Christianity against women

[bloom]

According to St. Augustine:

"Any woman who acts in such a way that she cannot give birth to as many children as she is capable of makes herself guilty of that many murders, just as with the woman who tries to injure herself after conception."

Conversely, "Throughout the whole of Oriental and Greco-Roman civilization abortion was permitted by law."


-Simone de Beauvior

______________________


The more I learn about "Saint' Augustine, the more ridiculous he sounds. He's the same one who popularized the "Original Sin" idea.


It's past time for the Catholic Church in particular to stop with their women-hating crap and let women be priests, let priests marry and the whole nine yards. It's time for the Catholic Church to get on board with birth control, as well, worldwide - wherever they have their influence.

And for people who haven't noticed - it's these same kinds of backward, regressive, anti-women ideas that BushCo promotes.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Fundamentalists in many religions put down women

and then point to other faiths to show how "backward" those faiths are. Meanwhile, progressives in all faiths understand that the feminine aspect of the Divine. So you have fundamentalist Christian churches who won't allow women to wear slacks or cut their hair, much less become ministers, who condemn all of Islam, when there are women who are not only ministers but senior teachers and heads of orders.

My hat is off to those Christians, especially in the Catholic Church, who are working for reason and enlightenment about women.

[Skittles]

3. in other words, they all suck

yes indeed

[darkmaestro019]

4. You beat me to it......

I was just going to say, that of all the Judeo-C religions, I hate Catholicism the LEAST, because at least they have forms of the Goddess still included in their traditions. And that seems to be why being Catholic is "Satanic" to a lot of fundamentalist types.

/is a Satanist, if I had to choose a word, though heathen is nice and all-inclusive and lacks the Wiccan-connotation that pagan has come to possess
//hates the quote thing but I think it's appropriate in this context
///hanging out at Fark way too much : )

[bloom]

6. "Saint' Augustine

influenced all of Christianity - essentially - unfortunately.


While it's nice that the Catholic Church gives a prominent spot to Mary - that doesn't make up for how they demonize women and therefore birth control. Or how they reserve ALL the powerful roles for men. Most, if not all, other denominations have moved beyond that.

I don't think that the Catholic Church can progress until they are willing to renounce "Saint' Augustine and some of the practices that flow from his ideas.

There are a lot of misogynists in history who are held up as "Saints" or who are put on coins or statues, or what have you. I think they all need to be denounced.

[omega minimo]

9. What do you call people who don't believe in 'Satan'? Might need a separate forum for that.....

:evilgrin:

[msongs]

2. religions invented by men are anti-women are they not? goddesses need not apply

in most cases.

mother earth is not well served by the fear based religions created by men for men and about men.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[Larkspur]

5. Augustine was a hypocrite too

He was a philanderer long after he converted to Christianity. When he wanted to rise up the Church's leadership positions, he quietly sent his mistress packing.

Christianity isn't the only religion that was/is misogynist. All 3 branches of the Abrahamic faith are misogynist as well as pagan religions of male dominated societies. It's the male supremacist ideology, regardless of religion, that is the real undercurrent of socially accepted misogyny.

[hyphenate]

7. This is a constant

in most religions, unless they are of the progressive type (and any further references refer only to those who continue to remain non-progressive). In the "old" religions--i.e., the Pagan religions that were most visible before the origin of the Christian religions, women had as big a place as men, including a large and visible number of female (and equal) deities (most notably, Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse), women held positions of power (including leadership of their country in a couple ) and benefits, including education, property ownership and the power to divorce.

Civilization has gone back wards in this regard with Christianity, founded by men, and controlled by men. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is included only in the "heretical" Gnostic Gospels/Bible, and not in the Xtian canon, and one of the reasons was that acknowledging the most popular follower of Jesus as Mary Magdalene would have elevated women to the same (if not higher) position than men, and that was anathema to the earliest popes, who knew a good thing when they saw it: a completely male controlled church, with no mention of power held by any woman along the way.

Da Vinci Code notwithstanding, the heritage of women in the Xtian world has always been secondary and always beneath the men.

