploitation was the matriarchal rule. (See War.)
Goddess worship usually entailed frank acceptance of the natural cycles of sexuality, birth, and death; and maternal concern for the welfare of coming generations. Love was not the abstract principle that "love of God" was to become. In the very process of worship it could be directly, intimately, and physically experienced. (See Karuna.) Certainly there was still a strong element of this Oriental-feminist concept in the medieval "heresies" that aroused the ire of the church.
(See Romance.)
, Perhaps the most important part of any religion is the direction it gives to interpersonal behavior patterns. The patterns evolved by women in honor of their ancient Goddess surely deserve close study today. As one of the Goddess's scriptures pointedly said, "What use are grand phrases about the soul on the lips of those who hate and injure one another? . .. Religion is kindness." (See Atheism.)
Traces of the "kind Goddess" are still to be found in a thousand hidden pockets of history and custom: myths, superstitions, fairy tales, folk songs and dances, nursery rhymes, traditional games and holidays, magic symbols, sagas, and scriptures both original and revised, apocryphal and otherwise-in addition to the valuable material recovered by archeologists, orientalists, and other scholars. Patterns emerge from comparative studies, which can be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle is far from complete; but many of its pieces are
here, in this book.
These Myths and Secrets are drawn from more than paganism. Biblical myths are especially significant, not only because they shaped the attitudes of western culture, but also because they were written and rewritten during centuries of transition from matriarchal to patriarchal systems. The later development of Christian myths contributed much to
sexist thinking. ~j)e, sexism was a primary_ product of the __G.hristian church. Patriarchal religions like udaism and Christianity established and upheld the "man's world" largely by an ela ol]k structure oHalsehood. Among the Secrets in this book are many surprising histoncal sec~ets that were covered up, whitewashed, or otherwise falsified through 1500 years when the church maintained a monopoly of literate records, and virtually wrote its own history to its
own order.
Some of the facts concealed by that Christian history have come to light in recent decades. Others are being kept secret even now, by religious organizations still dedicated to preserving a patriarchal society. Laymen and especially women are theoretically forbidden to investigate them. Nevertheless, they can be found out.
Naturally, the secret most deeply concealed by Christianized history was the many-named Goddess, the original Holy Trinity who created and governed the world, gave birth to its Saviors, sent her tablets of divine law to the prophets, and watched over every life from womb to tomb, according to pre-Christian belief. Today she is viewed as "mythic~!," having been' replaced by a God (equally mythical, but more acceptable to a male-dominated culture), who took over most of her attributes. It is not usually understood that the spiritual life of western man, and especially of western woman, was greatly impoverished by her violent suppression.
The unremitting warfare of the church against followers of the Goddess is a large part of what feminists now call our hidden history. Even though Christianity itself grew out of the once-universal religion of the Goddess, it was a matricidal son whose bigotry tinged every thought and feelif\g with woman-hatred. In the end it produced a society in which members of one sex invariably oppressed members of the other, and both came to regard this inequity as a natural state of affairs, ordained by a male "Creator." Matters were otherwise in the pre-Christian world where the "Creator" was more often a "Creatress." Through making God in his own image, man has almost forgotten that woman once made the Goddess in hers. This is the deep secret of all mythologies, and the fundamental secret of this book.
B.G.W.
