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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: History / Historical
- Published: 03/31/2016
THE SACRED SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN
Born 1949, M, from Bridgwater, United KingdomTHE SACRED SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN
A Hard-Hitting Socio-Religious History
By Peter W. Mills, MA, PhD
(From his book “The Bible Exposed!”)
"Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great
social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval."
Karl Marx
“Woman… A female attendant or servant… a paramour or kept mistress… (Pop) a wife.” (Part of a definition in Funk & Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, 1952.)
With the discovery of metal at the end of the Stone Age, human society in general underwent major changes. As can be seen in the surviving records of this early period – the Egyptian hieroglyphics being just one example – all those qualities associated with rampant maleness became valued above all else; strength of limb, aggression, skill with weapons, fearlessness and rage in battle, contempt for the weak and meek, admiration for the strong and ruthless, jealousy of those mightier than oneself, and an overbearing assumption of the superiority of the male within society and culture.
In a male dominated hierarchy ruling a male warrior culture in which all aggressive and brutal male qualities were made virtuous, it became vital that the next generation of males, the sons, had an undisputed authority and unchallengeable right of succession to receive and perpetuate the line of kingship or the wealth and power of the established commoner.
For this lineage of exclusive male gender-dominance to become incorporated into the psychological blueprint of human affairs as one of the foundations of social structure, it was necessary for the direct line between father and inheriting son to be maintained beyond any reasonable doubt. The status of a mother became largely immaterial, providing her pedigree was acceptable for the production of suitable human livestock: a male ruler could, and did, have as many wives in his seraglio as he wished: the idea was at least extremely rare and generally socially disgraceful that women could have their own harem of multiple husbands.
If there was any doubt that the male line from father to son was unbroken, that an heir was the true child of the father, that the jealously guarded male right to the pedigree of succession and inheritance had been flawlessly upheld, or any suspicion that a mother had strayed from the designated marriage compound, then the male offspring would be viewed as contaminated by female wilfulness. Then the pillars of warrior society would be undermined. Then the throne could topple, the security of the state would be jeopardised, the inheritance could be lost, the hoarded power could be dissipated, the male warrior god would be compromised and angered, and divine retribution would descend on the entire population.
To avoid such apocalyptic consequences, any male offspring resulting from proven female disobedience would usually find themselves demoted and disinherited, and the contaminated woman would be executed. After the early Bronze Age, mythological fables highlighting the dreadful religious consequences of allowing women to have their way and give ideas to men became incorporated into the newly-emerging male-god beliefs.
To safeguard against such occurrences, the warrior society essentially enslaved womanhood and reduced sex to a prerogative of male demand and something shameful and submissive for women. In all lands over which the spectre of an absolute male god now began to hover, women were made the subject of stringent male laws to ensure that no impregnation was permitted to occur other than that caused by the woman's legal owner (in the same manner that the owner of a pedigree female dog wishes to ensure it does not breed with a mongrel).
Females who transgressed were executed (the stoning to death or beheading of women accused of having sex with a man other than their husband continues in some regions to this day). Woman became the property of man, encouraged by - demanded by - the new religious beliefs and creatively supporting writings of the male warrior caste.
In more recent historical times, one example of this social downgrading of women for the reason of producing a male heir to an identified and undisputed father was the Salique Law. To quote from Shakespeare's "Henry V", when King Henry asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain this law (which might present a legal barrier to Henry's claim to the French throne), the Archbishop refers to it as "...a female bar." He goes on to explain its origin: "No woman shall succeed in Salique land... where Charles the great, having subdued the Saxons, there left behind and settled certain French; who, holding in distain the German women, for some dishonest manners of their life, established then this law - to wit, no female should be inheretrix in Salique land..."
In other words, the German women of Charles the Great's time were behaving in a free manner, enjoying sex with whomever they fancied just for the fun of it, in an open and honest natural way. This female freedom, of course, could not be tolerated in a male dominated society where women, like cattle, must be prevented from straying, and it was swiftly legislated against and then eliminated.
Under the ethos of the male god, women must be kept strictly subjugated to the will of the “superior man”, who was, of course, obviously superior because he was made in the actual image of the god and woman was not – a propagandist social control mechanism of the male god’s human fabricators and copywriters which succeeded in robbing womanhood of its otherwise incontestable item of natural superiority over man within any society - the ability to give birth. In a total perversion of the laws of nature, it was proposed instead that the first man had given birth to the first woman, and this strange but necessary belief was included in the religious requirements of the warrior society in order to make it appear indisputably true.
The widespread historical discrimination against women, which has still not disappeared from our world, is very largely the lingering result of the rise of the male-supremacist religions that acknowledge only an exclusive single male god first invented in the Bronze Age. It was the prevailing conviction throughout all countries holding these beliefs that the only genuine god was male - not merely male in some vague nebulous spiritual sense but literally a man-god, for he had created mortal men in his own image and therefore must be identical to them in appearance - and woman had been created, as it were, at second-hand from a man's rib, and women were thus obviously inferior, an afterthought of creation.
It should particularly be remembered that it was only comparatively recently that women in the West were even allowed to vote in supposedly "democratic" elections. It was not until 1848 that women began to unite successfully against this legacy of socio-religious male dominance.
This train of events had begun in 1840 when two members of the Society of Friends (more commonly known as "Quakers"), Elizabeth Cady Stanton of New York State and Lucretia Mott, visited London as official delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. They were both astonished and outraged when, in common with all British women present, they were refused permission to address the convention, or even to be seated at it, simply because they were women. Stanton later wrote: "We resolved to... form a society to advocate the rights of women." In 1848, Stanton and Mott organised the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in New York State.
In a paper, Elizabeth Stanton itemised eighteen grievances (the same number listed just seventy years earlier by the revolutionaries in the Declaration of Independence from the rule of England, although of course the nature of the grievances were somewhat different). The introduction to this paper also paraphrased the introduction to that earlier Declaration, commencing: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different to that which they have previously occupied… We hold these truths to be self-evident… among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”
Following this introduction, Mrs. Stanton prefaced her paper by stating: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world."
She then listed her 18 specific injustices as:
1. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
2. He has compelled her to submit to law in the formation of which she had no voice.
3. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners.
4. Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
5. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
6. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
7. He has made her morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, providing they be done in the presence of her husband.
8. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master: the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement.
9. He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes and, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless to the happiness of the women: the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man and giving all power into his hands.
10. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
11. He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
12. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honourable to himself.
13. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
14. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
15. He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
16. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude woman from society are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
17. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
18.He has endeavoured, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Although this list, which amounted to an embryonic manifesto for a new political movement towards eventual female equality, was drawn up as recently as 1848, the grievances it itemised (as hinted at in the wording of the declaration) were the lingering religiously-bolstered legacy of the Bronze Age social revolution from a mixed-sex pantheism to a patriarchal godhead.
Very slowly, prompted initially by Elizabeth Stanton and her supporters and then by the spreading of the message of equal rights for women by later activists, changes were made within the very structure of westernised society, the process of necessary change being not yet fully complete worldwide. It was not welcomed by all even when Elizabeth Stanton first proposed it: at a meeting in Philadelphia in 1854, a male objector in the audience shouted: "Let women first prove they have souls; both the Church and the State deny it!" In point of fact, this was not entirely incorrect, as we shall soon see.
The first ever woman's suffrage (the right to vote) was actually a legal mistake made in New Jersey in 1776, where in the state legislature the word "people" was inadvertently used instead of "men", but the law was altered in 1807. In 1838 the tiny British colony of the Pitcairn Islands, home of the Bounty mutineers and their descendents, permitted women to vote, but this was largely because there were only ever a tiny handful of people living there: it was the single exception in the British Empire.
