Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Tuesday, January 11, 2000

The Churches and Women

Votes for women is not now opposed by the church, and some Christian feminists speak of Jesus as if women’s suffrage had been won by the Galilaean. Ordained women priests have now been granted, and accepted, the right to continue to propagate the Christian nonsense, as if propagating a repressive lie, as it is especially to women, was a triumph of spirituality.

Progressive women had to fight for years for elementary rights, and are still struggling for equal pay and status. Why was there no such struggle in nearly 2000 years of Christian redemption? Why is it only in the modern age of atheism and Paganism that the struggle began and the first hesitant steps made? Why is it that Christians, even female Christians, refuse to examine baleful Christian history?

What did Christianity do? It seemingly put a “halo” about women, and “taught us reverence for women.” Christians who claim they taught men a “reverence” for women are completely ignorant. They are parroting the usual lies about the Pagan vices and Christian virtues. Much of the lying depends on selective quotation, a technique that relieves the liar of the guilt of actually saying something false. Omission is as much a sin as commission, as Christians ought to know. Accordingly, they told us the Pagan had regarded women merely as “an instrument of his lust.” And the apotheosis of Mary uplifted the whole sex.

The truth was that Christianity brought degradation upon women. After the year 500 AD, Christianity suspended human life for a thousand years. In 300 AD, women were in a position of freedom and respect. From 500 AD, by which time Christianity was fully established and Paganism driven out or underground, women fell to a state of degradation unparalleled in Paganism. In the thousand or more years that Christianity dominated life, women remained degraded. How do Christians live with these truths—especially Christian women?

Christian apologists say:

It took the world a long time to realize the true implications of the Christian spirit.

No! It was the result of Christian doctrine, not any misapplication of nicer principles. It was morbid regarding about love and the legends of Genesis, purity in the sight of God and sad and unnatural dreams about the incorruptibility of heaven. The men who most drastically relegated women to an inferior position were the men whom the Churches regarded as their religious heroes and oracles.

Women Before Christ

Taking the position of women as a test of civilization, history divides into two, perhaps three counting recent advances—the period before Christ and the Christian Era. No Christian cares to compare the status of women in 400 AD with their status in 800 AD. Christianity found women free and respected, and degraded her for 1500 years.

Babylonia was a remarkably moral place with severe sentences for sexual misdemeanours, but there was not one law for the man and one for the woman as in Christendom. The only laws that seem unfair were that a retired priestess was burned alive if she went to a wine-shop for a drink, and the marriage-contracts commonly guarantee that the bride is a virgin. Otherwise, women had the same rights and the same obligations as men.

Women were protected from man’s “lust” by drastic laws which no section of Christendom ever knew! A man was burned alive for rape and was drowned for intercourse with his daughter-in-law. Faithful wives and husbands alike were valued, Babylonian adulterers jointly incurring a sentence of death by being bound together and thrown into the Euphrates. A mother and son were burned alive for incest. No woman was forced to prostitute herself at the temple, and there was probably no temple of that kind in Babylon.

When Egypt and Babylon were the chief civilizations—at least as long as subsequent history—women were free and independent or at least the equal of man in bondage to others. She was treated with the same justice and respect. In the Teutonic branch of the Indo-Europeans, women were also respected but, in the Greek and Roman branches women did not have the equality and freedom they had had in the north, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete.

In the Greek community, a woman’s place was the home. A special and secluded part of the home was set apart for the women, but they were not free to come and go as they pleased, unlike the men. A woman was property, carefully guarded from a defilement that lowered her value. Nevertheless, girls had a life of freedom before marriage. Like boys, they enjoyed athletic training, music, games and graceful dancing, but women were excluded from public life and had no part in the democracy of the Greek city states. Despite this, there was no note of contempt, no insinuation that she was unclean and useful only as a breeder of men, as in Judah. The “Medea” of the great tragedian Euripides is one of the most poignant presentations of the case for women ever given to the world. The Greeks also had the poetry of Sappho.

In Crete, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, women had been free and respected, then, for a few centuries in Greece, she becomes dependent and inferior, though not degraded or vilely used, for most Greek writers still treat her with respect. At the dawn of the Golden Age of Athens, a movement for her proper emancipation begins.

A movement for the emancipation of women from grievances far lighter than those of a century ago in Britain and America began in Greece nearly two thousand five hundred years ago. Athens was ruined before it succeeded, yet its ideals continued. Amongst the early Romans, the man had a despotic power over the woman, though it soon disappeared, unlike the poor treatment of women amongst the Jews or Hindus.

The chief Greek writer about the time of Christ, Plutarch, maintained that woman was mentally and morally equal to man, and ought to have, as Plato had said, the same education. He denied that the moral law should be interpreted more liberally in the case of man than of woman. The most influential Greek writers endorsed this, but it completely disappeared when Christianity became the religion of Europe, and it did not reappear until skepticism about Christianity spread through the civilized world.

The last glimpse we have of Pagan Greek culture, before it is lost in a Christianized and barbarized world, is the picture of the female philosopher Hypatia, taking a leading part in the life of the city of Alexandria, and rising high above her contemporaries through her culture and personality. The murder of Hypatia by a Christian mob was a fitting allegory of the eternal murder of the hope of women by Christianity. That may seem a harsh sentence, but the historical facts must give Christian women ground for reflexion.