There are other worldwide religions which do include women, including Hindu, and probably the one religion where women are dominant, Wicca. Of course with the latter, it is not unusual to see Xtians constantly persecuting Wiccans through the centuries, punishing them as anti-Christians, and associating them with the Devil or evil. Since the Devil is a Christian construct, the ignorance level of those who do persecute Wiccans has got to be extremely high, since Wicca is a totally NON-Xtian religion, but one based mostly in nature and pre-Xtian beliefs. But as we have seen so many times in history, ignorance hasn't stopped these intolerant assholes from pretty much torturing whoever they've wanted to, or kept them from forcing their agenda on the women they know, who are unable to find a way to get away from them.

In countries where traditional Christianity has become the major religion, there is a rather lopsided belief that demons are more often women (one place this is prominent is Ireland) than men, and that it is the banshees, the succubi and other such horrors who rob men of their manhood and other things, and are completely evil.

I think we can see, though, in a left-handed complimentary way, that men have feared women for most of history, because if these pissants actually gave us our due, we would be well ahead of them in almost every single way. :)

[mongo]

10. Well, maybe for some Dianic branches

the one religion where women are dominant, Wicca.

Wicca recognizes both the Goddess and the God, and it is the balance of the two that is worshiped.

[AnnieBW]

8. It Came From the Hebrews

From what I understand, the ancient Hebrews took over Canaan (what is now Israel and Palestine) by usurping all of the Goddess-worshipping tribes there. They killed the men and forced the women into marriage. There was apparently an underground Goddess movement in the Hebrew culture, mostly from these women who refused to give up their Goddess. There's a whole line in Isaiah where he tells them to stop giving cakes to the Queen of Heaven because it's blasphemous, and they basically tell him to f**k off, because it's integral to the fertility of the land.

The ancient Greeks were also very misogynistic, which is why they turned to young boys for pleasure. And, of course, the Romans were pretty misogynist, too. When Christianity was young, there were a LOT of women who were active in the early Church. Unfortunately, the men didn't like that too much, and changed a lot of things so that the women were shut out.

[bloom]

13. Other history

Yes - I've read about some of that, as well. The suppression of Goddess worship (that's what part of where the 'snake as evil' comes in - the serpent was associated with the Goddess as wisdom, for example).


There has been much that has been bad - Simone discusses various cultures and how some would allow women to own property, inherit property, transact business, etc. and a lot of cultures would not. That has been a big indicator of rights. And women before the Judeo-Christian era - in that area - are known to have been property owners/business-women.

This quote from Saint Augustine (in the OP) jumped out as a huge flag - his idea that women who are not bearing children constantly he called murderers. According to Simone, "It was Christianity which revolutionized moral ideas in this matter by endowing the embryo with a soul; for this abortion became a crime against the fetus itself".

That is not what had historically been the idea. The idea being that the Romans, for example, considered the unborn to be a part of the woman - not with any sort of separate identity. So while misogyny and control of women was pervasive - this idea was a new way to put that misogyny and control in religious terms. We still see vestiges of it in the "right to life" movement - which the Catholic Church in particular has pushed.

Simone also mentioned how the Pope had recently (this was written in the 50s) declared that if there was a choice to make between the mother and the unborn - that the unborn should live and the mother should die. That was not any sort of historical practice (as far as I know). And I think it's an especially serious indicator of misogyny.

And of course, it is such ideas as that that G.W.Bush and other Republicans argue for.

[mongo]

11. Maybe it's time to abandon the Catholic Church

and Christianity altogether.

Religion has caused more wars and more suffering than any single idea.

[hyphenate]

12. I think that it's the message

that's been mangled over time, not just the messengers. We KNOW that most of the messengers are in it for themselves--Paul, Constantine, the rest of the Apostles, the popes, etc.--but the major, enduring message is to have charity for all, goodwill and love, to help those who cannot care for themselves, that all are equal in the eyes of the lord, and other such, humanistic and non-legalistic teachings. It shouldn't matter whether Jesus Christ was divine or not--the fact that he was a philosopher of renown, who often told the rich where to go, who lived that message himself, makes it clear that his message was a sound one and a particularly powerful one. The politics of his time were pretty much a parallel to our own, a factor that has changed very, very little even through most of history, and that fact alone shows we really haven't come very far at all.

When you get into the fucked up legalistic atmosphere of the fucked up religious right, it's just that much clearer to see that men have abslutely no inclination to give up what they figure is their "birthright" and they will continue to muck up the message that JC preached and complicating it beyond repair.