By 
Jimmy Carter had been a Southern Baptist for over six decades — you know, back when the SBC used to be a bunch of racist and sexist bigots. Today, only some of them are racists bigots — but most of them are still sexist bigots.
I can say that because I used to be one.
Anyway, Jimmy left the SBC in 2000, but has recently published an article on his reasons for leaving — the main one being the rampant sexism in the SBC:
It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief — confirmed in the holy scriptures — that we are all equal in the eyes of God.This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths.
I was with him up until “confirmed in the holy scriptures.” The entire argument from the Southern Baptist leaders is that the Bible is sexist, and therefore they should be too. (Except they don’t call it sexism, they prefer the label “complementarianists,” bless their misogynist hearts.) It’s biblically motivated.
Yet Carter wants to say they were wrong because of the Bible. That ain’t gonna work.
The Bible does have a few passages that can be interpreted to mean everyone is equal. And there are more numerous texts that seem to show pretty clearly that non-Jews, women, and slaves are not equal. Quoting the Bible is not going to win anyone over to either side. They believe what they believe, and they will only accept the passages that agree with their position — the others they will reinterpret or ignore.
Anyway, he continues:
The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.
Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions – all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.
I’m in agreement with Jimmy — and any other rational person — that women should have equal rights. But his religious emphasis baffles me. After huffing and puffing for paragraphs about how much harm religion has done, he concludes pointing to religious leaders that are responsible for people holding on to such backwards beliefs.
He’s a smart guy. How can he say such a thing?
Jesus didn’t choose any women for his twelve disciples to lead the church, and didn’t give any teachings on making them equal. Paul was a clear misogynist and commanded women to be silent in his churches and to be obedient to their husbands. His reason? Because Eve ate the fruit first (the very reason Carter says is his reason for leaving the SBC). The laws attributed to Moses treat women as second-class citizens and made them “impure” for a third of their lives. And Muhammad… do we really need to go there? A quick look any Islamic country will give you a basic idea about what Muhammad thought about women.
What is the justification for sexism in our world? That’s right — it’s always religion. It happens with the Christian fundies in the US and it happens with the Muslim fundies in the Middle East. Religion is used to keep women in their “place,” and pointing to people like Jesus, Paul, Moses, and Muhammad is not going to make anything better.
Religion isn’t the answer — it’s been tried for thousands of years, and is the modern root of these sexist beliefs.
Instead of appealing to religious values and pointing to ancient sexist leaders, perhaps we should be pointing away from religion. It doesn’t matter what ancient books say about how women should be treated. It doesn’t matter if they endorse slavery, or killing homosexuals and infidels. We’ve been past that for a long time.
All humans are given equal rights — let holy books and ancient superstitions be damned.
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123 Comments
Spot on. However I think, maybe, the reason that he doesn’t argue we should lead a secular lifestyle or abandon holy books is to avoid being negatively portrayed by the press.
I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. To me Carter represents a typical liberal Christian view — discard all the bad parts of the Bible and Christian doctrine, and make your own religion using the bits and pieces that you find attractive. I’ve never understood how one rejects entire sections of a religion without recognizing that it just isn’t true, and should be discarded completely.
Well, the Bible is not really a whole book, but a collection of literary pieces. To discount the whole thing because you don’t like everything is not exactly open minded. Indeed, much of the scriptures is sexist. However, the words and actions of Jesus show him to be a defender of women. And in fact, he did have women followers, but there’s a good possibility that the writers of the gospels excluded them as much as they could. Some would say that they are mentioned at all means they were so important they could not be written out of the accounts.
Well, since females are 51% of the population, why didn’t Jesus have 6 female apostles? I mean if he was really God and wanted to usher in an age of gender equality, then why didn’t he do it? (Perhaps because he was just a man who was a product of his culture???)
Good point. I’m not defending the exclusion of women. I’m suggesting that the Bible, which was written by men, probably did not mention the women who were active in their discipleship.
Being a apologetic, which doesn’t work.
In order to defend the whole, you must defend every bit. Otherwise, you’re defense is useless. What you’re doing is similar to saying heroin addicts are bad, but you’re not, because you’re only a moderate heroin addict.
See my point?
Your comparing a Christian to a heroin addict is a little difficult to get past. In any case I don’t think it’s an accurate analogy. I don’t feel like I have to defend any of the Bible. However, I’ve been a lifelong student of it and I know that it is intellectually incompetent to judge it as a whole.
Many people, I think, don’t have a concept of what “religious faith” means. Just imagine that you are in a situation at school in which magically everyone knows about [your crush on that girl|the stain in your pants|that you're the one who let out the silent stinker|etc., I admit that my fantasy is lame here, but I guess you get the picture]. At least you believe that everyone knows it. And guess what your perception does.
If you are in this mental situation… or, for example, if you are looking for signs that the girl wants you… then you will experience a strong distortion in your reality-interpretation-mechanism. Basically it’s the hammer-nail-syndrome: When a hammer is the only tool you have, every problem looks like a nail. Or you could call this confirmation bias.
The data delivered into your brain gets interpreted with a strong tendency towards… well, whatever your belief is (e.g. that the girl really is into you and stuff, but she just breathed, that happens).
Religious belief is based around the idea that there is an all-seeing and quite able consciousness behind the walls of reality that alters its rhythm or even manifests quite macroscopic things/events, and once the believer has attained a strong belief, guess what:
The person begins to see things. These are not hallucinations, they are just misinterpretations. The boring everyday-reality suddenly has a nice sugar icing which is actually a source of happiness – it is entertaining, it gives you positive energy! Born again? Now you know what it probably means.
I have had that. Not religiously based, but after several mushroom tripps. I was adding interpretation to the reality that I experienced.
That is called schizophrenia.
This is like a drug addiction: The additional positive energy experienced becomes normal. Loss of faith is withdrawal. The sickness becomes “necessary”. And of course you would want others to join the game. Basically, we’re really talking about mass-insanity, and just like in Hitler Germany, something awfully wrong became a right just because everyone was doing it. No Godwin here, we’re talking mass-effects in the name of evil.
And that is exactly what religious faith, if it works like described above, is. If it’s just the faith that there is a God and he means well, that’s relatively harmless as long as there’s no special reality-interpretation going on (but since people are interpreting reality anyway, being far from objective… well, you can’t be too careful). I wish I wouldn’t need so many words to describe this, and I wish this would be common knowledge.