Christian propaganda divides Roman history into two parts: a first part, until a century or two before the birth of Christ, when women were virtuous but slaves, and a second part when women were free but wicked. The women of the Roman Republic, in its earlier centuries, were chaste and virtuous. Women were the property of the men. The law did not enter a Roman’s house. He had power of life and death over his wife, his children, and his slaves. Small wonder that the wife and daughters were “virtuous.”

Yet, women were more secure than than in Judaea. One of the Roman historians, Valerius Maximus claims there was no divorce in the Roman Republic for five hundred and twenty years after its foundation! The Jewish civilization was practically a contemporary of the Roman, and a record of women’s experience in the two would be an instructive document. Roman women were not confined in special quarters of the house, were not forbidden to go out to dine or to the theatre, and had no separate places in the temple. They were treated with respect at home and outside.

Anyway, Roman patriarchal tyranny was breaking down long before the time of Christ. Greece had existed only a few centuries—not fifteen hundred years, like Christianity—when it started a movement for the emancipation of women. Rome, similarly, existed some three or four centuries when its women began a formidable movement for emancipation and admission to political life.

In the second century before Christ, in Rome crowds of women obstructed the way of opposition senators and loudly demanded their rights. Their greatest opponent, Cato the Elder, the personification of the old Roman discipline, is reported to have accepted:

A man who beats his wife or his children lays impious hands on that which is most holy and most sacred in the world.

Christian writers ask us to gasp at the crimes of Nero or Elagabalus, but never mention that far more of the rulers of the Empire were good and successful, and perhaps as many were good people but unlucky or incompetent.

They grossly exaggerate the vices of Messalina and Faustine and they never tell that there were ten good Pagan empresses for every bad one, and say even less about the perversions of Christian empresses and the Popes. They quote S Jerome about the virtue of a score of his Christian pupils but ignore his assurance, in the same letters, that the Christian world was vicious and corrupt.

There was no valid contrast of Pagan vice and Christian virtue. The notion that at the adoption of Christianity the world passed from an era of vice to one of virtue, from a period in which women were toys of “brutal lusts” to a period in which they were respected because of their Christian virtues, is a fantastic and unjustifiable fiction.

The Clergy and Women’s Struggle

Modern Christianity has not discovered a new meaning in the words of Jesus, but has disowned his teaching. The medieval and Catholic doctrine of monasticism is a perfectly sound implication of Christ’s teaching. Jerome and Athanasius, and all genuine monks and nuns, did exactly what Christ advised and what leading Essenes did. Christians reject chunks of the teaching of Jesus and Paul as cheerfully as they reject the wrong prediction of the end of the world—soon. Christian teaching—the teaching of Jesus and Paul, both derived in their extreme ideas from the Essenes, but ultimately from the Jewish scriptures—implied that women were inferior, that their moral weaknesses handed the race over to the devil and lost us paradise, and that their sweetest charms are baits on the devil’s hooks.

The emancipation of women was impossible as long as people really believed the teaching of Jesus and Paul. A Christian preacher once began a sermon with a quotation from Paul about the status of women, continuing:

That is where Paul and I differ.

Did he not consider, then, that upholding the institution that had deliberately degraded women for a thousand years, on the grounds of the quotation he disagreed with, was wrong? Not a chance! No Christian wants the boat rocking. A local leader of the Anglican Church once described Bishop Jenkins, then a controversial Archbishop of Durham, as being clever but not wise. He meant that Jenkins should have been wise enough to keep his cleverness to himself, so that the Christian boat was not rocked.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, David F Strauss, the writer of the famous critical “Life of Jesus,” confessed bitterly that his own critics had said it would have been more decent to have written his work in Latin. Then the ordinary Christian punter could not have read it—it would have been kept among the ranks of the Christian professionals, who mostly know the whole shebang is candy floss. Modern professional Christians like to seem progressive, but would carry much more conviction if they campaigned to get their beloved churches to acknowledge and reject their own odious history, based as it is on Christian principles.

From the fifth to the fifteenth century, from the death of Hypatia to the time of Petrarch at least, no one had a good word to say for women. Not a priest or writer in Christendom wrote a syllable of protest against the disgraceful injustice. The literary men of the Renaissance began to raise women—the women of their class—to a position of equality, and the Renaissance was the rebirth of Paganism and skepticism. Then came the Reformation and the attempt to emancipate women was at once crushed.

Protestantism was as prejudiced against women as Catholicism. The opinions of feminist writers about the effect of the Reformation vary—many letting their Christian sympathies overrule their feminism. What did women get from the Puritans of England or New England? From the Calvinists of Switzerland? From the Lutherans of Germany and Scandinavia? Nothing! Protestantism smashed the tyranny of Rome but attempted to set up a tyranny of its own. Luther hit at the Catholic glorification of virginity and all the hypocrisy caused by it, but had no more respect for women, saying:

No gown worse becomes a woman than the desire to be wise.

As stereotypes of the ideal German woman, Protestantism set up the “three K’s” of Kirche, Kuche and Kinder—church, kitchen and children.

In England, in the Elizabethan age, a tiny minority of educated women had more freedom, socially, though they lost their last hold on public life. But their new freedom was because in England the Reformation and the Renaissance occurred together. The Reformers, through a statute of Henry VIII, forbade “women and others of low condition” to read the Bible. The Humanists invited them to read.

In 1820 Frances Wright, a Deist, and pupil of the British Agnostic Robert Owen, entered the States. She was joined by Ernestine L Rose, a Polish Jewess who had cast off all theology, by Lucretia Mott, a Quaker whose views were regarded as “heresy” even in the Society of Friends, by Abby Kelly, another Rationalistic Quaker and by the sisters Grimke, also Quakers. For fifty years, the clergy of America were the most deadly enemies of this movement, basing their opposition expressly upon the Bible.