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Sexism, an Encyclopedia Article from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker
The Catholic Encyclopedia Declares, " The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul."(1) This is a somewhat modified version of the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas, who insisted that every woman is birth-defective, an imperfect male begotten because her father happened to be ill, weakened, or in a state of sin at the time of her conception.(2) Knowing nothing of the human ovum, the church taught the doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas that a mother contributes nothing to her child's genetic inheritance, but acts only as "soil" for the male soul-bearing seed.3 Nevertheless, churchmen claimed the birth of a true freak was not the father's fault, but the result of "the heated and obstinate imagination of the mother during sexual intercourse.4
Fathers of the church were earnest woman-haters. St. John Chrysostom said men suffer "a thousand evils" from having to look at women; "the beauty of women is the greatest snare." St. Odo of Cluny refused to be ensnared; he said, "How should we desire to embrace what is no more than a sack of dung!" According to Waltar map, "Even the very good woman, who is rarer than the phoenix, cannot be loved without the loathesome bitterness of fear and worry and constant unhappiness." A 19th-century Anglican churchman said women are"intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and nature, weak in body, inconstant in mind, and imperfect and infirm in character."5 In the 1890s, the president of a leading theological seminary declared, "My Bible commands the subjection of women forever."6
So it did. Through teh centuries, the Bible supported sexist sentiments which were echoed by all churchmen. St. paul said: "The head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man" (1 Corinthians 11:3). St. Peter said in the Gospel of Thomas: "Women are not worthy of life."7 Clement of Alexandria quoted the words of Christ from the Gospel According to the Egyptians: "I have come to destroy the works of the female."8 He added: "Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman."9
Up to the modern era, clergy men continued to appeal to biblical authority to maintain the political subjection of women. "The clergy were often in the forefront of the fight against suffrage, dredging up quotations from the bible to prove that the natural order of things was female obedience to man.." Simone de beauvoir says: "For the Jews,Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is master by divine right, the fear of God will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female." As late as 1971 an Episcopalian bishop confirmed these views: "The sexuality of Christ is no accident nor is his masculinity incidental. This is divine choice." Feminists believe that even if the churches should destroy themselves in the effort, they will cling to their notion of male supremacy to the very end, for this was their primary foundation in the beginning.10 Theology's entire conceptual system was invented by men to serve the interests of men--and, not incidentally, to restrict and suppress the interests of women.11
Church fathers long ago laid down the principle of woman's guilt for the existence of death and sin. Augustine blamed the perpetuation of original sin on the "concupiscence" that united male bodies with female ones under any circumstances, including marriage.12 Christianity was the first religion to announce that it was sinful just to be alive, on account of having been sexually conceived and born of a woman.13 St. John Chrysostom commanded every Christian father to instill into his son " a resolute spirit against womankind. . . . Let him have no converse with any woman save only his mother. Let him see no woman."14
Sometimes the writings of Christian men revealed an almost hysterical fear of woman. her very glance could "infect, entice, bewitch." her eyes "poison and intoxicate the mind: yea, her company induceth impudency, corrupteth virginity, confoundeth and consumeth the bodies, athe goods, and the very souls of men. And finally her body destroyeth and rotteth the very flesh and bones of man's body." Vairus said women become witches because "they have such an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally. . . . And they are so troubled with evil humors, that out go their venomous exhalations, engendered through their illfavored diet, and increased by means of their pernicious excrements, which they expel."15
John Aylmer labeled all women "tale-bearers, eavesdroppers, rumor raisers, evil tongued, worse minded, and in every wise doltified with the dregs of the Devil's dung hill."16 Similar opinions have been offered by modern woman-abusers, such as the rapist: "I thought women were trashy, low down and scummy because that's what i had been taught."17
Andrew the Chaplain said woman is "by nature a miser, envious, a slanderer . . . Greedy, a slave to her belly, inconstant, fickle. . . . disobedient and impatient of restraint, spotted with the sin of pride and desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of secrets, notice ttoo much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never loving any man in her heart."18
John Scotus Erigena taught that human beings were once without sin and without sexuality but after they disobeyed god,, they were divided into two sexes. The sinless part was embodied in man, the sinful part in woman.19 Other theologians said woman was "the Churhe's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the devil's decoy"20 Official church literature said:
All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. . . . [T]he natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.21
Curiously enough, modern genetic research indicates that the truth may be something like the reverse of this view. The XY chromosome that produces a male is physiologically an "incomplete" female chromosome. Some individuals are born with an XYY chromosome abnormality, making them genetic super-males. They are said to be tall, below average in intelligence, and strongly disposed to criminal behavior.22
Tis would have surprised men like Orestes Brownson, who insisted that woman's "ambition and natural love of power" must be subject to masculine control, otherwise "she is out of her element, and a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, excepting thorugh a woman's influence.23 Such men never bothered to notice that their denunciations of women were self-contradictory; as in this case, for instance, if woman's love of power was "natural," then in exercising it she would be in her element, not out of it.