But that’s not all: This distortion in the reality-interpretation-apparatus is something that the brain usually solves. Observations, experience, logic, reason, scepticism, challenging tasks at work and so on – the brain normalizes.
But the whole idea behind attaining a religious faith is that this faith is strong, that it doesn’t go away! And so, the believer has to create some kind of informational cancer in his brain, so that no arguments or reasoning can dissolve this nice touched-by-God-circuit that works in the brain.
And this distortion is of course not just a nice icing – it is something that changes the way the whole system works with information. A person can, for example, not be as sceptic about stuff as it could otherwise be. Of course the person is extremely sceptic towards everything that says no to the belief-distortion-field in the information matrix.
Oh, and whenever you really get close to the core of this distortion (and a distortion is all it really is), the believer will feel threatened. The whole persona is endangered! The positive energy is about to get lost, the person must protect itself! And for example immediately say that yes God is real and so forth. It is really obvious, yet the masses don’t see religion for what it is: Sickness! Insanity!
I don’t know how many people actually have said religous belief, but theoretically, everyone who prays and judges whether or not their prayers came true (wrong-think: “worked”) has this mind cancer.
People who really fortified themselves against all possible arguments or doubts regarding this nice reality-interpretation-game-circuit are hopeless. They can not be saved. And this circuit, once that strong, defines their personality and their actions. There might be exceptions, but theoretically, there aren’t.
Well, and there might be billions of these people out there. And they see it as a feature when their kids get this mind-cancer. That is child abuse. But society doesn’t think clearly, no one sees this sickness for what it really is.
And thus, billions of more or less insane people (who manage to perform the survival tasks and communication nicely) dance in a rhythm that is meant to be ignorant of objective reality – which is actually what science tries to perceive. Science tries to emulate the perfect human consciousness. The perceiver with absolute clarity, no confirmation bias, no hammer-nail-distortion.
Religion and science are natural enemies.
But no. I am not to speak out against religion, because I am just a jealous evil-ass atheist.
It’s hopeless anyway. The people who matter don’t swallow the words that I wrote, and the people this is about would naturally ignore them – to protect their beloved faith-structure. Who am I to say that billions are schizos. Right.
EDIT:
And you can even use nicer words – but it doesn’t change the fact that an atheist arguing to a religious believer that their faith is practically baseless (based on scriptures which they believe in mostly because they were born into that religion or their parents infected them; based on gaps in our explanations as to how reality works and how it came to be; based mostly on wishful thinking)… is inevitably using an ad-hominem-argument, even if it is phrased nicely. The message is that the believer has an inferior, even damaged mind. And that is the classic ad hominem, the argument against the person instead of the person’s arguments. But that’s just the truth about the religious people: They basically have nothing and, see above explanation, cannot admit it! The atheists are pushed into the position of ad-hominem by the situation presented by religion. The only way not to offend is to shut the fuck up and let the sickness that religion is spread like the virus it is designed to be and hope that society won’t break down completely.
But I say this is nonsense. We have all the right to defend the cause&effect-world that we share against insanity.
So you are saying that your bible has all the parts about sexism, racism, homophobia, genocide, authoritarianism, etc. sliced out, and what is left is the part that is OK. Or is it that the parts that you don’t agree with are simply allegorical, they didn’t really happen, there are just there to prove a point and, what better way to prove a point than with violence and inequality? Or is the argument that those were just different times. Honestly, not one of those sounds like a good enough reason to believe.
I actually didn’t say any of those things you mentioned.
Perhaps you didn’t explicitly say any of those things, but I asked you a question about those things based on the inference that your above statement suggests that you can, in fact, pick and choose the literary pieces that you agree with and discard those that you do not. So (one of) my questions, quite literally, again, is do you have a version of what is generally assumed to be ‘the bible’ with the pieces you do not agree with removed, or somehow denoted as not part of your beliefs about sexism, slavery, etc. etc.
I’m having a hard time understanding your question but I’ll try to answer.
I try very hard not to view any part of the Bible in the superstitious way I was taught as a child in a fundamentalist religion. On the other hand, I’m not going to write it off angrily because some people are are crazy.
The collection of writings in the Bible was chosen and established by people, sometimes for political reasons. Just because someone put this together in one book doesn’t make it one book.
It is intellectually unsound to take a collection of poetry, narratives, and theological statements and insist that it should be viewed as a whole. You’re suggesting that I can’t pick and choose which part of the Bible to accept, but any competent student, whatever her/her point of reference, should do just that.
Thank you, you answered my question. I was not suggesting that you can’t do that, I was simply interested in the means by which you decide which parts to accept and which parts to not.
Obviously you’re not seeing the rational point here. You said: “I try very hard not to view any part of the Bible in the superstitious way I was taught as a child in a fundamentalist religion”.
You really don’t get it. The whole point is that the whole book is nothing but superstitious nonsense so there is no separate fundementalist way actually because no matter how you interpret it, the book stays the same, superstition.
So, how do you expect me to have a serious discussion with you when you can’t seem to lose the delusion rather you quantify your delusion…that’s a good one.
OK, good.
Well, they did name it “bible”, which means, AFAIK, “collection of books”. So, OK.
Yup.
Therein lies the crux of the matter. You can pick and choose whatever parts accept. You can pick and choose whatever parts of the Vedas, Q’uran, Book of Mormon, works of Friedrich Nietszche, whatever, to accept, too. Your acceptance makes it neither right nor true.
And I would add that any competent student would also recognize the bible as one of the greatest works of collaborative fiction in human history.
If one thinks any of the bible is not true then he must assume it to be false in total..it’s only logical.
Must it be an either/or proposition? Isn’t that the kind of extreme, two dimentional thinking that that evangelicals are accused of?
Call it what you want,all you’re doing is trying to pull others to your ignorance level. It is an either or, there is no god or jesus or devil or any of the other mythological magicians y’all manufactured out of superstitious ignorance of science. So you either believe or you don’t and the former is a delusional behavoior so deserves no respect and has no value as an argument.
In my mind, debating the validity of the Bible is not the same thing as debating the issue of God’s existence. Btw, thank you for clarifying my motives. What are yours?