Three of the leaders of the movement in America, Mrs Cady Stanton, Mrs Gage and Miss Susan B Anthony, all Agnostics, have described it minutely and conscientiously in their monumental “History of Woman’s Suffrage.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, describing the wrongs of women in 1850 AD in Boston, the most enlightened city of the United States in its day, writes:

Women could not hold any property, either earned or inherited. If unmarried, she was obliged to place it in the hands of a trustee, to whose will she was subject. If she contemplated marriage, and desired to call her property her own, she was forced by law to make a contract with her intended husband by which she gave up all title or claim to it. A woman, either married or unmarried, could hold no office of trust or power. She was not a person. She was not recognized as a citizen. She was not a factor in the human family. She was not a unit, but a zero, in the sum of civilization.

The status of a married woman was little better than that of a domestic servant. By the English Common Law, in force in Boston, her husband was her lord and master. He had the sole custody of her person and of her minor children. He could punish her “with a stick no thicker than his thumb,” and she could not complain against him.

The common law of the State held man and wife to be one person, but that person was the husband. He could by will deprive her of every part of his property, and also of what had been her own before marriage. He was the owner of all her real estate and her earnings. The wife could make no contract and no will, nor, without her husband’s consent, dispose of the legal interest of her real estate.

She did not own a rag of her clothing. She had no personal rights and could hardly call her soul her own. Her husband could steal her children, rob her of her clothing, neglect to support the family, she had no legal redress. If a wife earned money by her labour, the husband could claim the pay as his share of the proceeds. (“History of Women’s Suffrage,” 3:290.)

To appreciate the root of these degrading laws, take a look at the position of women in Jewish society in the fourth century BC, described in a book, “Leviticus” 12:1-5, written by Jewish priests setting up a religion to make themselves rich and priviledged as long as they kept order for the Persian kings.

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and borne a man child, then she shall be unclean seven days, according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean. And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days, she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled. But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation, and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying three-score and six days.

What had altered in almost 2500 years? From the start, for the God of the Jews and Christians, women were inferior. Her parents handed her over to a man who became her despotic lord and master. She was “unclean” about ten times in twenty years, to say nothing of shorter periods. She had no property, no personality. Her husband could divorce her when he willed, she could not divorce him when she willed. Her husband could take a second wife or a concubine or dally with whores. Rebecca had to disguise herself as a prostitute if she wanted a change (“Genesis” 38:14). And when she had fulfilled the whole Law, she was peppered with spiteful aphorisms (“Proverbs,” “Ecclesiastics”) about her malice and odiousness.

Those who started the female revolt and carried it through were overwhelmingly non-Christians. Few Christian women had ever heard of Fanny Wright or Abby Kelly or Ernestine Rose and the others. None knew that pastoral letters circulated amongst the American clergy had highlighted “the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury.”

The recovery of women had no help from Christianity, but only triumphed when allegiance to Christianity had weakened sufficiently. Degradation was lifted from women, not by Christian bishops, but mainly by critics of Christianity. No Christian clergyman raised a finger in the emancipation of women until it had so far succeeded that the clergy had to save their faces by joining it. As soon as it had become respectable, ministers were converting to the new cause by the score. Suddenly, Christianity was the only friend women had ever had! No amount of strained apology from old-fashioned Christian feminist writers can lessen this.

In Britain, the pioneers were Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Wright, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau—all Rationalists—supported by Godwin, Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, G J Holyoake and J S Mill—all Agnostics or Atheists. In Germany the work was done by Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Buchner, Engels, Bebel, Liebknecht and Luxembourg—all Atheists. In France it was Sieyes and Condorcet—Atheists—who first pleaded for the emancipation of women, and George Sand, Michelet, Saint-Simon, and Fourier—all deep-dyed heretics—who raised the plea again in the nineteenth century. In Scandinavia, Ibsen and Bjornson and Ellen Key—all Rationalists—led the protest.

A time will come when women will burn the figures of Christ and Paul as propagators of untold oppression and suffering to women, and they will look to a female principle—a priciple of life not death.

Minority Cultures and History

NeoPagans know better than most about cultural oppression. Minorities, oppressed on the basis of some difference, that they cannot or do not want to lose, are cultural minorities, and the acceptance of minority cultures as beneficial to societies, comes largely from the oppressed—racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities—seeking a place of esteem in society in which they can feel a pride. This pride will allow them to enter the wider sphere of their former oppressors or critics and be accepted as people of value. They hope, by establishing a cultural pedigree, to raise their status.

If they succeed, then the minority has become recognised within the society as an acceptable subculture with the same rights as everyone else, and are no longer considered deviants or inferior beings. Evolution like this is a continuing process in western societies when refugees and oppressed minorities have been admitted successively, providing us with a diverse, interesting, changing and constantly stimulating culture.

In their desire to follow this evolutionary course, minorities might distort the contribution of their culture to history. The black community set out to show black African people entering and changing history, thus contributing to modern culture—admirable when it is true, but often based on negligible or non-existent evidence. Feminists want to do the same, seeking women of influence and power pulling the puppeteer’s strings in every era.

A minority’s historical background does help give a sense of belonging and rootedness, and so helps members of a subculture to identify, but the background must be historically accurate. Suitable historical figures will be promoted and serve some purpose but the overall exercise of trying to find what is not there can be demoralising rather than uplifting.