It was not until 1869 that the Wyoming Territory in the United States became the first sizeable modern state where equal suffrage was granted to women. A women's rights movement led by Kate Sheppard pressured the New Zealand administration to become the first country in the world to introduce universal suffrage in 1893. The following year, South Australia followed suite, also granting women the right to stand for public office including membership of parliament. Finland followed in 1906, then Norway, Denmark and the rest of Australia before the First World War began in 1914.
Pressurised by the suffragette movement and prompted by the necessity of employing women in previously male-only jobs during the Great War, both Britain and Germany permitted women to have the vote in 1918. In January of that year, the Representation of the People Act in Parliament gave the vote to all British men over the age of 21; women were still considered a less advanced component of society though, and only those who owned their own houses or were married to householders were deemed responsible enough to vote at 21, others having to wait until they reached 30. It was not until 1928 that the voting age for British women was lowered to be equal to that of men.
America, the "Land of the Free", finally followed suit on 26th August 1920 when the Secretary of State certified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, extending the right to vote to all (in effect, white) women. (It was only in 1965, four years before men first landed on the Moon, that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act which made it supposedly illegal in the USA to prevent black Americans from voting).
Before this, following the lead of Wyoming, individual state legislature had permitted women to vote in an increasing number of regions, such as Colorado in 1893, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Montana in 1914 and so on, but it was not until the thirty-sixth and last state, Tennessee, signed for ratification that the 19th Amendment could be authorised. France and Japan did not allow women to vote until 1945, Switzerland until 1971 and Liechtenstein until 1984. Certain countries still do not permit women to vote, including Saudi Arabia where – although under pressure to reform its political system which is based on a very rigid interpretation of Islamic Sharia law – at this time of writing women are also not permitted to drive or even to travel unaccompanied by male relatives.
In the present day, only a relative handful of states still hold women in thrall, usually on the basis of certain interpretations of the Koran or the Bible (such as in the case of the Vatican State). The first Arab women who were legally permitted to vote were actually living in Israel in 1948 when the country was being founded.
The ideal of women's equal rights still faces monumental problems in the Islamic world, where, for example, classical Islamic scholars have ruled that it is prohibited for a woman to lead men in prayers, and within the similar world of Roman Catholicism, where women are strictly prohibited from entering the priesthood and achieving any clerical position, only being allowed to become nuns or serve as laypeople. Again, the male supremacist legacy of the patriarchal Bronze Age warrior god can be clearly discerned in the case of both these male-dominated religions. Viewed from the outside, in fact, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are the same thing - three alternative ways of proclaiming the same male Bronze-Age god.
Unfortunately, although much attention has been focused in the West from time to time upon the Islamic treatment of women, the religiously-inspired subjugation of women acquired its most unhealthy and vicious character in Christianity, the pivotal belief of which requires, in absolute terms, the denunciation of the female, not merely as subservient, a slave or as "property", but actually as something inherently evil, a fact that all too frequently escapes most modern Christians and is played-down in importance by the majority of Christian apologists and publicists.
Ask any Christian to state in a few words the absolute central core of their belief system, and the reply is most likely to focus upon concepts such as "Christ", or "Jesus", or "salvation", or "redemption" or something along these lines. They are wrong. The theological bedrock upon which the Christian religion is predicated and constructed is not Christ, but rather, it is the reason why Christ was considered necessary on earth in the first place.
The most relevant question is; if Christ offers salvation or redemption, salvation or redemption from what? From sin, of course, will be the most usual reply. However, the "sin" with which, in Christian theology, everyone is supposed to be contaminated is not actually the normal petty stuff of daily life; these ordinary human sins can be, and are, pardonable through the agency of a mere priest, as in the regular confessional practiced by Roman Catholics. The "sin" which requires the "salvation" supposedly generated only by the advent of Christ is, specifically, original sin.
If there had been no "original sin" afflicting all mankind, then - according to the tenets of Christian theology - it would not have been necessary for their god to have sent his son to earth to be sacrificed in order to save everyone from it, because if it had not been for this original sin committed by Eve, humanity would still be living in primal innocence within the Garden of Eden, in direct communion with the god, in a "state of grace", as this god was supposed to have originally planned.
Many branches of the modern Church now attempt to distance themselves from the original Christian core belief that women are a source of spiritual evil, as various divisions of Christianity now also attempt to distance themselves from other unpalatable aspects of their religion. For instance, some churches now sidestep the politically incorrect concept of a strictly male god by encouraging the belief that God is either without sex, or else encompasses both sexes. (How a neutered god can father a physical son has not yet been made clear: nor has it been clarified precisely how a god who is supposed to have "made man in his image" can be of both sexes without criticism, whilst trans-sexuals and homosexuals are still condemned as "evil" or "against the law of God" by many Christians.) Nevertheless, stripped down to the bare essentials, the following is a pocket statement of the primal Christian belief.
The Essential Christian Belief Summed Up:-
Because Eve, the first woman and mother of the human race, succumbed to the temptation of Satan in the guise of a serpent, all of Adam and Eve's descendents were born contaminated by this original sinful act. The serpent prompted Eve to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, specifically forbidden by God, and after eating it, Eve tricked Adam into doing the same. Thereby they became aware of the difference between good and evil, became mortal, had sexual intercourse and lost their innocence.
This meant that God's original intention that humans should remain in a state of unspoiled perfect grace with eternal life was subverted, and Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, after which each successive generation of children was automatically born contaminated by this original sin and subsequently passed it on in turn to their own offspring.
God eventually took pity on humanity and decided they were worth offering the chance of salvation from this continually inherited cycle of original sin, together with the possibility of regaining the original eternal life spoiled by the fall from grace in Eden. To accomplish this, God sent the spirit of his only son - whose spiritual form or essence had always been part of God's threefold being, Father, Son and Holy Spirit - to manifest on earth as a human man, entering the world by being born as a baby to a mother who was a virgin and consequently becoming the first man since Adam to be born without inheriting original sin. This baby was named Jesus, and he grew up as a carpenter's son - attracting the attention of occasional wise men and elders on the way - until at the age of approximately thirty he began to preach on behalf of God and perform various miracles as evidence of the divine part of his nature. He also gathered a growing band of followers, the most suitable of whom were chosen by him to be his apostles.
Due to the inherited sin released by humankind's original fall from grace, the majority of the people of Jesus' time refused to acknowledge that he was the Messiah, or Saviour (from original sin), and he was eventually denounced by the Jews as a troublemaker, heretic and danger to the established hierarchy of their theocracy. Because Judea was under Roman occupation and Roman law, Jesus was handed over to the Roman authorities and given a Roman execution, crucifixion. However, because of his divine nature, Jesus rose from the dead three days later and was resurrected to his living form again, communing for a time with his apostles before voluntarily ascending in living form into heaven to rejoin his father, God.
After this, the apostles - except for Judas Iscariot who had betrayed Jesus and had died - accepted the responsibility of spreading the story of Jesus and the teachings of God that Jesus had instructed them in throughout as much of the world as was possible in those days. Although many of them and their deeds are mentioned in the Bible in the Acts of the Apostles and various epistles, because of his tremendous zeal, energy and divine inspiration, St. Paul became their natural leader or principle activist and spokesman. After many trials, he and his colleagues, especially Peter, founded what became the Christian Church in order to complete the apostle's designated mission and become a route offered by God through his sacrificed son to personal salvation from original sin.
Anybody who came to acknowledge Jesus as Christ the Saviour and Son of God, and accepted the Church as his apostolic representative on earth, would be saved from the contamination of original sin and therefore guaranteed a place in heaven after death, and an eventual resurrection of their own physical body in eternal life, in a "state of grace", after a forthcoming Day of Judgement.