What is kinda funny to me is, well, I take a trip back into history in my mind and I see regular people writing accounts of their experiences attributed to god or ideas and philosophies of what a god must be like and want. Just like now, they did not agree. They contradict each other and create a god out of whole cloth to suit their own preferences. I wonder if they really thought in the future, people would still be referring to it.
I mean, you can distinguish what you do from regular old cherry-picking if you want, but if you’re going to hold up a book and call it evidence or proof of god’s will and teachings and laws, you pretty much don’t know which of those accounts is the true and which is the false. I say some of them sound like good ideas, some might have sounded like better ideas at the time, and most of it is useful to threaten and possibly comfort populations that existed locally as to the political leanings of those in power. Well, if slavery makes for restless community living at all, the best way to keep slavery to be an option and not get overthrown is make sure everyone knows god said so, I mean, shake your head and say that’s a damn shame, I have my hands tied here, we have no choice but to keep the slaves at work.
You’re holding up the same book. See, just because some people who wrote things in the bible had progressive thoughts and wisdom is no reason to conclude there’s a god and any of that is actually what he wants. You believe in god and prescribe from the portions of the same book what you think he was really trying to get through all that contradictory inhumane inequality stuff. That’s what you want. It might be what we all want, but obviously it’s not. Some others choose to pick out the parts they want and because there is no god defining what’s what, we get to yell at each other and try to form a cohesive society going in the same direction. That book doesn’t have a single use in that regard.
There you go right there “In my mind” you said. DUH. That’s the point, it is all in your mind, just as it is all in Carter’s mind. Gods and devils are delusions of grandeur IMO. You believe this being is magical and can create things out of nothing, omnipotent, omniscient. And I think you and your ilk are delusional so you can not have a valid argument about the validity of the bible because by definition it is a mythological text.
I have enjoyed engaging in conversation with several of you. It has been stimulating and is it okay to say “fun”? Anything I say at this point will be simply repeating myself, so I’ll quit for the moment until I can think things through. I appreciate the sincerity and passion in your challenges. There’s a poem with a line that says “iron sharpens iron” that applies here. I’d tell you where it comes from but you’d be quick to dismiss it as delusional or fictional or oppressive.
Yes, with religion it has to be absolutely true or absolutely false. Otherwise the practitioners lead others to falsehoods. If it’s absolutely false, then read it as fiction and pick out the good parts, but don’t defend any part of it by following it’s religion.
Clearly mark it as fiction so that others aren’t induced into it’s lies.
Yes, either the Bible is all true or it’s all suspect. If there is a stroke of falsity, how do you know which parts are divinely inspired truth, and which parts are misunderstandings or mistranslations or made up by mortal men?
“All humans are given equal rights ” By whom? Equal rights are also a modern invention. Maybe the proponents of slavery were right and a certain class of people are justified in oppressing a lesser people. Maybe PETA is right and we’re guilty of speciesm, and fish, ants, and chickens have the same rights as humans.
Given by government and other people.
Not by government. Human rights are rights that we have as human beings that in an ideal world government should not infringe upon. The Founders of the US phrased these as rights that were “endowed by our Creator”. A modern secularist can see these as rights that are not given to us by a Creator but instead things that are attributes of our status as human beings — like having opposable thumbs and complex language.
But they aren’t granted by government – government can’t grant rights to anyone, they can just abuse rights and they can protect rights but they cannot grant them (which is why they are “rights” and not “privileges”).
“A modern secularist can see these as rights that are not given to us by a Creator but instead things that are attributes of our status as human beings”
Spot on.
What does this even mean, though? How does one define these “attributes”? What is this “status” mean? Given history and its almost universal catalog of hierarchical societies, oppression, and war, what in “our status” gives us rights? Why is an egalitarian society more an attribute of our status as human beings than traditional hierarchical societies?
Of course…maybe these questions are biased by own upbringing in a hierarchical culture (like almost every one over the past 5-10,000 years. Some argue that agriculture was the great error and that hunting and gathering bands WERE fundamentally more egalitarian, just, fair, and even more human.
“A modern secularist can see these as rights that are not given to us by a Creator but instead things that are attributes of our status as human beings”
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“What does this even mean, though? How does one define these “attributes”?”
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That’s a tough one. If not from God, where do rights come from? True the government does establish laws and practices, but what standards of judgement does it use? Justice probably has some humanistic origin: the understanding that we should not do to others what we would want done to ourselves. I think this was the original spiritual enlightenment. It’s universal and religions probably emerged from it, rather than the other way around.
You’re right. It’s hard to pin down the content of ” status as human beings”. Maybe it’s meaningless. But still, it has as much meaning as “endowed by our Creator”.
we should not do to others what we would *not* want done to ourselves.
George Carlin had it figured out: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a Bill of Temporary Privileges…”
What are you driving at, Barry? That we have no way of determining what is right?
“By whom?”
Agreeing with Daniel. You don’t have to believe that rights were “given” by some higher power. For example, I don’t think that Madison – father of the constitution – believed that. They are, however, a practical way of checking to power of the majority, preventing rule by faction and creating a more stable democracy.
“Maybe the proponents of slavery were right and a certain class of people are justified in oppressing a lesser people. Maybe PETA is right and we’re guilty of speciesm, and fish, ants, and chickens have the same rights as humans.”
Ok, I’ll bite. Maybe you are correct. Show your work.
By me and a growing number of other humans. We don’t need it written on tablets and apparently neither did the Bible.
Yeah. History teaches us human rights are whatever we collectively agree them to be. I understand that it sucks (that is, it requires a certain level of maturity) to have to logically argue for or against the practice of slavery rather than just default to Godsaidit. But sometimes it is good to put away childish things.
I once challenged a Christian friend — who had been studying theology — on the subjugation of women in 1 Corinthians.
He agreed that it looked bad on the surface, but said one of his professors had explained it to him in a way that made sense. He couldn’t quite remember the details, but just insisted that there was a proper way to read it so that it wasn’t misogynistic.
Of course! There’s always a “proper way” to get around the ugly parts of scripture, so long as you’re prepared to do a lot of interpretive gymnastics.
Then that is just like the work of the guy PZ Myers posted about recently. He wanted to hold on to the belief that Genesis was somehow True and did have scientifically supportable content. To show this, he simply changed the meaning of the words, from light to vision, from grass to bacteria or the like. Utterly silly, but still we’re supposed to listen and nod in respect.