And surely it also defeats the valuable historical fact and indeed argument today that, for centuries or millennia, the minority was oppressed. Is the feminist argument that talented women kept emerging from their oppression but their achievements were suppressed by men? They were allowed, then, to display their talents but were ignored. That is distasteful but not as distasteful as the women being prevented from practising their talents, a far greater degree of oppression. Naturally both happened, but it is more true and worse that women were not allowed to emerge, whatever talents they had—and especially if they were not middle class.

If the minority is a recent one, a lot of thrashing around in the history pot will not turn up much in the way of precedents unless they be general examples of deviants or innovators pressing their way in an adverse society, and there is not much original in that.

The proper argument for these is the purer one of their value to society, to culture precisely as eccentrics and deviants fulfilling our need for variety and the unusual. Spain is a wonderful country with a distinctive atmosphere made up of its own history and culture. But let it lose its tapas in favour of beefburgers and it has slipped further into the mire of boring conformity. Only idiots go to foreign places to experience what they can experience on their own street corner. As Tom Clark puts it:

We don’t want the MacDonaldization of society which cultural homogeneity would bring.

The fact that our neighbours’ beliefs and practices disconcert us is part of the cultural stir that benefits us. Out of it often comes a whole new set of concepts and inspirations that lead us on to better solutions to social or artistic puzzles.

Revisionist accounts of the past are unnecessary and ultimately self-defeating attempts to rewrite history for partisan purposes. And any historical revision to promote minority self-esteem has to be accepted in the wider community of opinion, else it will only undercut the credibility of those proposing it. When a fraudulent history is found out, the effect can only be discouraging to members of the minority and risable to outsiders, thus ending or delaying acceptance by the majority.

Standards of History

What standards do we use to judge the factual truth of history? The answer is that we use the scientific method. The historian looks up all the relevant facts, assesses them and devises a hypothesis to explain them. Science aims for objectivity but, of course, it is impossible for a human being to be purely objective. The researcher’s background and education predispose them to certain views, so that interpretation is slanted in some way, however slight it might be.

Furthermore, all of the facts are never available, and often the historian is dependent on secondary sources which have their own biases already built in. It is in judging these difficult and incomplete cases when the historian is most susceptible to bias and these are often the ones in dispute, because the minority will assert that the sources have themselves been biased or deliberately falsified.

We are, of course, talking here about genuine differences of opinion and not cases where someone sets out to prove something and does so by selecting some evidence and suppressing other evidence. This is the danger to which we referred, because as soon as someone presents all the evidence, the selection will betray its bias.

Definition of terms is another arena for historical squabbles. Cleopatra came from the incestuous Greek family of a former general of Alexander the Great. She was a Greek and therefore not black unless one wants to define “black” as meaning having some black blood however small a proportion. In that case, Cleopatra was quite possibly black. The Ptolemy family had ruled Egypt for 300 years and in that time it does not seem unreasonable to think that Egyptian blood entered the predominantly Greek bloodline.

Truth is literally neither black nor white, and the sooner black and white are accepted as shades of grey, the better for the community of the human race. Even though the questions surrounding historical objectivity may never be resolved, the arguments and opinions of the contending parties are united by being in a discourse with common ground.

Since ultimately the argument is one of acceptance of a minority position, it is decided by society at large and has to be able to convince people who started out biased. It helps if the members of society are trained to assess such arguments and, when they are sincerely offered, not to be frightened of them.

In our Judaeo-Christian society, they are not, because any such training would rapidly cut the foundations from the religion which society’s leaders consider its bulwarks. Not surprisingly some of the worst conflicts of modern times, as of the past, are conflicts of religion, many involving Christians and indeed many being between Christians.

Of course, there is a difference involved in “re-writing history,” if we agree that what we are doing is writing mythologies rather than historically valid facts. Mythological romances are a way of expressing cultural and psychological truths rather than factual ones, but it is dishonest and often dangerous to pretend that one is the other.

Christians have a set of myths, which over the centuries have accumulated a vast literature of interpretation. As pointers to moral truths and models of humane behaviour these are extremely valuable, but Christians have been led to believe they are real historical truth, not the mythological background to an ethical system. Christians today believe a load of historical nonsense and it has never stopped them from being murderously intolerant. Most other mega-religions seem the same.

Take a lesson from what we see: Anyone who would re-write history will be obliged to re-live it.

NeoPagans and matriarchs will face our history with its warts and will not be discouraged. It is our image of the future that is more important.

The Adelphiasophism of Radical Feminist Christians

All of the world’s people are the children of God, yet the Bible says only those who have received Jesus as Saviour are the children of God (John 1:12; l John 3:1-10; Rom 8:14-17), and this despite God being the Creator. For Christians, membership in God’s family is by grace alone. Christians are those who have been adopted as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ (Eph 1:5).

Dorothee Soelle, from Germany, calls for a feminist revolution in society to replace what she sees as corrupt patriarchal structures that oppress women. She calls for a mystical union with God like that envisioned by Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century heretic. In her book, “The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity,” Soelle writes:

It is meaningless… to use as a point of departure for our theology statements like “Christ is the Son of God” or “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… “ This kind of deductive language is dying out in theology… even though fundamentalist Christians are doing their best to keep such language alive… Theology begins with experience and sets experience over against the promise of a whole life, the promise of the Kingdom of God… Redemption is not the granting of salvation to a specific individual. It is instead an occurrence that takes place in this world and for everyone of this world… Protestantism has always stressed human sinfulness and our inability to change the conditions of our lives… It is internalized helplessness… why is it that human beings honour a God whose supreme quality is power, whose interest lies in subjection, and who fears equality? These are phallocratic fantasies.