Martin Luther claimed the physical differences between men and women demonstrated God's plan for sexism. "Men have broad and large chests and small and narrow hips and more understanding than women who hae but small and narrow chests and broad hips, to the end that they should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring up children."24 But if their bearing and bringing up children wore them out, it was no matter, Luther said: "If women get tired and die of bearing, there is no harm in that; let them die as long as they bear; they were made for that."25
Schopenhauer, who detested women, found nothing likeable about their physical appearance: "It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race. . . . [T]he sympathies that exist between them and men are skin-deep only, and do not touch the mind or the feelings or the character."26 Hartley tends to agree that thanks to Christian tradition, "An extreme outward sex-attraction has come to veil but thinly a deep inward sex-antipathy, until it seems almost impossible that women and men can ever really understand one another."27
Those few Renaissance men who would speak on behalf of women were outside the church, and usually suspected of heresy, like Agrippa von Nettesheim, who wrote that women "are treated by the men as conquered by the conquerors,, but be any divine neccecsity, for any reason, but according to custom, education, fortune, and the tyrant's opportunity."
The tyranny of men prevailing over divine right and the laws of nature, slays by law the liberty of woman, abolishes it by use and custom, and extinguishes it by education. For the woman, as soon as she is born, is from her earliest years detained at home in idleness, and as if destitute of capacity for higher occupations, is permitted to conceive of nothing beyond needle and thread. Then when she has attained years of puberty she is delivered over to the jealous empire of a man, or shut up forever in a shop of vestals. the law also forbids her to fill public offices. no prudence entitles her to plead in open court.28
There was sex discrimination even in the penalties imposed for witchcraft. Female witches were more severely punished than male witches. A law of 1683 said that for the crime of causing death by witchcraft, a man may be hanged, but a woman must be burned at the stake. Men could with impunity kill their wives (e.g.., by beating) in the 1650s, but women were burned for killing their husbands, a crime defined as "petty treason."29
A self-perpetuating belief in woman's inferior intellect was fostered by the almost universal custom of keeping women out of schools, all but a few aristocratic ladies who could receive an expensive private education. Queen Elizabeth I of England was unsexed by several historians who thought she was too clever to be female. They claimed she died in infancy, and a boy was secretly raised in her place. The small minority of educated women were seldom accepted as such. On one occasion a learned lady was prsented as a curiosity to King James I, and he was told she was fluent in latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He only inquired, "But can she spin?"30
The church controlled most schools, and the church would have no truck with women unless it was unavoidable. St. Columkille made a rule that no woman could even be buried in the vicinity of a Christian church, alleging that this was the custom from Christianity's beginings. County Tyrone in Ireland still has a relig-na-man, "cemetery of women," located a half -mile from the church where only men were buried in the churchyard.31 Some churchmen opined that women didn't even have any souls to save. Ockham claimed women did have souls, and on that account should be allowed to vote in church councils. The pope instantly condemned this as heresy.32
Josaphine K. Henry castigated the churches for their consistently anti-female atiutueds over the centuries:
Has the Church ever issued an edict that women must be equal with man before the canon or the civil law, that her thoughts should be incorporated in creed or code, that she should own her ow body and property in marriage, or have legal claim to her children born in wedlock which Christianity claims is a "sacrament" and one of the "holy mysteries"? . . . No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to woman as is the Christian Church. It demands everything from her and gives her nothing in return. the history of the Church does not contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman. . . . Through Tyranny and falsehood alone is Christianity Able to hold woman in subjection.33
Indeed, women were better served by pre-Christian laws nearly everywhere. Under the ancient byzantine code, inheritance laws made no distinction between heirs on the basis of their sex; and although centuries of Christian revision, the laws freely allowed men to commit adulterer, though their wives could be imprisoned or beaten to death for it. until 1857, no English woman could obtain a divorce on any grounds without a special Act of Parliament, which meant only upper-class women with plenty of politcial leverage could even hope for a divorce.35
In 1835, a Mrs. CarolineNorton left her husband after he repeatedly subjected her to beatings, mental abuse, and infidelity. He kept his mistress in the same house with her. A court ruled that the wife need not return to the house, but the husband was give their three children because the wife had "condoned his actions" by staying with him through all his cruelties. in 1839, the Infants' Custody Act introduced a slight modification. At his own discretion, a judge in equity could allow separated mothers to keep children under seven years of age, or to have visiting rights to older children, provided the mother was not guilty of adultery.36 father suffered no such restriction, of course.