Still it was refreshing to see Broze Age Mythology changed instead of the Science.
What is the justification for sexism in our world? That’s right — it’s always religion.
This isn’t true. It’s not always religion. Sometimes it’s evolutionary psychology that’s used as a justification. Sometimes it’s the stupid “womenfolk are physically weaker than menfolk so obviously they shouldn’t be doing X” argument. Sometimes it’s research into IQ metrics. Religion is just one of many things that are used to justify sexism – if religion disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow we would still have sexism because our culture is soaked in it. And I’m not willing to say that religion is the source of the sexism either – except in the sense that religion was the dominant legal and political power structure for most societies up until the Enlightenment.
What humans are really good at is justifying what they already believe, and they’ll use whatever tools they have at hand to do it. Religious folks will use religion to justify their beliefs. Less religious folks will look for just-so stories, or turn to science or philosophy or appeals to authority. It’s hard to look at your beliefs, evaluate them with real evidence, and throw them away when they don’t fit the evidence at hand. That’s why not many people tend to do it and the folks that do tend to be scientists (where the job requires that you constantly evaluate your beliefs about your research and be prepared to throw your pet theory away if it turns out to be untenable – that mental attitude leaks out into the rest of your life after a while. And not even all scientists are very good at it.).
As for Carter – he’s a smart man but he’s also a lifelong believer. I wouldn’t expect him to renounce his faith any more than I’d expect the Pope to stand up and say “This whole Transubstantiation thing – it’s a bit of nonsense, isn’t it?” He does come very close in the passages cited above to acknowledging that religion is man-made, not divine though — “The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.” — “option to interpret” means “the rules are what people make them” not “God has laid out clear rules”. That’s more than many evangelicals are willing to admit. Of course then Carter turns right around and talks as if there is only one possible reading of the text – the one HE believes in. Which shows that even if he has intellectually acknowledged that the text isn’t a clear roadmap on what believers are supposed to do, he hasn’t internalized that acknowledgment yet.
Good points. I thought about some of those things as I was writing this, and I probably oversimplified things.
I realize religion isn’t the original root of sexism — but I think today it’s the main force behind it. In my own case, I didn’t WANT to be sexist. I felt a bit bad about it. But it was what the Bible said, and I embraced it. In Muslim countries, it seems this is the same tendency but the kids are raised with it so it’s much worse.
So if religion were erased, would we still have sexism? Probably. There are always pigs. But I think there would be a lot less of it, because the rational justification is gone. Sure, some women are weaker than some men. But some men are weaker than some women. That doesn’t give a basis for sexism.
However, God saying women must be obedient to men, is a basis for sexism.
I think you do point to where religion is at its most pernicious — it leads people to uncritically (or possibly critically but regretfully) side with the sexists because they’re afraid/convinced that their religion says that they must. So people who think it’s unreasonable that women are treated as inferiors (or gays, or people of other races, or whatever) go along with it without objection because their religion says that they should.
That’s actually also where I think Carter and other liberal Christians can do some good – turn around this awful track that American Christianity has taken over the past century and point out that the book they’re all basing their lives off of has to be interpreted by someone because the “plain meaning” of the words just isn’t that plain. And that different readers with different biases and different backgrounds can take away entirely different meanings from the same passages in the book. That strikes right at the heart of biblical fundamentalism – and the shakier the hold biblical fundamentalism has on people’s minds the better off we all are.
Daniel,
Please don’t take this as an attack, as I am gueniunely curious. I’ve read your comments on the topic before, but this statement struck me:
How does a person be sexist without WANTING to be sexist? I’m sure nearly anyone could talk-the-talk about being sexist, and I can envision circumstances where peer pressure would make pretending to be sexist easier for a person to get by in society. But I honestly can not imagine any person BEING sexist unless they WANTED to be.
Urk, I failed at those HTML codes.
The statement I was asking about was:
“In my own case, I didn’t WANT to be sexist. I felt a bit bad about it. But it was what the Bible said, and I embraced it.”
Really? It’s quite easy in a religious environment. For instance, you may not want to kill a witch. But the Bible says you must. So you convince yourself it is best even though you don’t like or don’t completely understand.
It can be the same with sexism. You might want your wife to work. But you think the Bible forbids them to work. So you insist she doesn’t work, but instead stay around the house, because you want to be obedient to what God says. And eventually you convince yourself it is best and look down on others who are different. You see yourself as the “godly” one, and the others as “feminists” which is intended as a slander.
It’s like that with many things in evangelicalism, at least from my own experience.
I wrote a big long post in response to this and then realised that the entire issue boils down to two things.
1) Convincing people to fight against something that seems to benefit them short term is practically impossible.
2) The level of double-think a person is capable of boggles the mind sometimes.
Here is the way the Bible works. If there are conflicting verses, the verses one agrees with trump the verses one disagrees with. This is how it works for liberal and conservative Christians.
And any other Christian… you can’t believe it all if it’s contradictory, unless you believe in paradox, in which case, it is all true and false at the same time, in which case you also don’t believe it.
I also wrote about this recently. The thing I objected to was what Jer pointed out, that Carter makes it sound like there is only one right interpretation (pro-women’s rights), and that you have to be crafty and carefully pick your verses in order to read the Bible in a way that’s misogynistic. In reality it’s the opposite that’s the case, you have to look to find a rare nod to women in a highly misogynistic book.
I can understand Carter not believing that women should be subjugated to men (even though the creation story in Genesis 2-3 says this, for example), but then he should come out and say that the Bible is simply wrong in some places. My guess is that as an intelligent man, he must realize this, but
1) his emotional attachment to his faith, and/or
2) his desire to convince others believers who aren’t as enlightened
led him to word things the way he did for what he saw as a greater cause: supporting women’s rights. I disagree with him, but I understand.
From Genesis to Revelations, the “word of god” is nothing but a hate rag which relegated women to childbirth chattel slavery and possessions of men. It is because of the shell game in the very first book (Genesis) that men are not held accountable for their actions, but women get nothing but the sh*tty end of the stick…while men feel unjustly entitled to deny women some basic fundamental human (and Constitutional) rights because the Judeo-Christian god “says so.” Namely the right to have self-determination which means fundamentally, the right to have control over our own bodies, health, and lives…you know, the same rights men in the US get to enjoy known as “liberty”,”freedom”, “equal protection under the law”, and “the right to be secure in their person.”