Those who do not acknowledge these things before they die, or have them acknowledged by a priest on their behalf - even if there is no choice, such as in the case of babies who die without baptism, or natives of other regions who have had no connection with Judeo/Christian ideas, or followers of entirely different religious beliefs - are still infected by Eve's original sin. Such sinners are instead consigned to Hell, the domain governed by Satan the original temptor of Eve, who is able to claim them as his own if they have not received salvation, and they will burn in torment for eternity.
In the case of unbaptised babies and certain others, this unfair sentence was later moderated by Christian theologians to have them sent instead to a place called "Limbo". "Limbo" (from Latin "limbus") literally means "hem" or "border" as in “borderland” (the Italian lembo and English limb come from the same root word). In Christian theology, the name is applied to two spiritual storage facilities or depositories on the borderland of Hell.
One of these is for the souls of the biblical patriarchs such as Moses and Abraham etc. and of other good people who died before Christ ascended into heaven (i.e. they died BC, or in the few decades AD before the crucifixion and ascension). This is technically called the Limbus Patrum (i.e. "the Limbo of the Patriarchs"), from which advancement into the Kingdom of Heaven is eventually permitted.
The other Limbo, the Limbus Infantium (or Puerorum), is defined in Christian theology as a permanent dumping place for the souls of unbaptised children. There is no escape or progression permissible from the Limbus Infantium, but at least it, too, is only on the border of Hell and not in the actual main infernal region, a notion that is apparently intended to be of some comfort to the bereaved.
How the Snake got its Hiss:-
The story of "Adam and Eve" and the Garden of Eden is nothing more than a pure myth "borrowed" from the folktales of earlier cultures and peoples, and conflicts diametrically with the facts of science, history and evolution. The very basis of Christianity as distilled out of the Bible is erroneous, for nowhere in Genesis is the serpent of the Garden of Eden actually identified with "Satan" or "the Devil", who is a fabricated mythological figure that did not even historically exist when Genesis was first set down, for his invention as a “god of evil” or “fallen angel” did not take place in Hebrew mythology until about 600 BC.
The identification of the serpent in Genesis with Satan is nothing but a later assumption. It is not until the opposite end of the Bible is reached - and in one of the most recent portions written about AD 95/96 - that the information "...the old serpent who is called the Devil and Satan" is included (Revelation 12:9)
.
Indeed, the serpent is very clearly and explicitly described in Genesis as nothing more than a representation of an actual snake: the sentence "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made..." (Genesis 3:1) clearly indicates the serpent was nothing more than a rather clever "beast of the field". The original Hebrew version in the Torah, on which the Bible's Book of Genesis is based, says the same thing in even more explicit wording, naming the serpent as nothing but a natural animal: "Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made..." (Tanakh, Bereshit 3:1). In the myth, certainly, it is able to talk, but then so are the majority of mythological animals featured in any medicine-spirit tales from around the world.
In fact, the biblical account of God stating to the serpent: "...Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel..." (Genesis 3;14-15) is merely an example of a "This Is Why" story of a kind universally used within tribal mythology throughout the world in order to provide explanations of why things are the way they are - in this case, why people are frequently afraid of snakes.
Possibly the best modern example of such fabricated tales are Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (first published 1902), in which, with his tongue in his cheek, Kipling, who was thoroughly familiar with primitive world mythology, explained in a series of immensely popular children's stories exactly how various things came to be the way they are today. (The technical term for a contrived tale that attempts to "explain" observed facts is ætiological.)
"...Then the Man threw his two boots and his little stone axe (that makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the Cave and the Dog chased him up a tree; and from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree..." (The Cat that Walked by Himself). "...And from that day to this the Camel always wears a humph..." (How the Camel got his Hump). "...and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside..." (How the Rhinoceros got his Skin). "...From that day to this the Moon has always pulled the sea up and down and made what we call the tides. Sometimes the Fisher of the Sea pulls a little too hard, and then we get spring tides; and sometimes he pulls a little too softly, and then we get what are called neap-tides..." (The Crab Who Played With The Sea). "...and ever since that day, O Best Beloved, all the Elephants you will ever see, besides all those that you won't, have trunks precisely like the trunk of the 'satiable Elephant's Child..." (The Elephant's Child).
If it had not already been included in the Bible, another "Just So" story might have been written: "...And that is why, from that day to this, all snakes have crawled in the dust and bitten unwary people in the heel..."
Welcome to Heaven (Women Not Admitted)
The important point of this myth that underlies all the rest of the Bible and the religion of Christianity itself, is that it was Eve, the woman, who committed the first and greatest sin, which thereby contaminated every successive human born. This particular anti-female theology resulted in Saul ("St. Paul") referring to women as "the weaker vessel" (1 Peter 3:7). St. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman." The Church Father Tertullian wrote of women in general: "…And do you not know you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert -- that is, death -- even the Son of God had to die."
In the sixth century, the Christian philosopher Boethius wrote in his work The Consolation of Philosophy: "Woman is a temple built upon a sewer", and in the same century (585 AD) the church's Council of Macon in Burgundy voted on the issue of whether women even had souls or were actually human beings. (Fortunately for women, the council officially decided that they were human after all.) It was a popular belief for many centuries that the Latin word for "woman", femina, came from fe ("faith" [from facio/feci "religion"]) and minus "without". St. Odo of Cluny in the tenth century stated: "To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure." In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas made the suggestion that God had been mistaken in creating women altogether, saying: "...nothing deficient or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then." Even more recently, in 1647, a pamphlet published in Italian in Lyons, France, was entitled: “Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture.”
In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not recognise women as human beings until after Peter the Great (1672-1725) had come to the throne of Russia, and censuses carried out up to that time under that branch of Christianity counted only males as "souls".
After the Christian Reformation, Lutherans at Wittenberg - the place where Martin Luther had founded Protestantism - also held a debate on whether women should be considered human beings or not. In 1533 Martin Luther himself wrote: "Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." He made certain his opinion on women was absolutely clear by also writing: "If (women) become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth - that is why they are there." For a considerable time after the Reformation, women in England were not even allowed to read the Bible: Henry VIII (1491-1547), famous for beheading unwanted wives, issued a statute prohibiting "women and others of low degree" from using it.
The French Catholic priest and judge Nicholas Rémy (1534-1600) wrote: "(It is) not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, (i.e. witches) should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex". Rémy was responsible for the burning alive of over nine hundred innocent people, mainly women, in the witch trials he presided over in the ten years from 1581 to 1591, and he was extremely proud of his record. In his book Demonolatriae Libri Tres (usually translated simply as "Demonolatry") published in Lyon in 1595, amongst other atrocities, he boasts of having children stripped and flogged around the pyre where their parents, accused of witchcraft, were being burned alive.
Under Church law, girls were allowed to be tortured and prosecuted for witchcraft from the age of nine and a half; for boys, the age was ten and a half. Younger children could be tortured to produce testimony that could be used to convict their parents, and even the testimony of two-year old children was accepted as evidence in witchcraft trials.
It is recorded that the men who tortured women accused of witchcraft frequently became sexually aroused. Because Christianity considered sex to be the result of Eve’s fall from Grace and therefore wicked and ungodly, this arousal was declared to be a "spell" originating from the "witch". Amongst the favourite targets for torture were the breasts and genitals of the victim, which were torn off with red-hot pincers.
In some instances, the Inquisition permitted men considered to be "zealous Catholics" to visit women accused of witchcraft in their prison to sexually abuse them: they were not raping them for their own lust, but in the name of God, which made it righteous. In Toulouse, France, the local populace became so certain that the regional inquisitor, Foulques de Saint-George, brought witchcraft accusations solely for the purpose of committing rape and sexual sadism upon various women he desired, that they took the bold step of independently gathering evidence which proved it.