Soelle also celebrates the rebellion of Eve as liberation and suggests that people read the story as a “coming out… Without Eve, we would still be sitting in trees. Without her curiosity we would not know what knowledge was.”

Soelle rejects the concepts of obedience, sacrifice and the yielding of self. She proposes instead solidarity, unity, oneness with all life, oneness with the All that is God. It is…

…not a matter of a distant God exacting sacrifice and self denial, but rather a matter of agreement and consent, of being at one with what is alive… When this happens, solidarity will replace obedience as the dominant virtue… There is “one world” we have to believe in; there is a universal “wholeness”…

Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, from Cuba, replaces the concept of the “kingdom of God” with the “kindom” of God, because the former is a…

…sexist word that presumes that God is male… and the concept of kingdom in our world today is both hierarchical and elitist. The word kindom makes it clear that when the fullness of God becomes a day-to-day reality in the world at large—we will all be sisters and brothers—kin to each other.

Diaz is a theologian concerned with liberation as it relates to Hispanic women. In her book, “En La Lucha,” she writes,

For Latinas to talk about salvation, liberation and the coming of the kindom of God are one and the same thing. Liberation involves freedom, faith community and justice… mujerista theology does not shrink from claiming that the fusion of Christian, Amerindian, and African religious strands operative in the lives of Latinas may be good and lifegiving… The history of Christianity shows orthodox objections to syncretism have less to do with the purity of the faith, and more with who has the right to determine what is to be considered normative and official… To insist on imposing the divinity of. Jesus as the only true and relevant expression of the divine for people who believe differently or for whom such claim is irrelevant, shows a lack of respect for a people whose religion includes other claims…

Chung Hyun Kyung, from Korea, says, “I feel like my bowel is Shamanist; my heart is Buddhist; my right brain is Confucianist and my left brain is Christian.” In her book, “Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology,” Chung speaks of God as a “life-giving spirit everyone can encounter within themselves and in everything that fosters life… and that is all-embracing.” She also insists that the Church must “move away from Christo-centrism” and embrace “survival-liberation centered syncretism.”

Her religion, she says, “revolves around the rhythm of the cosmos, the here and now on earth.” She rejects the “sacrality” of the Bible and denies the Canon as “a guarantee of truth.” She ofers her trinity of goddesses—Kali, Kwan In and Ina—which she has fused with her Christian tradition along with the concepts of yin and yang and chi (the universal life force).

Feminism and Love of the “Unreal” God

A Catholic priest, Manfred Hauke, in God or Goddess? Feminist Theology: What Is It? Where Does It Lead? writes that feminist theology—merely a form of Marxism—undermines the basic dogmas of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. John J Reilly, another Catholic apologist, believes he is warning the innocent lambs not to be deceived over Christian feminist theology, but actually does a good job of summarizing some of what is wrong with Christian belief. Feminist Christians:

• are pantheistic,
• reject a transcendent God, as justifying hierarchical domination in the world, when it simply projects patriarchy—the tyranny of men over women—on to God,
• reject Jesus as the incarnation of God, because feminists take it that any God must already be incarnate in the world, and because no just god could ignore half the human race, the female half,
• reject the apostolic succession and ordination as a sacrament because they extend intolerable old beliefs into today.

Feminists criticize Christianity because Christians churches teach that wome are inferio to men and that the body is sinful, and absurdity because to believe in God as creator necessitates a belief that He made people’s bodies as they are, and with the functions they have. Different sexual organs did not arise as the work of the Devil. If these utterly stupid beliefs have to be part of Christianity, then they automatically mean no woman should be a part of it. To be a part of it is to be gulled by the patriarchal scam.

Reilly says the weird sisters of American theology are:

Mary Daly, the post-Christian ex-nun, Rosemary Radford Ruether, the “moderate” who would retain the Church as a front for social liberation of various kinds, and Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, who edifies her readers by rewriting Gospel passages to say what they should have said.

JJ kindly puts it succinctly for us, but he is not bothered by feminist theology, for, having rejected the authority of the Church, it is undergoing typical sectarian fissure. Utterly oblivious to the fact that any coin has two sides, he says, “ideas are either true or false, and if you act on the assumption that false ones are true, then your projects will miscarry”. He believes feminist theology is false, and cannot begin to comprehend that patriarchal Christianity itself was wrong all along. It lost the intellectual debate at the outset, instead inventing the whole pseudo-scholarship of theology to attempt to justify its appeal, which was really based purely on the woman’s love for a son, and the terrible loss she feels when a son is unjustly killed. It continues to corrupt people and institutions, remaking them in its own image of fraud and lies. Truth will assert itself and the power of the churches to corrupt will then disappear.

Ideas might be true or false, but JJ gives us no reasons for thinking the ideas of the Catholic church are true, unless it is that people are leaving Catholicism to go to evangelical churches. He bases this on the Catholic feminists and not on the attraction of the evangelicals for neurotic Christians.

The Catholic Church knows that feminist theologians, whether men or women, do not want the Church reformed. They want it dead. If this is true, it is something that the feminist theologians should be told. They seem to think that something can be made out of Christianity. If feminists really want it dead, they are right. A profoundly patriarchal religion like Christianity cannot be salvaged. Theology is a Latin name for patching up torn dogmata. The patriarchal character of Christianity is an irreparable rip in its fabric. These clever women would be cleverer if they gave up their religion of indoctrination and turned to a religion of reason and Nature.