But Christians and social conservatives whose votes reflect their misogynist attitudes towards women, especially with their preoccupation for wanting to punish women for having sex and for fighting for our rights as citizens (the women’s liberation movement). Of course, the theologically justified human rights violation of forced pregnancy/forced birth in recent attempts to take away women’s right to determine when or if she will carry a pregnancy to term unjustly over-privileges men — it’s only women’s bodies and lives that are 100% at stake, and it’s only pregnant women who routinely get forced out of the job market and into poverty.
The real motive of the “pro-life” movement and the true face of Christianity is explained here:
http://atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/the-true-face-of-the-prolife
Sorry, but to all the Christians who posted here, if you and your imaginary friend and the lying plagiarist MEN who wrote “god’s word” feel that women need extra punishment and suffering just for being women, then you and your god need an attitude adjustment.
I claim moral superiority to your god, which has the manners of a spoiled child, the temper of a petulent tyrant, imbued with a sense of entitlement and the psychological profile of a sociopathic narcissist with the “angry white male syndrome.”
No ‘perfect, loving, and omniscent’ “god” would tell half of his creation (women) that our bodies were something to be ashamed of and that having sex for natural human pleasure — not just procreation — was “sinful.” And no moral person would presume that they had the right to subordinate the rights of already-living women to that of a POTENTIAL human life which is a contingent life form and parasitic against the woman’s will.
No man would tolerate it if politicians and judges tried to force him to have his body permanently changed and encumbered so that his organs can be used as a life support system against his will. But Christians want to force ALL women into this fertility servitude in the US, whether we’re Christians or not. Talk about forcing religious doctrine on someone…
Christianity = forced childbirth = oppression and enslavement of women
I refuse to feel ashamed of my body. I refuse to apologize for embracing my sexuality. And I refuse to repent just for being a woman.
You absolutely nailed it.
Ms Homan is completely correct. Feminist men too affirm that our daughters, our spouses, our lovers must be free and responsible for their lives, not “saved” or “forgiven” of any small to capital offense. I appreciate cousin Jimmy breaking with official bigoted church ties and his peacemaking & authorship improves greatly his legacy as President. None the less few Presidents have repudiated theocracy. Obama is talking out of both sides of his mouth. Nice that he gives lip service to non-Christians and non-believers but he continues to fund a racist war against muslims bankrupting our nation when pro-active peacemaking is the only sane solution backed up with finding real terrorists one by one and their financial supporters. But that would require slapping the billionaire friends of big oil, and we know that money, printed with the lie “In god We Trust” comes before justice. Women, too can continue to suffer circumcision, beheadings & honor killings in many lands with few voices relatively allowed in government venues to demand it all stop. Most religions in writings and in practice are phantasmagorical and violent. Though believers may not personally participate, few believers actively rebel against theocrats and bellicose perpetrators against such crimes against humanity. Jimmy Carter may be taking many postive steps forward, but until he fully repudiates McCarthyism & the defacto theocracy of our praying to the flag & 1909 illegal coin mottoes & 1955 illegal currency mottos, he is still enabling the problem, not embracing the solution of Madison, Jefferson & other founders of our nation. We should be bragging about our Treaties of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers which correctly reassured Muslims we are not a “Christian, Mehomitan or Mussleman” nation. We hunted down the Barbary Pirates with Muslim Caliph help through that treaty that reassured all no single crusade would come from the US of A. Thank you MS Homan for your precise statement on how religion harms women. Our planet will be much better off when Atheists and Secularists and pacific people are fully involved with leadership, not just the puppets of petrochemical patriarchal cabals. Peace, Larry Carter Center 843-926-1750
rAmen, Jacqueline!!! rA-friggin-men!
Actually, there are a number of texts that were left out of the bible, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that point to Mary Magdalene being treated much better than the apostles since she was Jesus’ wife. It was actually she who was charged with spreading the church. This was changed by the church though so they could preserve their male-dominated power structure.
And yes, I got this all by reading the Da Vinci Code.
Just FYI – The DaVinci Code isn’t history. It’s a potboiler based on a book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” which depending on what story you listen to was either an intentional hoax by the authors, the authors getting duped by their first-hand sources, or the authors just being kind of nutty.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with Mary Magdalene and in fact have nothing to do with Jesus – they’re a bunch of Jewish documents that show some ties to the type of thoughts espoused by Jesus according to the Bible, but actually pre-date Jesus’s ministry. Some folks get the Dead Sea Scrolls confused with the documents found at Nag Hammadi in the 1940s – which were a cache of Gnostic Christian documents like the Gospel of Thomas and IIRC a partial copy of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Dan Brown’s book has only made this confusion between Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls worse.
If you’re interested, I can highly advise Bart Ehrman’s “Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code”. He walks through the stuff that Brown got right, somewhat wrong, and horribly, horribly completely wrong from a historian’s perspective. If you’re more interested in what the early Christian communities were like, I can also highly recommend his book “Lost Christianities” which makes for fascinating reading and games of “what if” when you see all the possible paths Christianity could have taken.
He was kidding, Jer.
Governments give rights only in the legal sense of the term. I have the right to drive 70 mph on this highway because the sign says so but only 35 mph on this road beause the sign says so. Are you really willing to grant this power to the government in the moral sense of the term, which is how I’m reading the thread. If you are, sure you would change your mind if you lived in Darfur or China.
“What humans are really good at is justifying what they already believe, and they’ll use whatever tools they have at hand to do it”
Jer is spot on, so at the end of the day I think the way most people view rights in the sense of what they value. For example there is a debate on whether or not universal health care is a right or a privilege. On the other side many claim their right to bear arms, and they often go beyond the legal sense and imply that it is their moral right to do so. These values are so often in conflict with each other its no wonder there is so much strife in the world. From nationalistic wars to individual crimes these actions when reduced to their lowest common denominator are conflicts over values and hence a disagreements on rights. What seems so clear to one party is viewed as idiocy by the other and we as humans have been pretty pathetic at finding a standard with which to judge.
Here are several reasons why I think you’re wrong about Payl being a misogynist.