The Sorrow of Sex and Birth:-
Genesis 3:16 has the biblical god speak to Eve after the temptation by the serpent: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children..." It was due to this biblical passage that as recently as the nineteenth century some Christian priests opposed the use of anaesthetics during childbirth, claiming that it would amount to a disobedience of God's will by preventing the necessary suffering ordained in the Bible. Only after Queen Victoria herself had insisted on being given anaesthetics during delivery did the practise become more acceptable and more commonly employed.
As the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell put it: “One occasion for the logical intervention to prevent …human suffering was the discovery of anaesthetics. Simpson in 1847 recommended their use in child birth, and was immediately reminded by the clergy that God said to Eve 'In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.'"
The Christian point of view was summed up by a church minister in the USA: "Chloroform is a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise, in time of trouble, for help." The City Fathers of Zurich (a town that was in previous centuries one of the greatest centres of witch-burnings) actually outlawed anaesthesia altogether for a time, on the grounds that "Pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin. Any attempt to do away with it must be wrong."
Women have frequently been regarded amongst Christians as an obstruction to faith, and the male warrior god of the Bronze Age is understood by many to demand a rejection of physical pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Christianity has always condemned the enjoyment of sex, considering it nothing but a mechanism for producing offspring. "It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman." (Corinthians 7:1). A Christian judge in the sixteenth century stated: "The Devil uses them so (i.e. as temptresses of men), because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations." The Dominican monks Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, writers of the infamous instruction book for witch hunters the Malleus Maleficarum, stated: "... the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men; because being formed from a man's rib, they are only imperfect animals and crooked, whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged."
As long ago as the thirteenth century, preachers are recorded as denouncing women for "...on the one hand, the lascivious and carnal provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things." A Dominican monk of the same century stated: "Woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest... a hindrance."
Another symptom of the Christian unease with the female sex, and also of their ancient alarm at the notion of anyone worshipping a goddess, was the growing suspicion amongst the various Christian authorities that their Virgin Mary was becoming an object of veneration in her own right. As a result of this growing sense of disquiet, and a knee-jerk reaction against a dawning suspicion that if Mary was accorded holy status as the "mother of God", Christianity was beginning to fashion its own pantheon of gods and goddesses in the pagan style, Protestants ruled that there should be no reverence for Mary and even Catholics reduced her importance to a considerable degree. Accordingly, devotion to Mary was often viewed as a sign of evil and actually became suggestive of witchcraft in the Christian mind.
There is a case recorded from the Canary Islands, colonised by Spain, that a woman named Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition because she had smiled on hearing someone mention the Virgin Mary. Another result of this fear of Mary being worshipped in her own right was the devising of what became one of the most notorious instruments of torture of all time. The Inquisition designed a perverted human-size image of the Virgin Mary which would open up to reveal an interior of sharp spikes that would be closed upon the victim within. This became known as the "iron Virgin" or "iron maiden".
Christianity Confused by Women-Haters:-
And yet, according to some parts of the Bible, it is perfectly permissible for women to be church leaders, to teach men finer points of religious interpretation, and to be apostles. "...and Priscilla... expounded to him the way of God more perfectly" (Acts 18:26). "...I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, which is a servant of the church... Greet Priscilla and Aquila... my helpers in Jesus Christ" (Romans 16:1-4). "...Junia... of note among the apostles" (Romans 16:7). (The Revised Standard Version of the Bible uses the Greco/Latin word for a servant “deacon” in the anglicised female declension “deaconess” to describe Phoebe's status in the passage in Romans.)
In the opposite corner of the boxing ring, however, we also have 1 Corinthians (14:34-35): "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church": and 1 Timothy (2:11-12): "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
The question must be asked: how can anyone possibly manage to equate the women apostles, teachers and helpers of the New Testament with the total denigration of women also required by the Bible? It is a fact that some translators of the Bible were so offended by the concept of a woman being specifically named as an apostle that the original name "Junia" mentioned in Romans 16 was often surreptitiously altered to "Junias" in the belief that this was a male version of the name. In fact, "Junias", although recorded extremely rarely in classical sources, can also be a female name, as confirmed, for example, by Plutarch (AD 50-120) who writes in his Life of Marcus Brutus that Junias was the name of Brutus' sister who became the wife of the regicide Cassius, which again places considerable weight on the argument that the apostle Junia or Junias was a woman.
The argument about the apostle Junia has raged for many centuries. Within the early Church, Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis and later of Aparneia (315-403) compiled an Index disciplulorum (Index of Disciples) in which he describes "...Iounias, of whom Paul makes mention...". Written in Greek, in chapter 125, verses 19-20, the text uses the word hou (a masculine relative pronoun) for "of whom", thereby indicating that Epiphanius considered Iounias (Junias) to be a man.
However, John Chrysostom who lived at about the same time (347-407), in his preaching on the passage in Romans 16, referred to Junias by exclaiming: "Oh! How great is the devotion of this woman..." John Chrysostom is referred to in the Catholic Encyclopedia as "...generally considered the most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit." He is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, in the Roman Catholic Church, and in the Church of England. It would therefore be a particularly brave or rash Bible fanatic who would dare state that he was mistaken in his considered opinion that the apostle Junias (or Junia) was female.
This conflicting set of messages in the Bible, coupled with the inbuilt prejudice of the Church Fathers and their acolytes down the centuries against the idea that women are equally worthy to hold office at all levels in the Church, has until the later twentieth century resulted in the exclusion of women from the majority of proper Church offices.
Quite simply, the female was viewed by biblical dogma and the societies it produced and moulded as something inferior to the male, something that should be kept very firmly in its subjugated place, and whose main purpose apart from continuing the species was the temptation of man into sin and his distraction from a properly religious asceticism, from the time of Adam onwards.
It should also be born in mind that the Church of England only gave normal permission for the ordination of women priests as recently as 1992, although Congregationalist Elsie Chamberlain was appointed in 1946 as the first female chaplain in the RAF, and the first woman to actually become an Anglican priest was Florence Li Tim-Oi, ordained to serve inside Japanese-occupied China in World War Two. Seven Roman Catholic women who were “unofficially” ordained as priests in 2002 were excommunicated for this “sin”, the severest punishment the Catholic Church can now inflict.
In July 2006 the General Synod of the Church of England finally agreed to the appointment of women bishops. When the first of these were ordained and blessed in Bristol Cathedral, the Rev. Malcolm Widdecombe, vicar of nearby St. Philip and Jacob church (brother of Ann Widdecombe MP and former shadow Home Secretary) sounded a dirge from his church bells in protest at the event.
Susan Restall, vicar at St. Margaret’s in Yate near Bristol, has stated that some people have crossed the church to avoid receiving communion from her, saying: “Some of the nastiness has to be seen to be believed”. Jane Hayward, vicar of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol’s most important church apart from the cathedral itself, is quoted as stating: “Some priests have cut me dead. Once, one of them snatched the chalice out of my hand.”
As recently as July 2008 – as reported by the BBC – the ruling Synod of the Church of England has been challenged by some 1,300 clergymen who have threatened to leave the Church unless they are guaranteed being subject only to male bishops.
It is clear that in Christianity in general there remains a widespread entrenched belief that women are unfit to serve their deity in exactly the same capacity as men – a sexual prejudice ultimately originating in the millennia-old view that all woman are evil, the mind-set of this view itself descending from the arrival in the Bronze Age of the all-conquering male warrior Semitic tribal god whose atrocities and crimes against humanity are so meticulously detailed by the various authors and editors of the Bible.
