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Thank you Ms. coyote, as usual you are the lone voice which hits the mark.
"Anyone who can make you accept absurdities can make you commit atrocities" attributed to Voltaire.
Anyone who can believe there is a big daddy in the sky will eventually commit or look away from atrocities. The whole point of religion is to control human behavior. …
Thank you Ms. coyote, as usual you are the lone voice which hits the mark.
"Anyone who can make you accept absurdities can make you commit atrocities" attributed to Voltaire.
Anyone who can believe there is a big daddy in the sky will eventually commit or look away from atrocities. The whole point of religion is to control human behavior. It is an extra-biological mechanism of human social control. Its greatest enemy is Democracy which is as an alternative mechanism.
My advice is for all believers to read the five proofs of God's existence in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The greatest thinker in Christianity shows how all the proofs are faulty and unacceptable. I wonder how many Christians have read him and understand the vast implications of what that brilliant thinker said.
Well, yes, but he also said of women, "the female is a deficient and misbegotten male.” He believed we were necessary for procreation and nothing else as we are, in all ways, inferior. He also believed that all fertilized human eggs are meant to be male, but some disruption caused them to be those "misbegotten" males.
He put it thus: "As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence."
Suzie the opposite is true, the original state of humans and mammals was female, and we reproduced parthenogentically. I don't need science, to prove it look at nipples on the male, also look at YDNA, it really isn't a Y it is a truncated X, some segments were cut off the X chromosone, and instead of reproductive organs on the inside, the reproductive organs are on the outside,
I know you understand this, but Aquinas did not and he was informed first and foremost by the Bible, and secondarily by Aristotle, who frequently voiced the misogyny of his day.
Wish I could like! Count this.
The whole of the ancient world was patriarchal and thus misogynist. The Priests of Sumer, Akkadia and Babylon, would seek out the prettiest virgins, dress them in white, garland and perfume them, then rape them in private, and then make a big to do of sacrificing them to the god or gods.
Queen Hatsheput of Egypt pulled of one, an became the only female phaRAoh, but still had do cross dress and have a beard affixed to her statues.
Aristotle the first botanist, but it stopped there.
Six things that Aristotle got wrong. No 1 is Women are monstrouos, and in keeping with Aristotle the cult of Rome has carried through, the church loved Aristotle. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/6-things-aristotle-got-wr_b_5920840
he also believe that the speed of an object was proportional to its weight and that heavy objects fell faster than light objects.
I do not accept that "the whole of the ancient world" has always been patriarchal, though the history of the "civilized world" as written by the men does seem so. Even today, anthropologists have a way of erasing female accomplishment. For example, while it was most likely women who domesticated dogs, by throwing them kitchen scraps, all credit is given to men in the most recent documentary I saw - it was all about dogs hunting with men, something that likely only happened after women domesticated those dogs. There was no mention of women's role. It was only about men. Erasure.
Also, recently (within the past few months) DNA analysis shows that Mayans sacrificed male children as well as female, at about the same age often from the same families (at least two sets of twins were found). Call me cynical, but I suspect politics at work with who got chosen as a gift to the gods. Piss off the wrong priest or other elite and tell your kids goodbye.
We have some clues, however, that pre-written records, patriarchy was far less prevalent. I've of late been studying Japanese spirituality (by no means an expert, or even what one would consider knowledgeable - only a smattering; perhaps someone here knows more.) But I was intrigued by this one thing. There were both male and female gods in ancient Japan's Shintoism. The chief deity and origin God was Ameratsu, a female. When the patriarchal version of Buddhism was made the state religion, the female gods genders were changed and they were given male names, their histories mostly erased.
"In 552 A.D the introduction of Buddhism from China would interfere with the Shinto dominated perception of women. According to Dr. Lebra and Joy Paulson, “The aspects of Buddhism which define its character had begun to make inroads on society’s attitude towards women.” This particular form of Buddhism that assimilated in Japan was immensely anti-feminine. Japan’s newfound Buddhism had fundamental convictions that women were of evil nature, which eventually led women into a submissive role of in Japanese society." ... "The anti-feminine tendencies of Buddhism redefined the role of women and continually progressed and regressed over a period of thirteen hundred years. There is an evident change of femininity and matriarchy at the dawn of Japanese civilization to the restricted and submissive women of the Tokugawa era that was “devoid of legal rights,” by the birth of modern Japan"
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/286/women-in-ancient-japan-from-matriarchal-antiquity-to-acquiescent-confinement
Japan still keeps an oral Shinto tradition and some of the female gods are still revered.
In the Middle East, the advent of Yahweh - father of all three "great" religions - Judaism, Islam and Christianity was when it got really nasty. Yahweh was originally a Jewish war god. He was not the only god in the pantheon, but a special god for the Jewish people, later promoted to the all-seeing, omnipotent deity we have inherited today. Yahwism, in all its forms, is deeply tied to war.
Ms. Coyote, I could not help but notice your comments about the domestication of dogs, being a dog lover myself. Many years ago when I studied Cultural Anthropology under Beth Dillingham, an associate of and co-author with one of the two founders of American Cultural Anthropology, Leslie White at Michigan, I read about the domestication of dogs. Anthropologists then thought dogs were domesticated in the way you mentioned. That is, they followed mobile bands of Hunter-gatherers and ate the food scraps those humans left behind.
Recent research indicates that this is not the best explanation. Instead biologists have found the allele which makes dogs qualitatively different from wolves. Even though dogs and wolves are both lupine creatures and can mate, producing hybrid offspring. They are not genetically the same creatures. In his recent, lovely book DOG IS LOVE author Clive Wynne actually reveals the number of the allele which is found in dogs, but not in wolves. Thus, dogs have appeared sometime in the ancient past as a result of a genetic mutation. A qualitative leap. Dogs are not domesticated wild lupine creatures. Dogs are their own thing. The obvious affection they display for humans is built into them biologically. Neither wild African dogs nor wolves can be made into lovers of humans as dogs are. It is simply not built into them.
Sorry if I am didactic. I could not resist. I love dogs.
Nobody has mentioned Riane Eisler "The Chalice and the Blade." All too passe' ? I am pretty old.
Thanks Suzie! I know Aquinas is a problematic figure if one is female, but I would not have been able to quote!
Ms. Coyote, I am not defending or advocating for Aquinas, only recognizing his insightful logic and importance for Christians. I am an Atheist who studied Symbolic Logic under the great Irving Copi at the University of Michigan a lifetime ago. Copi was, I think, a non believing Jew. Aquinas' foolishness about other topics in no way detracts from his convincing logic about the idea of a god. Just as Euclid's and Pythagoras' foolish ideas about nature detract not at all from their timeless truths, without which there would be no mathematics as we understand it today.
I don't believe you are being defense. I do believe that female voices have been wiped out of educational institutions.