I’m not disputing that there aren’t misogynistic passages in the bible; there are, no doubt about it. I just don’t think you’re right about Paul.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that historical figures can be conflicted internally just as we can today. He was trying to strengthen a young organization and would possibly be tempted to accept help from wherever it came. Further, when Paul calls Phoebe a leader he can be doing so subtly. Most or all of us have seen instances of graceful acknowledgment when beneficial but seen the same person lambasted in times of stress.
However, I’m not trying to be definitive about Paul’s personal beliefs about the roles of women. Do we really have enough information to define his range of understanding and relationships to women? And besides, for me it doesn’t really matter what his fully fleshed out range of beliefs are on this matter. Whatever the nuances are, and I think he was probably moderately progressive, his position is antiquated. This subject matter is more important to believers and that, I think, is liberalism’s blessing/curse.
However, I’m not trying to be definitive about Paul’s personal beliefs about the roles of women.
I would argue that the trajectory of Paul’s thinking on the issue is pretty clear and that said trajectory is important to we Christians who believe in this type of justice and equality, as Carter clearly does.
In short: In Jesus as the Christ, he witnesses a liberating force (there is neither Jew nor Gentile …). But, he was also a man who was undeniably bound by his time and culture, just as you and I are, and I don’t think he fully grasped the implications of that liberating power as a result (although I still maintain that we can’t simply conclude he was a misogynist as Daniel does). In other words, Paul was onto something, I think, in Galatians (the Jew/Greek passage), but he didn’t always apply the concept fully — but frankly, expecting him to do so may not be quite fair to him. He lived when and where he did, and when judged by those standards, he was an advocate for liberation. That same trajectory of liberation is one I think we Christians need to affirm and adopt as our own.
Where is the evidence that he was an advocate for liberation? A one off quote about equality (before God) and one instance of calling a woman a deaconess and leader is scant evidence even of moderate difference with the culture. If he had been that radical the evidence would be bleeding all over his relationships and would have precluded or required qualification of statements about submission. In fact, I doubt he could have survived as a leader himself with such beliefs. A moderate progressive of his day perhaps but again I am not convinced based on the scant biblical evidence all of which has broad interpretive latitude.
We all have weaknesses and unwarranted tendencies. Christian liberalism, I think, sometimes has the proclivity to over modernize biblical heroes.
“he was also a man who was undeniably bound by his time and culture”
So, in other words, he wasn’t God?
he was speaking of Paul, and no, Paul was by no means God!!
Sorry. When I read “In Jesus as the Christ, he witnesses a liberating force”, I saw “In Jesus as the Christ *we witness* a liberating force.” Oopsie. I’m mildly dyslexic and this happens sometimes.
@ Brgulker
Why do you think god didnt just inspire a non sexist bible in the first place. Didnt god know how much trouble would be caused throughtout the world by sexism?
Just Curious.
markbey:
I don’t know the answer to the question, “Why didn’t God just _______________.” I wish I did, though. If I ever figure it out, I’ll look you up :)
There is no answer, its a rhetorical question. Sexism was then and continues to be a great tool for controlling a huge percentage of the population.
Exactly. Sexism has nothing to do with the bible. The bible came after sexism. The reason why the bible is anti-gay, sexist, racist and absurd is because it was written by primitive backward men who were anti-gay, sexist, racist and who held absurd beliefs.
I think that sexism is based on the fact that men are physically stronger than women. Second class treatment of women has been physically and mentally beaten into women probably since man first evolved.
Does anyone here believe that if women on average were as physically strong as men they would have put up with the sexism?
You have to be able to physically enforce sexism or in other words might has made right for the majority of human history.
It might have something to do with menstruation and pregnancy.
None of that would matter if women in general were signifigantly physically stronger than men.
You have to be able to physically enforce sexism. Or any other kind of ism.
In special, methinks, pregnancy.
A pregnant woman in a mostly violent, ruthless world is a liability. Children are important because, well, perpetuation of the species is a driving force – it makes sense that women would be protected and cosseted and kept from danger, considering the precious content of their bodies. Women make children, therefore they should be kept as caretakers of said children. Men, unencumbered by such things, go forth and provide for them. Humans in general are fragile by nature; a woman slowed down by pregnancy and/or children even more so.
Does that make it right? No, but explains it, IMHO.
I can’t claim to be an expert on the patricentricity of societies, but yeah, I can certainly wager a few guesses that would include all of the usual suspects: physical and psychological differences are at the top of my list.
The fact is that we can, as a species, waste our time trying to argue about these ridiculous ancient documents and people who may or may not have even existed, or we can learn from the myriad mistakes they’ve caused, stop taking any of it as literal, and move forward.
Aye – gods always behave like the people who invented them.
LOL.Great line. I wish I had said it.
Read Why I Am Not A Christian and Other Essays… recently, among many good ideas Russell points out that we call the Golden Rule divine because it rings true, not vice versa. That is, rather than our ethics reflecting our theology, our theology reflects our ethics.
I disagree. The patriarchal god of Bronze Age desert nomad superstition and its accompanying doctrine, the bible, ARE used today in the US as the basis for depriving American women equal protection of their rights as citizens under the law, namely:
equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, the right to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity, the right to freedom of religious oppression (freedom FROM a hateful male chauvinist god and his equallt misogynist followers), the right to be free from ANY form of chattel slavery — yes, forced pregnancy/forced childbirth against a woman’s will even in the event of rape and even if it jeopardizes her health and life in the name of religious attachment of personhood to ovum or zygotes or fetuses — IS a form of chattel slavery. Moreover, it is a crime against humanity along with FGM and forced sterilization.
Women are already livng people and citizens. Zygotes are not — they are contingent life forms and not in a symbiotic relationship, but parasitic.
No man is being forced to have total control over his body subordinated to lawmakers, judges, and religious bigots.
No man is forced into chattel slavery of being FORCED by the iron fist of law to give up his organs and his body to be a life support system for a contingent life form, or even an already living post-born life form; that encumbers his liberty, his body, encroaches on his health and life, and possibly leaves him permanently maimed, disabled, or even dead.
Thanks to religious conscentious objector laws, pharmacists who, because of their religion, can DENY women birth control pills including emergency contraception in order to PREVENT unwanted/dangerous pregnancies…and whose rights as citizens, as PEOPLE, are being denied because of that? Women and girls.