”Has Christianity reinforced the subjection of women? Yes, Yes and Yes, again”.(Don Cupitt, “Crisis of Moral Authority”(London: SCM, 1972))

For many women, sexism is one of the primary reasons why they are ceasing to link their secret, spiritual lives to a doctrine of God encoded in a set of patriarchal directives. Rosemary Radford Ruether in 1990 said that Feminism rejected Christianity’s ethical claims as well as its claim to truth. Christianity with its prohibitions, indoctrination, old values of degradation and otherworldliness, has reached the limits of its truth.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent account of the history of women in the priesthood, condemns “a long tradition of Christian misogyny which has constituted one of the major failings of the Churches over the centuries”.

Women’s voices assert that the Christianity that taught male primacy is ceasing.

The radical feminist consensus is that spirituality is above theological doctrine, and that God is to be made a unifying symbol that expresses all that spirituality requires of us. God occupies no transcendency and humans fall into heavens of their own making.

Luce Irigaray, author of “An Ethics of Sexual Difference,” believes that the divinity of women has been hidden. It must be rediscovered and redefined in order to enter further into womanhood. Women must now fashion for themselves a God that is the fulfilment of their sex. She fights against any falling back upon phallocratic and patriarchal monopoly of values. But her vision does not extend to The Goddess.

The Christian has no god of the feminine sex, and has not provided fulfilment and a path of hope for women. Only thus will it be possible to establish as concrete qualities of good those attributes belonging to women, and to rediscover the love of a real God as a haven for women.

In the words of Simone Weil:

In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God… When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real.

Weil was certainly not talking about any Goddess but her metaphors are apt.

Women Resist Christianity’s Patriarchal Elements

Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), says she wants “women of faith” to assert that they were fully equal in the eyes of God and entitled to respect. They should distance themselves from patriarchal elements in the church and raise their voices to alter sexist language. Women make up half of the membership of their churches but are often banned from ordination.

Doubtless this is a legitimate call for “women of faith” but the absurdity is the call to them to distance themselves from patriarchal elements. The churches, especially these that still prevent half the human race from having full rights before their paper God, are patriarchal from baptism to unction and resurrection to ascension.

What is the attitude of a woman of a church like this to the God that she worships? Has he deliberately kept her and her forebears in subject positions? If so, why do they think he deserves such respect that they want to take up the chalice themselves? If these “women of faith” are as upset as they should be by millennia of bad treatment, they should be leaving the church in droves and seeking something better that they can build themelves.

Do they appreciate that before they became besotted with the surrogate son, they had temples and priestesses of their own to the Goddess of their own, and a Goddess who was far more real and important than the bearded old fellow living his lonely but only imaginery life in oblivion, or His ahistoric son?

Ireland’s pro-choice and feminist views upset many women, and to make such a suggestion would perhaps see her drummed out of office despite her long tenure. Though she is a leading voice in public debate on abortion rights, welfare, poverty, lesbian and gay issues, and working conditions overseas, she dare not suggest that American matriarchs should return to their natural religion.

The right wing nutters are already gunning for many NOW members, especially those supporting abortion. Ireland has warned against a fundamentalist Christian faction that, since the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, has advocated a brand of belief “antithetical to women’s equality.”

Though Ireland seem to be more inclined to the views of her skeptical father than her Christian mother, she believes, “We’re really connected in a grander way.” Indeed, we are, through the Goddess Nature with whom the whole of creation shares an umbilical cord.

The rector of the church where Ireland made her address explained that “people do not want answers, they want a spiritual journey.” Adelphiasophists suggest they start out now on a completely new spiritual journey, and one far more exciting than the turgid claptrap they have endured throughout their own and many others’ lives.

Goddess Worship

According to Starhawk, a feminist and a practicing NeoPagan,

The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world.(“The Spiral Dance” (New York: Harper & Row 1989), 23. )

Radical feminist thought is based on the great round, the cosmic egg, the wheel of time, the infinite womb. The circle is a feminine sign—the symbol of oneness, the cosmos, eternity and the sun. The Goddess Nature is an unbroken circle, encompassing all reality. The circle also forms a sacred ceremonial space within which all are equal.

American Indians, like Adelphiasophists and most NeoPagans reject the cross in favour of the ring, the circle or the disc. They believe that everything the Great spirit does is done in a circle. The canopy of the sky is round and the earth is round like a ball. The wind in its greatest power, whirls. The seasons form a great circle in their changing and return. The sun comes forth and goes down. The moon does the same. Both the sun and the moon are round. Birds make round nests. Teepees are round like the nests of the birds and they are always set in a circle. The world’s nations form a nest of many nests. A person’s life is a circle from childhood to childhood. And so it is in everything where power moves. Power came to the Indians from the sacred hoop of the nations and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished.

Europe was once inhabited by a matriarchal, egalitarian society. Europeans worshipped a matrifocal, sedentary, peaceful, art-loving Goddess 5,000 to 25,000 years before the rise of the first male-oriented religion. This egalitarian culture was overrun and destroyed by a semi-nomadic, horse-riding, Indo-European group of invaders who were patrifocal, mobile, warlike, and indifferent to art.