Women who refused to submit to the 'discipline" of marriage, but instead played the dangerous game of promising without delivering were known as jilts. Such women aroused the most violent outbursts of sexist sentiment, according to an old pamphlet:
Their tricks and devices are numberless, and not be paralleled by anything but their Ingratitude and Inhumanity; there indeed they exceed themselves; nothing in Nature being so perfectly brutish and cruel as one of these kind [sic] of Creatures . . . a Vermin so ravenous and malicious, and withal so sbtle and designing, so formally caste and hypocritically virtuous, and yet so scandalously common and impudently lewd, so proud, and yet so mercenary, and above all, so insolently ill natured, that in the short character of a Jilt, are comprehended all the Vices, Follies and Impertinences of the whole Sex. . . . In short, I cannot but fancy them a colony of Hell-Cats, planted here by the Devil, as a mischief to mankind.37
Noting that women often refused to play fair in the game for which men made all the rules, even Freud failed to transcend the sexist attitudes of his time. he wrote: " One cannot resist the thought that the level of normal morality is different for women. Their superego never becomes so unshakeable, so impersonal, so independent of its affective origins, as we demand it of a man. Critics since time immemorial have reproached women of certain character traits: that they exhibit less of a sense of justice than men do; that they are less prepared to submit to the great necessities of life." Since Freud regarded male domination as one of the great necessities of life, he should hardly have been surprised to find women resisting it. Simone de Beauvoir said every woman knows that "masculine morality, as it converns her, is a vast hoax. man pompously thunders forth his code of virtue and honer; but in secret he invites her to disobey it, and he even counts on her disobedience; without it, all that splendid facade behind which he takes cover would collapse."38
Since women weren't told the rules of the game, many of them became losers while they were still too young to figure it out for themselves. commenting on oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial, W.T. stead remarked, "If Oscar Wilde, instead of indulging in dirty tricks of indecent famiarity with boys and men, had ruined the lives of half a dozen innocent simpletons of girls, or had broken up the home of his friend by corrupting his friend's wife, no one could have laid a finger on him. the male is sacrosanct: the female is fair game."39
Though women were scorned for being "simpletons," they were even more violently scorned when they tried to develop their minds. Florence Nightingale's popularity inspired many women to seek educations in medicine, but male students ganged up on them. In 1870 a group of student doctors formed lines to prevent five women from entering classes in Surgeons' hall in London. medical examiners tried to embarrass female students with indecent questions. when women received high marks in examinations, they were passed over, and scholarships were awarded to the men immediately below their level.