I don’t care what you believe in or who you pray to or where. You have NO right to force me to live under your oppressive religious beliefs against me just because I’m a woman, or against my step-daughter and her daughter, just because of women’s particular and exclusive vulnerability to pregnancy — which is not a benign medical condition.
Forced pregnancy/forced birth = chattel slavery = sexual abuse = human rights violation
If you don’t believe contraception is right and you don’t believe abortion is right, then don’t get one. And if you’re male, get a vasectomy so your not walking around with a loaded weapon that would make someone pregnant against their will. As long as it is my body 100% at risk and NOT yours, you have NO right.
Hear! Hear! Jacqueline, that’s the best comment made so far,succinct and to the point.
@ brgulker
If religion were harmless, if people didnt use religion to promote hatred and bigotry I would never ask you or any other question why god does this or that.
But I find it hard to understand why anyone would follow a god (who is supposed to perfect, all knowing and just) whos document that one should live by promotes anti gay, anti women and racist views.
It dosent add to me that a perfect loving god would allow so much hatred in his guide to life for humans.
Do you realize how many gay/lesbian people have been disowned by thier families because the bible.
From what I have read of your post I fail to understand why you even believe. I fail to understand how someone as intelligent as you can believe in a god that would inspire a guide for his beloved man that is only partially true. Especially if he is not going to give us a way of seperating what he actually said verses what he didnt inspire.
Brgulker do you think god is perfect and all knowing?
@markbey
Guess he’s not into theodicy. I found your blogs interesting.
http://ironymous.blogspot.com/
The SBC was founded for the sole purpose of allowing southern whites to keep their black slaves.
Why did many liberals believe Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion disqualified him for the presidency, but no one took issue with the religion of Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and Mike Huckabee?
Another issue I have with the SBC is it role in maintaining the white underclass. It has a long history of being anti-intellectual and not valuing higher education. We all know all the “book learnin” clouds you mind from the pure word of god.
The SBC was founded for the sole purpose of allowing southern whites to keep their black slaves.
Many organizations are formed for different reasons than that which they presently fulfill.
Why did many liberals believe Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion disqualified him for the presidency, but no one took issue with the religion of Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and Mike Huckabee?
Well, I don’t much grant your premise. Harry Truman’s religion was not an issue because before about 1960, the personal religion of candidates was not much discussed at all. Jimmy Carter’s religion was a major point in the election of ‘76, with his up-front religious influence being a thing of some concern on both sides of the aisle. Mike Huckabee’s past as a pastor and current evangelism was likewise noted during the campaign, and not without a significant amount of disapproval, especially from the left.
But besides all that, religion is not at all determinative of the character or the policy proposals of any person, let alone any politician. Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order, and Carter has long stood up against misogyny and racism. The Southern Baptist Convention also had Martin Luther King, Jr. as a member. Kennedy did not take orders from the pope. It is rare when the religious persuasion of a single politician actually matters, and it only tends to matter when that politician claims that their religious beliefs will directly guide their political choices.
Not at all? I disagree. The U.S. government has plenty of policy based upon religion. Maybe not the religion of any one person, but plenty of policy is based on religious beliefs of both the politicians and the voters that were responsible for electing said politicians. And the responsibility of the voters aside, shouldn’t it be the responsibility of those politicians to uphold the separation of church and state?
Yes, perhaps the religious affiliation of *one particular* politician alone may not actually matter, but the simple fact that religion plays a factor in overall policy at all is the real issue.
Dr King was the founder and member of Southern Christian Leadership Confernce, not a SBC
My apologies, you are correct.
So after 60 years he finally lightens up a little bit. Meh. He still believes in ghosts. Arguing over who may have been a misogynist in the bible is silly. The fact is that there are plenty of examples, and thats one of the many great reasons to ditch it, grow up and move on.
I mostly agree with what Jer had to say though. I don’t really know who all looks to Jimmy Carter for any type of guidance anymore, spiritual or otherwise, but I wouldn’t expect him to just full-on renounce his faith entirely at this point in his life. I hope somehow this move can at least inspire some enlightenment to others who are SB to examine the bible and think a little bit more about how misogynistic it is, and feel free to say so and explore other avenues, not excluding atheism, but at least somewhat more comfortably diverse. I don’t think he’s going to change the world with this alteration of attitude, not instantly, but certainly not even a little if he said F it, I don’t believe a single word of it, there is no god after all.
“They believe what they believe, and they will only accept the passages that agree with their position — the others they will reinterpret or ignore.”
Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around these days. If you catch my drift…
No.
What is your drift?
My drift is that there’s a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy on both sides.
Again, a generalization with no information in it.
Do you have information to share?
Maybe an example of ’sanctimonious hypocrisy’?
Apparently you didn’t read the article.
Apparently you have nothing to actually say.
The article is woode, dogmatic nonsense. The entire article is incurious, chauvinistic and stupid. Preaching to the choir. Entirely without merit. The author completely abuses President Carter’s opinion in an attempt to make its idiotic point.
Excuse the typo. The word I intended was “wooden”. Which implies a stunted view.
Bob, you see, was very fond of generalizations.
I think if you had any real point to make you would have brought up some way to justify your opinion. As it is, you just sound like you are lashing out because an article is critical of something that seems to be important to you. If you can justify your opinions, that can only make them stronger. If you cannot, then learn from it.
[deleted]
As I predicted.
Cut off? Or cut off from your meds?
[deleted]
[deleted]
Wow, you fell apart fast.
Bob seems to have forgotten to take his meds this morning.
Thankfully, we won’t be seeing any more of his comments.
Awww, I wanna see Bob’s posts!! I logged on too late…
Can’t you put them back? =(
No. I rarely delete comments, but he broke the rules and then tried to put up 10 more extremely vulgar comments. I don’t let people like that yell and shout vulgarities around my house, and I don’t let them do it on my blog.
It looks like what this person does it make vulgar and accusatory comments on people’s blogs, and then accuses them of censorship. Censorship is his main thing — he wants to push people to do it, so he can bitch about it.
I love when people complain of censorship on a private blog.
Seriously. I don’t let people scream profanities at me in my house, and I don’t let them do it on my blog, either.