These Indo-European invaders considered themselves to be superior to the peaceful and art-loving Goddess worshippers because of their superior military ability. The matriarchal religion of these early settlers was eventually assimilated into the patriarchal religion of the invaders. As these invaders imposed their patriarchal culture on the conquered peoples, rapes and myths about male warriors killing serpents, symbols of the Goddess worshippers, and saving beautiful princesses from fearful dragons appeared for the first time. As the assimilation of cultures continued, the Great Goddess fragmented into many lesser goddesses.

The dismissal of the Great Goddess, begun by the Indo-European invaders, was finally accomplished by the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem religions that arose later. The male deity took the prominent place. The female goddesses faded into the background, and women in society followed suit.

The Goddess and NeoPaganism

The Goddess is the giver of life. Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, in her book “Goddesses in Everywoman”, has this to say about the Goddess:

The Great Goddess was worshipped as the feminine life force deeply connected to nature and fertility, responsible both for creating life and for destroying life.

Bolen goes on to say that “the Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent” prior to the coming of Christianity. For NeoPagans, the Goddess is the earth itself. Mother Earth, or Gaia, is an evolving being, as is all of nature. Starhawk, in her best-selling book “The Spiral Dance”, says:

The model of the Goddess, who is immanent in nature, fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things. NeoPaganism can be seen as a religion of ecology. Its goal is harmony with nature, so that life may not just survive, but thrive.

The NeoPagan views Gaia, or Mother Earth, as a biosystem. She attributes consciousness to the earth and believes it to be spiritual as well. In other words, Gaia is a living and evolving being that has a spiritual destiny.

The environmental movement of our day is greatly influenced by those who practice NeoPaganism or hold NeoPagan beliefs. NeoPaganism is an attempt to reintroduce the sacred aspect of the earth that was, according to its practitioners, destroyed by the Christian world. The Goddess is a direct affront to the male-dominated religion of the Hebrew God.

Christianity teaches that God is transcendent, is separate from Nature, and is represented to humankind through masculine imagery. NeoPaganism holds a pantheistic view of God. God is Nature, therefore God is in all things and all things are a part of God. However, this God is in actuality a Goddess.

The importance of the Goddess symbol for women cannot be overstressed. The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, and our anger as purifying. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions.

Starhawk

The women’s spirituality movement is the answer to the male-oriented religion of Christianity.

The Goddess is a metaphor that reminds us of the female side of spirituality. Metaphors are important. You can’t know God directly. You can only know images of God, and each image or metaphor is a door. Some doors are open and others are closed. A door that is only male is only half open.

For many in the feminist world, the Goddess is an object of worship. Those in the women’s spirituality movement “reject what they call the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition, deploring sexist language, predominantly masculine imagery and largely male leadership.”

The radical feminist believes that the traditional church must be dismantled. The editors of the book “Radical Feminism” state that “political institutions such as religion, because they are based on philosophies of hierarchical orders and reinforce male oppression of females, must be destroyed.”

Naomi Goldenberg, in her book “Changing of the Gods”, states:

The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahweh… It is likely that as we watch Christ and Yahweh tumble to the ground, we will completely outgrow the need for an external God.

Some in the Goddess movement, according to a “Wall Street Journal” article, “pray for the time when science will make men unnecessary for procreation.” The radical feminist sees the Goddess movement as a spiritual outlet for her long-held beliefs. Mark Muesse, an assistant professor of religious studies at Rhodes College, agrees that “some feminist Christians push for changes ranging from the ordination of women and the generic, non-sexual terms for God and humanity to overhauling the very theology.”

Catherine Keller, associate professor of theology at Xavier University says in her essay “Feminism and the New Paradigm” that “the global feminist movement is bringing about the end of patriarchy, the eclipse of the politics of separation, and the beginning of a new era modelled on the dynamic, holistic paradigm. “

The feminist movement seeks a common mould for all of humanity. Jungian psychotherapist John Weir Perry believes that we must find our individuality by discovering androgyny. He states:

To reach a new consensus, we have to avoid falling back into stereotypes, and that requires truly developing our individuality. It is an ongoing work of self-realization and self-actualization. For men it means growing into their native maleness and balancing it with their femaleness. For women, it’s the same—growing into their full womanhood, and that includes their masculine side.

Starhawk tells us:

To invoke the Goddess is to awaken the Goddess within, to become… that aspect we invoke. An invocation channels power through a visualized image of Divinity. We are already one with the Goddess—she has been with us from the beginning, so fulfillment becomes… a matter of self-awareness. For women, the Goddess is the symbol of the inmost self. She awakens the mind and spirit and emotions.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, answered the question, “What ails our society?” by saying, “we suffer from the absence of one half of our spiritual potential—the Goddess.” The male-dominated religion of this present age has done an injustice to humanity and the ecosystem.

The New Age of matriarchy promises to be an age of peace, harmony, and tranquility, whereas the present dark age of brokenness and separation continues to bring war, conflict, and disharmony. So it is the Goddess with her feminine aspects of unity, love, and peace that will offer a solution for mankind and circumvent his destruction.

For the pagan, the Goddess represents life and all it has to offer. “The Goddess religion is a conscious attempt to reshape culture.”(Starhawk) This reshaping is nothing less than viewing man and his understanding of reality from a female-centered perspective, the focus of which is on the Divine as female. Therefore considerable emphasis is placed on feminine attributes.

A major part of this transforming process is the empowerment of women. The rise of the Goddess is a direct assault on the foundation of Christianity. This new spirituality affirms bisexuality, lesbianism, homosexuality, and androgyny through the expression of transvestitism.