THE SACRED SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN(Peter Mills)
THE SACRED SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN
A Hard-Hitting Socio-Religious History
By Peter W. Mills, MA, PhD
(From his book “The Bible Exposed!”)
"Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great
social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval."
Karl Marx
“Woman… A female attendant or servant… a paramour or kept mistress… (Pop) a wife.” (Part of a definition in Funk & Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary, 1952.)
With the discovery of metal at the end of the Stone Age, human society in general underwent major changes. As can be seen in the surviving records of this early period – the Egyptian hieroglyphics being just one example – all those qualities associated with rampant maleness became valued above all else; strength of limb, aggression, skill with weapons, fearlessness and rage in battle, contempt for the weak and meek, admiration for the strong and ruthless, jealousy of those mightier than oneself, and an overbearing assumption of the superiority of the male within society and culture.
In a male dominated hierarchy ruling a male warrior culture in which all aggressive and brutal male qualities were made virtuous, it became vital that the next generation of males, the sons, had an undisputed authority and unchallengeable right of succession to receive and perpetuate the line of kingship or the wealth and power of the established commoner.
For this lineage of exclusive male gender-dominance to become incorporated into the psychological blueprint of human affairs as one of the foundations of social structure, it was necessary for the direct line between father and inheriting son to be maintained beyond any reasonable doubt. The status of a mother became largely immaterial, providing her pedigree was acceptable for the production of suitable human livestock: a male ruler could, and did, have as many wives in his seraglio as he wished: the idea was at least extremely rare and generally socially disgraceful that women could have their own harem of multiple husbands.
If there was any doubt that the male line from father to son was unbroken, that an heir was the true child of the father, that the jealously guarded male right to the pedigree of succession and inheritance had been flawlessly upheld, or any suspicion that a mother had strayed from the designated marriage compound, then the male offspring would be viewed as contaminated by female wilfulness. Then the pillars of warrior society would be undermined. Then the throne could topple, the security of the state would be jeopardised, the inheritance could be lost, the hoarded power could be dissipated, the male warrior god would be compromised and angered, and divine retribution would descend on the entire population.
To avoid such apocalyptic consequences, any male offspring resulting from proven female disobedience would usually find themselves demoted and disinherited, and the contaminated woman would be executed. After the early Bronze Age, mythological fables highlighting the dreadful religious consequences of allowing women to have their way and give ideas to men became incorporated into the newly-emerging male-god beliefs.
To safeguard against such occurrences, the warrior society essentially enslaved womanhood and reduced sex to a prerogative of male demand and something shameful and submissive for women. In all lands over which the spectre of an absolute male god now began to hover, women were made the subject of stringent male laws to ensure that no impregnation was permitted to occur other than that caused by the woman's legal owner (in the same manner that the owner of a pedigree female dog wishes to ensure it does not breed with a mongrel).
Females who transgressed were executed (the stoning to death or beheading of women accused of having sex with a man other than their husband continues in some regions to this day). Woman became the property of man, encouraged by - demanded by - the new religious beliefs and creatively supporting writings of the male warrior caste.
In more recent historical times, one example of this social downgrading of women for the reason of producing a male heir to an identified and undisputed father was the Salique Law. To quote from Shakespeare's "Henry V", when King Henry asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain this law (which might present a legal barrier to Henry's claim to the French throne), the Archbishop refers to it as "...a female bar." He goes on to explain its origin: "No woman shall succeed in Salique land... where Charles the great, having subdued the Saxons, there left behind and settled certain French; who, holding in distain the German women, for some dishonest manners of their life, established then this law - to wit, no female should be inheretrix in Salique land..."
In other words, the German women of Charles the Great's time were behaving in a free manner, enjoying sex with whomever they fancied just for the fun of it, in an open and honest natural way. This female freedom, of course, could not be tolerated in a male dominated society where women, like cattle, must be prevented from straying, and it was swiftly legislated against and then eliminated.
Under the ethos of the male god, women must be kept strictly subjugated to the will of the “superior man”, who was, of course, obviously superior because he was made in the actual image of the god and woman was not – a propagandist social control mechanism of the male god’s human fabricators and copywriters which succeeded in robbing womanhood of its otherwise incontestable item of natural superiority over man within any society - the ability to give birth. In a total perversion of the laws of nature, it was proposed instead that the first man had given birth to the first woman, and this strange but necessary belief was included in the religious requirements of the warrior society in order to make it appear indisputably true.
The widespread historical discrimination against women, which has still not disappeared from our world, is very largely the lingering result of the rise of the male-supremacist religions that acknowledge only an exclusive single male god first invented in the Bronze Age. It was the prevailing conviction throughout all countries holding these beliefs that the only genuine god was male - not merely male in some vague nebulous spiritual sense but literally a man-god, for he had created mortal men in his own image and therefore must be identical to them in appearance - and woman had been created, as it were, at second-hand from a man's rib, and women were thus obviously inferior, an afterthought of creation.
It should particularly be remembered that it was only comparatively recently that women in the West were even allowed to vote in supposedly "democratic" elections. It was not until 1848 that women began to unite successfully against this legacy of socio-religious male dominance.
This train of events had begun in 1840 when two members of the Society of Friends (more commonly known as "Quakers"), Elizabeth Cady Stanton of New York State and Lucretia Mott, visited London as official delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. They were both astonished and outraged when, in common with all British women present, they were refused permission to address the convention, or even to be seated at it, simply because they were women. Stanton later wrote: "We resolved to... form a society to advocate the rights of women." In 1848, Stanton and Mott organised the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in New York State.
In a paper, Elizabeth Stanton itemised eighteen grievances (the same number listed just seventy years earlier by the revolutionaries in the Declaration of Independence from the rule of England, although of course the nature of the grievances were somewhat different). The introduction to this paper also paraphrased the introduction to that earlier Declaration, commencing: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different to that which they have previously occupied… We hold these truths to be self-evident… among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”
Following this introduction, Mrs. Stanton prefaced her paper by stating: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world."
She then listed her 18 specific injustices as:
1. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
2. He has compelled her to submit to law in the formation of which she had no voice.
3. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners.
4. Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
5. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
6. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
7. He has made her morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, providing they be done in the presence of her husband.
8. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master: the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement.
9. He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes and, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless to the happiness of the women: the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man and giving all power into his hands.
10. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
11. He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
12. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honourable to himself.
13. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
14. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
15. He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.
16. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude woman from society are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
17. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
18.He has endeavoured, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Although this list, which amounted to an embryonic manifesto for a new political movement towards eventual female equality, was drawn up as recently as 1848, the grievances it itemised (as hinted at in the wording of the declaration) were the lingering religiously-bolstered legacy of the Bronze Age social revolution from a mixed-sex pantheism to a patriarchal godhead.
Very slowly, prompted initially by Elizabeth Stanton and her supporters and then by the spreading of the message of equal rights for women by later activists, changes were made within the very structure of westernised society, the process of necessary change being not yet fully complete worldwide. It was not welcomed by all even when Elizabeth Stanton first proposed it: at a meeting in Philadelphia in 1854, a male objector in the audience shouted: "Let women first prove they have souls; both the Church and the State deny it!" In point of fact, this was not entirely incorrect, as we shall soon see.
The first ever woman's suffrage (the right to vote) was actually a legal mistake made in New Jersey in 1776, where in the state legislature the word "people" was inadvertently used instead of "men", but the law was altered in 1807. In 1838 the tiny British colony of the Pitcairn Islands, home of the Bounty mutineers and their descendents, permitted women to vote, but this was largely because there were only ever a tiny handful of people living there: it was the single exception in the British Empire.