It was the same in other professions. in 1879, Birmingham schoolmasters barred women from employment as teachers of small boys, on the ground that it would encourage 'immorality." Lawyers denied women admission to the Indds of Court. determined femenist efforts brought about admission of some women to classes at Queen's College in 1848; but the Bishop of London excluded women from Wheatstone's classes on electricity, because they had "congregated too abundantly" in Sir Charles Lyell's geology classes, keeping more deserving students (i.e. men) from finding places in the classroom. In the field of religion, the Church of england found it "unthinkable" that women should ever be admitted to the ministry.40
The basic fallacy of sexism in employment or education was pointed out by Christine Pierce: "We need not fear that women will do what they cannot do."41 If women were really unable to learn medicine, law, theology, science, or any other field of endeavor, ti would hardly have been necessary for men to exert such efforts to keep began to reved from view when women managed to receive education. But many men still clung to the belief that women must be less able to think than men.
In 1913 T.E. Reed wrote a book called Sex, Its Origin and Determination, to prove "scientifically" that women were biologically inferior to men. the author said cotus during an incoming tide always conceived boys, while cotus during an outgoing tide conceived girls--proving that the female was weaker, born of "waning" energy. Despite the fact that incoming and outgoing tides differed on every one of the world's coastlines, and infants conceived inland couldn't be identified withy any tide, the theory proved popular.42
In many ways, sexist thinkers have tried to pretend male dominance is "natural" or is a divinely ordained biological mandate. yet as other mamalian species demonstrate, such an arrangement could serve no biological purpose.
Any animal species in which males were biologically programmed to attack and injure the females would be at a disadvantage in terms of species survival, since mammalian young can't grow to maturity without healthy, competent mothers43 Thus it is found that, in most species, males are biologically inhibited from attacking females, even under strong provocation. And the one virtually unbreakable male animal taboo is any kind of interference between a female and the young she protects.
Karen Horney suggested that men's antagonism may have developed as a result of sexual envy: "The male is sexually dependent on the female to a higher degree than the woman is on him, because in women part of the sexual energy is linked to generative processes. Could it be that men, therefore, have a vital interest in keeping women dependent on them?"44 Judith Antonelli says, "Patriarchy is based on the 'phallacy' that the male is creator. Man's original awe and revrence of woman becomes, under patriarchy, resentment and hostility. The only way man can possess female power is through woman, and so he colonizes her, suppressing her sexuality so that it serves him rather than being the source of her power. . . . Patriarchy is indeed a male neurosis."45
Bibliography [NOT POSTED YET]
1. Evans, N.H.N., 180
2. de Riencourt. 227.
3. Rees, 227.
4. Shumaker, 95.
5. Bullough, 98, 187, 203.
6. Stanton, 194.
7. Malvern, 1.
8. Stone, 194.
9. Lederer, 162.
10. Stone, 236- 38.
11. Daly, 4.
12. Bullough, 117.
13. H.Smith, 250.
14. Laistner, 112.
15. Scot, 227.
16. Bullough, 202.
17. Goldstein & Kant, 85.
18. Murstein, 160.
19. de Riencourt, 227.
20. Tuchman, 211.
21. Kramer & Sprenger, 44.
22. Torrey, 178.
23. Bullough, 309.
24. de Lys, 179.
25. de Riecourt, 258.
26. Murstein, 261.
27. Hartley, 266.
28. Agrippa, 271.
29. Robbins, 165, 209.
30. Bullough, 223.
31. Joyce 3, 374
32. Coulton, 227.
33. Stanton, 205-7.
34. Soisson, 43.
35. Crow, 147.
36. Crow, 40-41.
37. de Vries & Fryer, 11-13.
38. Lederer, 93-95.
39. Pearsall, N.B.A., 231.
40. Pearsall, N.B.A., 43-45.
41. Gornick & Moran, 252.
42. Montagu, S.M.S., 92.
43. Fromm, 192.
44. Roszak, 110.
45. Spretnak, 401.
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"Status assigned to women in the bible is somewhere between that of household servant, and an outright slave. How any woman could defend the bible and even remotely support it is beyond me. The book is horribly male chavanistic and sexist" Dennis Mckinsey
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Chapter and Verse Examples of Sexism,
1st Timmothy 2:11-13:
Let a woman learn in silence, with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then eve.