As this revival of the Goddess continues, a growing lack of distinction between male and female will become the norm. John Weir Perry believes:

Both current psychology and ancient history point to an emerging transformation in our sense of both society and self, a transformation that includes redefining the notion of what it means to be men and women.

The message of the Goddess has gained a hearing in the church as well. The philosophy of the Goddess is currently being taught in the classrooms of many seminaries. Mary Daly, a Christian feminist, says: “Christianity itself should be castrated.” Daly continues: “The idea of salvation uniquely by a male savior perpetuates the problem of patriarchal oppression.”

Rev Susan Cady, co-author of “Sophia: the Future of Feminist Spirituality” and pastor of Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, is one example of the direction that Daly and others are taking the church. The authors of “Sophia” state that “Sophia is a female, Goddess-like figure appearing clearly in the Scriptures of the Hebrew tradition.” “Wisdom Feast”, the authors’ latest book, clearly identifies Jesus with Sophia. Sophialogy presents Sophia as a separate Goddess and Jesus as her prophet. The book replaces Jesus with the feminine deity Sophia. [The Philadephia Sophists are not Adelphiasophists!]

Whether the individual seeks the Goddess through NeoPaganism, the feminist movement, the New Age, or the liberal church, he or she is beginning a quest to understand and discover deep wisdom.

Three Flavours of Goddess

Professor Jocelyn Linnekin says that believers in the ’Great Goddess’ think that only by devotion to female deities can women be full and equal participants in religion, and these ‘Goddess believers’ come in three flavours.

1. The “Great Goddess” school of thought that, in prehistoric and ancient times, people adored a Great Goddess of fertility and reproduction. Evidence is the big-bellied, big-breasted figurines found at many prehistoric sites.
2. Another school seeks to give greater weight to goddess figures in existing religions, and to reinterpret sacred texts and traditions.
3. ”Goddess revivalists” assert that women must turn away from established religions because they are irredeemably patriarchal and return to active goddess worship. The goddess revival builds on the Great Goddess theory because adherents believe that they are reclaiming “the” ancient women’s religion, which was the primeval religion of humanity.

Linnekin says there are problems lurking in all of the “goddess” arguments. First, are ordinary women, in a society with a religion having powerful goddess figures, better off, or do they have more status or authority than in a society that worships primarily male divinities? She informs us the consensus among comparative religion scholars is that women are not necessary any better off.

Second, most of the “Great Goddess” theories presume “primitive matriarchy,” for which there is no evidence.

Third, she tells us, it is incredible that in ancient times, human society was more homogenous, humanity had “one” religious system, and the human species shared “one” "Great Goddess".

Linnekin’s analysis is empty. There are not three flavours. There are not three different sects within the Restoration of the Goddess Movement. These are three of the principle arguments that are used but they are not used exclusively by one group or another. Linnekin concedes that her third category uses the first. The truth is that Saviours of the Goddess use all these arguments and more. There is a united, not a splintered movement, and, if there are divisions, they are divisions not about the Goddess but about theological baggage that women have inherited from thousands of years of patriarchal religion—baggage like souls, spirit, eternal life and so on. Otherwise the differences are merely tactical, as they are in all widespread movements.

What of the problems Linnekin sees? She tells us that a “consensus” says women will be no better off under a female God. That is like telling American blacks that they will be no better off under a black president. It could only be true in a materialist sense, but that is the least reason for a black president or a female god. The important reason is psychological—spiritual, if you like. In a society in which men dominate almost every significant aspect, including religion, women will plainly benefit from the feeling that what they adore is feminine in some way.

It does not even have to be true in the verifiable sense. Is the Christ true? Whatever is the center of your beliefs is important to you and signifies something to you. If that helps to lift up your feeling of self worth, then it is will make you feel better off. The consensus is therefore wrong. When people speak of a consensus, you can bet that their argument is empty and the authority of the anonymous consensus is needed to give it weight.

Next Linnekin tells us that the theories “presume” primitive matriarchy for which there is no evidence. She is trying to make the reader think that the Goddess theories “depend” upon a primitive matriarchy. In fact, they presume a primitive matriarchy in the sense that the leaders of the Reformation thought there was some sort of simpler and purer early church—unless Christians are willing to become Essenes—to reform the Catholic church back in to. There never was such a pure early church but its value as a symbol of the Reformation was immense. So, yes, we do assume primitive matriarchy but whether it truly ever existed in the way we imagine does not really matter. What matters is what we want to bring about. We therefore refer to our aim as the “restoration” of the Goddess, but if there never was a purely Goddess oriented society, it is time there was!

The final problem of the three is answered by the answer to the second, but since we happen to believe that there was a primitive matriarchy, is it a telling argument? It is not in several ways. While all early societies worshipped a Goddess, there is no reason to think it was homogeneous. It will surely have varied by degrees over time and place, but the deity remained a Goddess. Today, we have so many varieties of Jesus that an alien might have trouble recognising them all as the same god. Yet no Christian will deny that it is, even though they will kill for their particular version.

Furthermore, in a very long human prehistory in which innovation was slow but mankind wandered to the ends of the earth, what is so incredible about societies almost uniformly worshipping a goddess? Artefacts of Stone Age people from widely different places are found to be similar. Society was relatively peaceful—absolutely peaceful compared with modern patriarchal human beings—and this civilisation, for it was a civilisation, continued almost unchanging for tens of thousands of years. If the myth of the Garden of Eden can be translated into anything in human history, this is it. Society over the whole of the world occupied by human beings was homogeneous because change was slow and societies were stable.

And, presiding over it all, we believe, was a goddess!

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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