I used to run a forum and I had it replace swear words with funny and sometimes emasculating things. Rather amusing at times. ;-)
I once frequented a forum (a silly, kiddy one) where they substituted the word ‘cock’ for ‘thingy’. So every time you wanted to refer to a peacock, it’d come out as peathingy…
wow, all very very intresting. I cant believe I actually read every single comment in all of my ADD-ness.
You know what I find so funny? The people that can pick a part a relegion to this extreme are so often the very ones that can’t handle the the scrutiny of thier own logic.
“From Genesis to Revelations, the “word of god” is nothing but a hate rag which relegated women to childbirth chattel slavery and possessions of men. It is because of the shell game in the very first book (Genesis) that men are not held accountable for their actions, but women get nothing but the sh*tty end of the stick…while men feel unjustly entitled to deny women some basic fundamental human (and Constitutional) rights because the Judeo-Christian god “says so”
And I also think it’s quite funny that some say Christians pick and choose what they want to believe from the bible when apparently this dear soul has skipped several portions to use only what she felt was relevent to this disussion.
It is important to remember the times and areas in which this book was written. It is a book of how imperfect man percieved God, and the scriptures reflect it. It doesnt mean those parts are entirely irrelevent. In Jesus’s death, a new covenant was ushered in… dont get so caught up in the old testiment laws.The law was never intended to save people but to point out sin and point people toward Jesus. The new covenant is in a sense the law with in us. Love.
Love is guiding force in Christianity. “In all things do them in love.”
Everything falls into place from there… including equal opportunity for women.
I will argue that it is not even possible for true equality to be achieved as women and men are in fact very different.
“I will argue that it is not even possible for true equality to be achieved as women and men are in fact very different.”
There was a funny 30 Rock episode about that, involving lifting heavy objects.
You know you may be on to something there. It may NOT be possible to have true equality. I mean for that all the DNA and cells and physical features would all need to be exactly the same.
The thought is revolutionary! That changes EVERYTHING!
(Or not.)
“I will argue that it is not even possible for true equality to be achieved as women and men are in fact very different.”
Equality is given through equal respect. It has nothing to do with equal physical capabilities.
“Love is guiding force in Christianity. “In all things do them in love.””
Christianity skews the message of love towards an absolute. Love is not an absolute and should not be treated as one, love is an incorporeal tangent. Philosophies that are obsolescent should be discarded(except for historical reference) and replaced.
Equality does not mean they have the same qualities, physical, psychological, or otherwise. The equality refers not to the person but to the way laws are to be applied. It refers to the rights of the person, not the person herself.
Nicely said.
No doubt religion perpetuates sexism, but the separation of “public life for men” and “private life for women” goes back at least to ancient Greece and the inception of public life and politics.
But, like all things, we too must evolve.
Yes, “it’s natural” and “it’s always been done that way” are terrible arguments to continue doing things a certain way. Murder, rape, and necrophilia are natural, for instance.
Most animals’ genders have vastly different structure and roles, which I guess might help describe past injustice, but does not justify future sexism.
Just making a point that I later discovered was already made above: religion isn’t the only source of misogyny. :)
How many times is the word love actually used in the bible? maybe 20 in the whole book ,yet death and killing are used 100s of times.So is this truly a book of love?
There is something else that merits mentioning: the New Testament is a compilation of over 300 religious “presbyters” throughout the conquered ancient Roman provinces. The traditions and religious beliefs of all of these “presbyters” were all different traditions about different deities.
The ONLY commonality between the most prominent ones of them all was the astrological significance of a winter solstice birth to a virgin mother, martyrdom, and resurrection/rebirth close to the spring equinox. Christianity was a contrived mish-posh of superstitions agreed upon and reworked by those 318 “presbyters” under the direction and supervision of Roman Emperor Constantine I, who was grasping for straws to save a crumbling imperialist empire. He knew that a state religion was the way to do it.[religio: Latin, meaning 'ties that bind']
So in 325 A.D. he ordered the 318 presbyters throughout the conquered territories to “mount your horses, asses, and mules available to the public and travel immediately to Nicea, bring with you all your scrolls and testimonies of your traditions and beliefs.” Hence, through ancient ROman public tranpsortation and a bloodthirsty emperor, the birth of Christianity commenced as a formal organized world religion at the First Council of Nicea…after which the Roman Empire “restructured” itself into the world’s first and largest and most powerful multinational corporation: the Roman Catholic Church, which turned the whole world into one big Mafia neighborhood.
[It is now headed by an ex-Nazi named Joe Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) who said that 9 yr old sexual abuse victims who become pregnant as a result ought to be forced to carry such pregnancies to term, even if it means the little girl's own life being lost in the process.]
And forget this nonsense differentiating between minor doctrinal differences because the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin cherry-picked what suited them and ditched what didn’t. ALL versions of Christianity are branches from the same rotten tree of female oppression legitimized by patriarchal mythology.
It doesn’t matter if a few sparse historical events in the bible are true (locations of ancient cities and whatnot), that doesn’t mean the bible’s deity with manners reminiscent of a cross between a petty tyrant and a spoiled child with an attitude of entitlement flavored with the “angry white male” syndrome is a legitmate or real god deserving of worship or the basis of laws, IMHO.
Homer’s epic The Illiad had some historical fact to it, more than what can be said of the Judeo-Christian bible: there really was an ancient Troy located in what is northwestern Turkey. Troy really was sacked around 1184 BC. But does that mean that all these gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus were real, or meddled in the Trojan War? Of course not.
The god of the Judeo-Christian bible is no more real than the dieties of Mycenaean Greece that were active participants in Homer’s account of the fall of Troy, namely: Nyx (primordial goddess of nightfall), Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, Eris (goddess of discord), and Apollo.
And just because the Mycenaean Greeks treated women as “less than”, that is NO excuse for discrimination against women and disenfranchisement of women today. Just because some Neolithic societies in the Agean treated women as childbirth chattel slaves with no rights whatsoever 3,200 years ago, that is NO excuse for doing so today. The ancient Greeks also practiced pedastry (man-boy sexual molestation) which was accepted then. We would not debate legalizing the sexual molestation of children today. The sexist oppression of women should be no different, and that practice, like pedastry, should go the way of the do-do bird.
http://jacquelinehoman7.googlepages.com/nothingyoucanpossess
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