1st Corinthians 14:34:
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission as the law says. If they want to enquire about something they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives submit to your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is the head of the church... therefore just as the church is subject to christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Genesis 3: 16 God said to the woman: Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall RULE over thee.
Eve was made from Adams rib.
1st Corinthians 11:9 : Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman was created for the man.
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Brahma, an Encyclopedia Article, from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.
India's patriarchal god, whose priests tried to establish wholly male dominated society and eliminate the Mother Goddess--who, nevertheless, remained the parent of Brahma as she was of the other gods. Though some of Brahma's scriptures tried to dissociate him from the Mother by calling him "the Birthless," yet the same scriptures incongruously referred to him as the Goddess's "Firstborn."(1)
The older dharma (holy law) said the worst of crimes was killing a woman or female child, because it meant killing unborn generations.(2) However, like most patriarchal systems, Brahmanism lifted the taboo on male aggression against females, and claimed that it was better to kill women than to insult Brahmans: "To revile and calumniate a worshipper of the Supreme Brahman is a sin ten million times worse than that of killing a woman."(3)
Like the medieval Christian church, Brahman priests made rules for rigid control of wives, and made their deity say any other kind of marriage was a sin that made the wife a whore and the children illegitimate, disqualified for religious observances.
Brahman marriage reversed the old system of matrilineal inheritance, insisting that property must pass from father to son. A widow without male children was entitled to inherit only if she "lives under the control of the relations of her husband, and in their absence under the control of her father's relations" ---that is, male relations---"this she entitled to inherit. the woman who is even likely to go astray is not entitled to inherit then only is she entitled to inherit. The woman who is even likely to go astray is not entitled to inherit the husband's property."(5) In practice of course, any or all of these male groups could easily declare the widow unfit to inherit and divide the property among themselves.
Brahmanism was essentially paternal ancestor-worship, possibly the root of similar paternal ancestor-worship instituted in israel by the legendary Abraham, whose name meant "Father Brahm." These was the same obsession with record-kepping. At every brahman wedding, long lists of paternal ancestors were recited, like the biblical lists of "begats." Brahman sons were taught to recite: "My father is my highest dharma. . . . My father is my Heaven. On my father being satisfied, the whole Universe is satisfied." Brahma also displayed the patriarchal god's usual insistence on exclusivity: "those who are averse to My doctrine are unbelievers and sinners, as great as those who slay a Brahman."(6)
It is clear that jewish patriarchy owed a debt to Brahman precedent. From the Far East came the legend of the golden Age of righteousness, when men were free from sin, had great longevity, and grew to gigantic size.(7) Comparable were the long-lived biblical patriarchs of the antediluvian age when there were "giants in the earth" (Genesis 6:4). The story of Cain and Abel was Indo-Iranian. Vedic poets used to beg their god to accept their sacrifices, and reject those of other arya (men).(8)
The legend of Jonah was prefigured by the Indian tale of Candrgomin, who endangered the ship he sailed on because a rival magician caused a storm and took the form of a sea beast to swallow him. (9)
Talmudic tradition adopted the typical Oriental belief in transmigration of souls; Adam's soul passed by transmigration into david, than into the Messiah.(10) Brahmanic revelation seemed to be part of the Messianic promise also. The Katha Upanishad said Brahma is realized in one's own soul dimly, as if seen in a mirror; but in the heaven of Brahma he is realized clearly, "as one distinguishes light from darkness."(11) The New Testament repeats the same message copied almost word for word: "For now we see through a glass (i.e. mirror) darkly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Brahman doctrine that a thousand years is one day of Brahma is repeated in Psalms 90: 4, and again in the First Book of Adam and Eve, where God explains that "five days and a half' for him means 5,500 years for men.(12)
Brahma is no longer popular in his own land. he is described as a theologian's god, whose worship never struck vital roots in the popular folk soil." He was used mainly to support the caste system. "Today Brahma is so relatively unimportant that only one or two temples in all India are reserved for his exclusive worship."(13)
Bibliography:
1. Upanishads, New York: mentor Books, New American Library, 1957. Page: 22.
2. O'Flaherty Wendy Doniger. Hindu Myths. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin books Ltd., 1975. Page: 293
3 Mhanirvanatantra, (Sir John Woodroffe, trans.). New York: Dover Publications, 1972. Page: 45
4. Ibid., 45, 58.
5. Ibid., 283.
6. Ibid., 215, 236, 16, 242.
7. Ibid., xlvii.
8. Dumezil, Georges. Archaic Roman Religion (2 vols.) Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 435
9. Tatz. Mark and Kent, Jody. Rebirth. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Co., 1969. Tacitus. Complete Works. New York: Modern Library, 1942. page: 146.
10. Waddell, L. Austine. Tibetan Buddhism. New York; Dover Publications, 1972. Page: 226
11. Upanishads, New York: mentor Books, New American Library, 1957. Page: 23.
12. Forgotten Books of Eden. New York: Bell Publishing Co., 1980. Page: 6
13. Ross, Nancy Wilson. Three Ways of Asian Wisdom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. page: 57.
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2- Abraham, an Encyclopedia Article from The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker
The name meaning "Father Brahm" seems to have been a Semitic version of India's patriarchal god Brahma; he was also the Islamic Abrama, founder of Mecca. But Islamic legends say Abraham was a late intruder into the shrine of the Kaaba. He bought it from priestesses of its original Goddess.1 Sarah, "the Queen," was one of the Godess's titles, which became a name of Abraham's biblical "wife."2 Old Testament writers pretended Sarah's alliances with Egyptian princes were only love-affairs arranged by Abraham for his own profit---which unfortuantely presented him as a pimp (Genesis 12:16) as well as a would-be murderer of his son (Genesis 22:10).
In the tale of Isaac"s near-killing, Abraham assumed the role of sacrificial priest in the druidic style,, to wash Jehovah's sacred trees with the Blood of the Son: an ancient custom, of which the sacrifice of Jesus was only a late variant. Jehovah first appeared to Abraham at the sacred oak of Shechem, where Abraham built his altar. Later Abraham built an altar to the oak god of Mamre at Hebron. Even in the 4th century A.D., Constantine said Abraham's home at the oak of Mamre was still a pagan shrine: "It is reported that most damnable idols are set up beside it, and that an altar stands hard by, and that unclean sacrifices are constantly offered."3
Bibliography:
1. Briffault, Robert. The Mothers (3 vols.). New York: Macmillian, 1927. Page: 3, 80.
2. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Vintage Gooks, 1958. Page: 163.
3. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Page: 335.
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Segment from the book, God is not Great, How Religion poisons everything, by Christopher Hitchens, pg. 54-55.
On Women and Sexism
A consistent proof that religion is man-made and anthropomorphic can also be found in the fact that it is usually "man" made, in the sense of masculine, as well. The holy book in the longest continuous usethe Talmudcommands the observant one to thank his maker every day that he was not born a woman. (This raises again the insistent question: who but a slave thanks his master for what his master has decided to do without bothering to consult him?) The Old Testament, as Christians condescendingly call it, has woman cloned from man for his use and comfort. The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the female. Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half the human race
is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of the female form and of female reproductive functions? And there may be someone who can explain the sexual and other cruelties of the religious without any reference to the obsession with celibacy, but that someone will not be me.
I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come: it is like seeing through the "let's pretend" of a child, but without the indulgence that comes from watching the innocent at play. The homicidal lunaticsrehearsing to be genocidal lunaticsof 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate
that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without ever having had a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradiseindeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at allbut it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way.