It was not until 1869 that the Wyoming Territory in the United States became the first sizeable modern state where equal suffrage was granted to women. A women's rights movement led by Kate Sheppard pressured the New Zealand administration to become the first country in the world to introduce universal suffrage in 1893. The following year, South Australia followed suite, also granting women the right to stand for public office including membership of parliament. Finland followed in 1906, then Norway, Denmark and the rest of Australia before the First World War began in 1914.
Pressurised by the suffragette movement and prompted by the necessity of employing women in previously male-only jobs during the Great War, both Britain and Germany permitted women to have the vote in 1918. In January of that year, the Representation of the People Act in Parliament gave the vote to all British men over the age of 21; women were still considered a less advanced component of society though, and only those who owned their own houses or were married to householders were deemed responsible enough to vote at 21, others having to wait until they reached 30. It was not until 1928 that the voting age for British women was lowered to be equal to that of men.
America, the "Land of the Free", finally followed suit on 26th August 1920 when the Secretary of State certified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, extending the right to vote to all (in effect, white) women. (It was only in 1965, four years before men first landed on the Moon, that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act which made it supposedly illegal in the USA to prevent black Americans from voting).
Before this, following the lead of Wyoming, individual state legislature had permitted women to vote in an increasing number of regions, such as Colorado in 1893, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Montana in 1914 and so on, but it was not until the thirty-sixth and last state, Tennessee, signed for ratification that the 19th Amendment could be authorised. France and Japan did not allow women to vote until 1945, Switzerland until 1971 and Liechtenstein until 1984. Certain countries still do not permit women to vote, including Saudi Arabia where – although under pressure to reform its political system which is based on a very rigid interpretation of Islamic Sharia law – at this time of writing women are also not permitted to drive or even to travel unaccompanied by male relatives.
In the present day, only a relative handful of states still hold women in thrall, usually on the basis of certain interpretations of the Koran or the Bible (such as in the case of the Vatican State). The first Arab women who were legally permitted to vote were actually living in Israel in 1948 when the country was being founded.
The ideal of women's equal rights still faces monumental problems in the Islamic world, where, for example, classical Islamic scholars have ruled that it is prohibited for a woman to lead men in prayers, and within the similar world of Roman Catholicism, where women are strictly prohibited from entering the priesthood and achieving any clerical position, only being allowed to become nuns or serve as laypeople. Again, the male supremacist legacy of the patriarchal Bronze Age warrior god can be clearly discerned in the case of both these male-dominated religions. Viewed from the outside, in fact, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are the same thing - three alternative ways of proclaiming the same male Bronze-Age god.
Unfortunately, although much attention has been focused in the West from time to time upon the Islamic treatment of women, the religiously-inspired subjugation of women acquired its most unhealthy and vicious character in Christianity, the pivotal belief of which requires, in absolute terms, the denunciation of the female, not merely as subservient, a slave or as "property", but actually as something inherently evil, a fact that all too frequently escapes most modern Christians and is played-down in importance by the majority of Christian apologists and publicists.
Ask any Christian to state in a few words the absolute central core of their belief system, and the reply is most likely to focus upon concepts such as "Christ", or "Jesus", or "salvation", or "redemption" or something along these lines. They are wrong. The theological bedrock upon which the Christian religion is predicated and constructed is not Christ, but rather, it is the reason why Christ was considered necessary on earth in the first place.
The most relevant question is; if Christ offers salvation or redemption, salvation or redemption from what? From sin, of course, will be the most usual reply. However, the "sin" with which, in Christian theology, everyone is supposed to be contaminated is not actually the normal petty stuff of daily life; these ordinary human sins can be, and are, pardonable through the agency of a mere priest, as in the regular confessional practiced by Roman Catholics. The "sin" which requires the "salvation" supposedly generated only by the advent of Christ is, specifically, original sin.
If there had been no "original sin" afflicting all mankind, then - according to the tenets of Christian theology - it would not have been necessary for their god to have sent his son to earth to be sacrificed in order to save everyone from it, because if it had not been for this original sin committed by Eve, humanity would still be living in primal innocence within the Garden of Eden, in direct communion with the god, in a "state of grace", as this god was supposed to have originally planned.
Many branches of the modern Church now attempt to distance themselves from the original Christian core belief that women are a source of spiritual evil, as various divisions of Christianity now also attempt to distance themselves from other unpalatable aspects of their religion. For instance, some churches now sidestep the politically incorrect concept of a strictly male god by encouraging the belief that God is either without sex, or else encompasses both sexes. (How a neutered god can father a physical son has not yet been made clear: nor has it been clarified precisely how a god who is supposed to have "made man in his image" can be of both sexes without criticism, whilst trans-sexuals and homosexuals are still condemned as "evil" or "against the law of God" by many Christians.) Nevertheless, stripped down to the bare essentials, the following is a pocket statement of the primal Christian belief.
The Essential Christian Belief Summed Up:-
Because Eve, the first woman and mother of the human race, succumbed to the temptation of Satan in the guise of a serpent, all of Adam and Eve's descendents were born contaminated by this original sinful act. The serpent prompted Eve to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, specifically forbidden by God, and after eating it, Eve tricked Adam into doing the same. Thereby they became aware of the difference between good and evil, became mortal, had sexual intercourse and lost their innocence.
This meant that God's original intention that humans should remain in a state of unspoiled perfect grace with eternal life was subverted, and Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, after which each successive generation of children was automatically born contaminated by this original sin and subsequently passed it on in turn to their own offspring.
God eventually took pity on humanity and decided they were worth offering the chance of salvation from this continually inherited cycle of original sin, together with the possibility of regaining the original eternal life spoiled by the fall from grace in Eden. To accomplish this, God sent the spirit of his only son - whose spiritual form or essence had always been part of God's threefold being, Father, Son and Holy Spirit - to manifest on earth as a human man, entering the world by being born as a baby to a mother who was a virgin and consequently becoming the first man since Adam to be born without inheriting original sin. This baby was named Jesus, and he grew up as a carpenter's son - attracting the attention of occasional wise men and elders on the way - until at the age of approximately thirty he began to preach on behalf of God and perform various miracles as evidence of the divine part of his nature. He also gathered a growing band of followers, the most suitable of whom were chosen by him to be his apostles.
Due to the inherited sin released by humankind's original fall from grace, the majority of the people of Jesus' time refused to acknowledge that he was the Messiah, or Saviour (from original sin), and he was eventually denounced by the Jews as a troublemaker, heretic and danger to the established hierarchy of their theocracy. Because Judea was under Roman occupation and Roman law, Jesus was handed over to the Roman authorities and given a Roman execution, crucifixion. However, because of his divine nature, Jesus rose from the dead three days later and was resurrected to his living form again, communing for a time with his apostles before voluntarily ascending in living form into heaven to rejoin his father, God.
After this, the apostles - except for Judas Iscariot who had betrayed Jesus and had died - accepted the responsibility of spreading the story of Jesus and the teachings of God that Jesus had instructed them in throughout as much of the world as was possible in those days. Although many of them and their deeds are mentioned in the Bible in the Acts of the Apostles and various epistles, because of his tremendous zeal, energy and divine inspiration, St. Paul became their natural leader or principle activist and spokesman. After many trials, he and his colleagues, especially Peter, founded what became the Christian Church in order to complete the apostle's designated mission and become a route offered by God through his sacrificed son to personal salvation from original sin.
Anybody who came to acknowledge Jesus as Christ the Saviour and Son of God, and accepted the Church as his apostolic representative on earth, would be saved from the contamination of original sin and therefore guaranteed a place in heaven after death, and an eventual resurrection of their own physical body in eternal life, in a "state of grace", after a forthcoming Day of Judgement.
Those who do not acknowledge these things before they die, or have them acknowledged by a priest on their behalf - even if there is no choice, such as in the case of babies who die without baptism, or natives of other regions who have had no connection with Judeo/Christian ideas, or followers of entirely different religious beliefs - are still infected by Eve's original sin. Such sinners are instead consigned to Hell, the domain governed by Satan the original temptor of Eve, who is able to claim them as his own if they have not received salvation, and they will burn in torment for eternity.
In the case of unbaptised babies and certain others, this unfair sentence was later moderated by Christian theologians to have them sent instead to a place called "Limbo". "Limbo" (from Latin "limbus") literally means "hem" or "border" as in “borderland” (the Italian lembo and English limb come from the same root word). In Christian theology, the name is applied to two spiritual storage facilities or depositories on the borderland of Hell.
One of these is for the souls of the biblical patriarchs such as Moses and Abraham etc. and of other good people who died before Christ ascended into heaven (i.e. they died BC, or in the few decades AD before the crucifixion and ascension). This is technically called the Limbus Patrum (i.e. "the Limbo of the Patriarchs"), from which advancement into the Kingdom of Heaven is eventually permitted.
The other Limbo, the Limbus Infantium (or Puerorum), is defined in Christian theology as a permanent dumping place for the souls of unbaptised children. There is no escape or progression permissible from the Limbus Infantium, but at least it, too, is only on the border of Hell and not in the actual main infernal region, a notion that is apparently intended to be of some comfort to the bereaved.
How the Snake got its Hiss:-
The story of "Adam and Eve" and the Garden of Eden is nothing more than a pure myth "borrowed" from the folktales of earlier cultures and peoples, and conflicts diametrically with the facts of science, history and evolution. The very basis of Christianity as distilled out of the Bible is erroneous, for nowhere in Genesis is the serpent of the Garden of Eden actually identified with "Satan" or "the Devil", who is a fabricated mythological figure that did not even historically exist when Genesis was first set down, for his invention as a “god of evil” or “fallen angel” did not take place in Hebrew mythology until about 600 BC.
The identification of the serpent in Genesis with Satan is nothing but a later assumption. It is not until the opposite end of the Bible is reached - and in one of the most recent portions written about AD 95/96 - that the information "...the old serpent who is called the Devil and Satan" is included (Revelation 12:9)
.
Indeed, the serpent is very clearly and explicitly described in Genesis as nothing more than a representation of an actual snake: the sentence "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made..." (Genesis 3:1) clearly indicates the serpent was nothing more than a rather clever "beast of the field". The original Hebrew version in the Torah, on which the Bible's Book of Genesis is based, says the same thing in even more explicit wording, naming the serpent as nothing but a natural animal: "Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made..." (Tanakh, Bereshit 3:1). In the myth, certainly, it is able to talk, but then so are the majority of mythological animals featured in any medicine-spirit tales from around the world.
In fact, the biblical account of God stating to the serpent: "...Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel..." (Genesis 3;14-15) is merely an example of a "This Is Why" story of a kind universally used within tribal mythology throughout the world in order to provide explanations of why things are the way they are - in this case, why people are frequently afraid of snakes.
Possibly the best modern example of such fabricated tales are Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (first published 1902), in which, with his tongue in his cheek, Kipling, who was thoroughly familiar with primitive world mythology, explained in a series of immensely popular children's stories exactly how various things came to be the way they are today. (The technical term for a contrived tale that attempts to "explain" observed facts is ætiological.)
"...Then the Man threw his two boots and his little stone axe (that makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the Cave and the Dog chased him up a tree; and from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree..." (The Cat that Walked by Himself). "...And from that day to this the Camel always wears a humph..." (How the Camel got his Hump). "...and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside..." (How the Rhinoceros got his Skin). "...From that day to this the Moon has always pulled the sea up and down and made what we call the tides. Sometimes the Fisher of the Sea pulls a little too hard, and then we get spring tides; and sometimes he pulls a little too softly, and then we get what are called neap-tides..." (The Crab Who Played With The Sea). "...and ever since that day, O Best Beloved, all the Elephants you will ever see, besides all those that you won't, have trunks precisely like the trunk of the 'satiable Elephant's Child..." (The Elephant's Child).
If it had not already been included in the Bible, another "Just So" story might have been written: "...And that is why, from that day to this, all snakes have crawled in the dust and bitten unwary people in the heel..."
Welcome to Heaven (Women Not Admitted)
The important point of this myth that underlies all the rest of the Bible and the religion of Christianity itself, is that it was Eve, the woman, who committed the first and greatest sin, which thereby contaminated every successive human born. This particular anti-female theology resulted in Saul ("St. Paul") referring to women as "the weaker vessel" (1 Peter 3:7). St. Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century: "Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman." The Church Father Tertullian wrote of women in general: "…And do you not know you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert -- that is, death -- even the Son of God had to die."
In the sixth century, the Christian philosopher Boethius wrote in his work The Consolation of Philosophy: "Woman is a temple built upon a sewer", and in the same century (585 AD) the church's Council of Macon in Burgundy voted on the issue of whether women even had souls or were actually human beings. (Fortunately for women, the council officially decided that they were human after all.) It was a popular belief for many centuries that the Latin word for "woman", femina, came from fe ("faith" [from facio/feci "religion"]) and minus "without". St. Odo of Cluny in the tenth century stated: "To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure." In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas made the suggestion that God had been mistaken in creating women altogether, saying: "...nothing deficient or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then." Even more recently, in 1647, a pamphlet published in Italian in Lyons, France, was entitled: “Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture.”
In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not recognise women as human beings until after Peter the Great (1672-1725) had come to the throne of Russia, and censuses carried out up to that time under that branch of Christianity counted only males as "souls".
After the Christian Reformation, Lutherans at Wittenberg - the place where Martin Luther had founded Protestantism - also held a debate on whether women should be considered human beings or not. In 1533 Martin Luther himself wrote: "Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." He made certain his opinion on women was absolutely clear by also writing: "If (women) become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth - that is why they are there." For a considerable time after the Reformation, women in England were not even allowed to read the Bible: Henry VIII (1491-1547), famous for beheading unwanted wives, issued a statute prohibiting "women and others of low degree" from using it.
The French Catholic priest and judge Nicholas Rémy (1534-1600) wrote: "(It is) not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, (i.e. witches) should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex". Rémy was responsible for the burning alive of over nine hundred innocent people, mainly women, in the witch trials he presided over in the ten years from 1581 to 1591, and he was extremely proud of his record. In his book Demonolatriae Libri Tres (usually translated simply as "Demonolatry") published in Lyon in 1595, amongst other atrocities, he boasts of having children stripped and flogged around the pyre where their parents, accused of witchcraft, were being burned alive.
Under Church law, girls were allowed to be tortured and prosecuted for witchcraft from the age of nine and a half; for boys, the age was ten and a half. Younger children could be tortured to produce testimony that could be used to convict their parents, and even the testimony of two-year old children was accepted as evidence in witchcraft trials.
It is recorded that the men who tortured women accused of witchcraft frequently became sexually aroused. Because Christianity considered sex to be the result of Eve’s fall from Grace and therefore wicked and ungodly, this arousal was declared to be a "spell" originating from the "witch". Amongst the favourite targets for torture were the breasts and genitals of the victim, which were torn off with red-hot pincers.
In some instances, the Inquisition permitted men considered to be "zealous Catholics" to visit women accused of witchcraft in their prison to sexually abuse them: they were not raping them for their own lust, but in the name of God, which made it righteous. In Toulouse, France, the local populace became so certain that the regional inquisitor, Foulques de Saint-George, brought witchcraft accusations solely for the purpose of committing rape and sexual sadism upon various women he desired, that they took the bold step of independently gathering evidence which proved it.
The Sorrow of Sex and Birth:-
Genesis 3:16 has the biblical god speak to Eve after the temptation by the serpent: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children..." It was due to this biblical passage that as recently as the nineteenth century some Christian priests opposed the use of anaesthetics during childbirth, claiming that it would amount to a disobedience of God's will by preventing the necessary suffering ordained in the Bible. Only after Queen Victoria herself had insisted on being given anaesthetics during delivery did the practise become more acceptable and more commonly employed.
As the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell put it: “One occasion for the logical intervention to prevent …human suffering was the discovery of anaesthetics. Simpson in 1847 recommended their use in child birth, and was immediately reminded by the clergy that God said to Eve 'In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.'"
The Christian point of view was summed up by a church minister in the USA: "Chloroform is a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise, in time of trouble, for help." The City Fathers of Zurich (a town that was in previous centuries one of the greatest centres of witch-burnings) actually outlawed anaesthesia altogether for a time, on the grounds that "Pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin. Any attempt to do away with it must be wrong."
Women have frequently been regarded amongst Christians as an obstruction to faith, and the male warrior god of the Bronze Age is understood by many to demand a rejection of physical pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Christianity has always condemned the enjoyment of sex, considering it nothing but a mechanism for producing offspring. "It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman." (Corinthians 7:1). A Christian judge in the sixteenth century stated: "The Devil uses them so (i.e. as temptresses of men), because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations." The Dominican monks Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, writers of the infamous instruction book for witch hunters the Malleus Maleficarum, stated: "... the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men; because being formed from a man's rib, they are only imperfect animals and crooked, whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged."
As long ago as the thirteenth century, preachers are recorded as denouncing women for "...on the one hand, the lascivious and carnal provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things." A Dominican monk of the same century stated: "Woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest... a hindrance."
Another symptom of the Christian unease with the female sex, and also of their ancient alarm at the notion of anyone worshipping a goddess, was the growing suspicion amongst the various Christian authorities that their Virgin Mary was becoming an object of veneration in her own right. As a result of this growing sense of disquiet, and a knee-jerk reaction against a dawning suspicion that if Mary was accorded holy status as the "mother of God", Christianity was beginning to fashion its own pantheon of gods and goddesses in the pagan style, Protestants ruled that there should be no reverence for Mary and even Catholics reduced her importance to a considerable degree. Accordingly, devotion to Mary was often viewed as a sign of evil and actually became suggestive of witchcraft in the Christian mind.
There is a case recorded from the Canary Islands, colonised by Spain, that a woman named Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition because she had smiled on hearing someone mention the Virgin Mary. Another result of this fear of Mary being worshipped in her own right was the devising of what became one of the most notorious instruments of torture of all time. The Inquisition designed a perverted human-size image of the Virgin Mary which would open up to reveal an interior of sharp spikes that would be closed upon the victim within. This became known as the "iron Virgin" or "iron maiden".
Christianity Confused by Women-Haters:-
And yet, according to some parts of the Bible, it is perfectly permissible for women to be church leaders, to teach men finer points of religious interpretation, and to be apostles. "...and Priscilla... expounded to him the way of God more perfectly" (Acts 18:26). "...I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, which is a servant of the church... Greet Priscilla and Aquila... my helpers in Jesus Christ" (Romans 16:1-4). "...Junia... of note among the apostles" (Romans 16:7). (The Revised Standard Version of the Bible uses the Greco/Latin word for a servant “deacon” in the anglicised female declension “deaconess” to describe Phoebe's status in the passage in Romans.)
In the opposite corner of the boxing ring, however, we also have 1 Corinthians (14:34-35): "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church": and 1 Timothy (2:11-12): "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
The question must be asked: how can anyone possibly manage to equate the women apostles, teachers and helpers of the New Testament with the total denigration of women also required by the Bible? It is a fact that some translators of the Bible were so offended by the concept of a woman being specifically named as an apostle that the original name "Junia" mentioned in Romans 16 was often surreptitiously altered to "Junias" in the belief that this was a male version of the name. In fact, "Junias", although recorded extremely rarely in classical sources, can also be a female name, as confirmed, for example, by Plutarch (AD 50-120) who writes in his Life of Marcus Brutus that Junias was the name of Brutus' sister who became the wife of the regicide Cassius, which again places considerable weight on the argument that the apostle Junia or Junias was a woman.
The argument about the apostle Junia has raged for many centuries. Within the early Church, Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis and later of Aparneia (315-403) compiled an Index disciplulorum (Index of Disciples) in which he describes "...Iounias, of whom Paul makes mention...". Written in Greek, in chapter 125, verses 19-20, the text uses the word hou (a masculine relative pronoun) for "of whom", thereby indicating that Epiphanius considered Iounias (Junias) to be a man.
However, John Chrysostom who lived at about the same time (347-407), in his preaching on the passage in Romans 16, referred to Junias by exclaiming: "Oh! How great is the devotion of this woman..." John Chrysostom is referred to in the Catholic Encyclopedia as "...generally considered the most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit." He is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, in the Roman Catholic Church, and in the Church of England. It would therefore be a particularly brave or rash Bible fanatic who would dare state that he was mistaken in his considered opinion that the apostle Junias (or Junia) was female.
This conflicting set of messages in the Bible, coupled with the inbuilt prejudice of the Church Fathers and their acolytes down the centuries against the idea that women are equally worthy to hold office at all levels in the Church, has until the later twentieth century resulted in the exclusion of women from the majority of proper Church offices.
Quite simply, the female was viewed by biblical dogma and the societies it produced and moulded as something inferior to the male, something that should be kept very firmly in its subjugated place, and whose main purpose apart from continuing the species was the temptation of man into sin and his distraction from a properly religious asceticism, from the time of Adam onwards.
It should also be born in mind that the Church of England only gave normal permission for the ordination of women priests as recently as 1992, although Congregationalist Elsie Chamberlain was appointed in 1946 as the first female chaplain in the RAF, and the first woman to actually become an Anglican priest was Florence Li Tim-Oi, ordained to serve inside Japanese-occupied China in World War Two. Seven Roman Catholic women who were “unofficially” ordained as priests in 2002 were excommunicated for this “sin”, the severest punishment the Catholic Church can now inflict.
In July 2006 the General Synod of the Church of England finally agreed to the appointment of women bishops. When the first of these were ordained and blessed in Bristol Cathedral, the Rev. Malcolm Widdecombe, vicar of nearby St. Philip and Jacob church (brother of Ann Widdecombe MP and former shadow Home Secretary) sounded a dirge from his church bells in protest at the event.
Susan Restall, vicar at St. Margaret’s in Yate near Bristol, has stated that some people have crossed the church to avoid receiving communion from her, saying: “Some of the nastiness has to be seen to be believed”. Jane Hayward, vicar of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol’s most important church apart from the cathedral itself, is quoted as stating: “Some priests have cut me dead. Once, one of them snatched the chalice out of my hand.”
As recently as July 2008 – as reported by the BBC – the ruling Synod of the Church of England has been challenged by some 1,300 clergymen who have threatened to leave the Church unless they are guaranteed being subject only to male bishops.
It is clear that in Christianity in general there remains a widespread entrenched belief that women are unfit to serve their deity in exactly the same capacity as men – a sexual prejudice ultimately originating in the millennia-old view that all woman are evil, the mind-set of this view itself descending from the arrival in the Bronze Age of the all-conquering male warrior Semitic tribal god whose atrocities and crimes against humanity are so meticulously detailed by the various authors and editors of the Bible.
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