Congress is dominated by Christians, by the way. And the few who aren’t Christians are Jews or Muslims. I believe there is only one person in all of Congress who is a self-identified atheist.
Also, Jesus didn’t throw out any laws or barriers against women. The closest he came was (allegedly) telling men not to divorce their wives to trade up.
Not all ancient cultures were patriarchal, but the patriarchal ones wiped out the ones that were matriarchal or other, and those patriarchal traditions are the ones that survived to modern day. Judaism was ruthless about removing any hint of the feminine from the Divine, and destrying all temples and shrines to Yahweh’s consort/goddess, Asherah.
Christianity and Islam followed suit, though Goddess worship still has a way of expressing itself through the Madonna.
Which if true is pretty encouraging (though personally I’m happy if they just vote as atheists) - but it doesn’t quite qualify it as atheist organization.
Your analogies to what I was saying are flawed. Church is a voluntary organization. If women are much more likely to attend church than men are, it’s because women choose to attend church more than men do. Hence it’s perfectloy logical to conclude that church is a more feminized insitutition than those that are dominated by men. The same logic would not apply to a geographical unit like Afghanistan.
I will follow my usual policy of ignoring personal insults.
That has nothing to do with the debate at hand. I pointed out that Congress is mostly male. Hence those who want to give the federal government more power over people’s daily lives necessarily want to give men more power over women’s daily lives. The fact that Congress is elected doesn’t change that.
That’s an irrelevant comparison. Congress has power over other Americans. They can pass laws and send people with guns to arrest anyone who doesn’t obey the laws. Hence it’s completely the opposite of churches, where all rules and organizing are determined collectively. A relatively low percentage of women in the clergy is as irrelevant as a relatively low percentage of men in choir or among the vergers.
Quoting Richard Dawkins is like quoting Rush Limbaugh? I guess to the extent that both actions involve quoting people, I have to agree with that.
The rest of this paragraph, on the other hand, is obviously wrong. If we suppose that both parents normally play equal roles in child-rearing, that would mean that 50% of child-rearing is determined by men and 50% by women. By contrast, if we adopted Dawkins’ atheist approach to child-rearing, if would be nearly all controlled by men. Hence the Dawkins approach would lead to a vast increase in power for men, a category that coincidentally includes Richard Dawkins. In reality, of course, it’s not exactly a state secret that in average households child-rearing duties skew towards women, so his proposal would shift the power balance towards men by more than 50%.
So you’re saying that my belief that Christians don’t require women outside the home to be accompanied by men and that Jews aren’t currently stoning women to death for wearing red is a sign of ignorance? Okay, then, why don’t you fight my ignorance by linking to a current news story about Jews stoning a woman to death for wearing red or Christians banning women from leaving their homes without being accompanied? I’ve already asked you once for a cite and you’ve fallen flat. If you can’t provide a cite the second time, I’ll have to conclude that you’re unable to do so.
The fly analogy works perfectly, and underscores the ludicrousness of your position - specifically you are equating voluntary attendance with authority.
This is, of course, nonsense. In most churches there is a hard line between those who decide policy, and everyone else, who get policies dictated to them. The women are on the dictatee side of the line. This destroys your position, whether you admit it or not.
That wasn’t a personal insult - I was insulting your arguments. Which are definitely insultworthy.
I pointed out that clergies are mostly male. Hence those who want to give the church more power over people’s daily lives necessarily want to give men more power over women’s daily lives.
The fact that clergy aren’t elected further annihilates your position that the sheep are in charge of the sheperds.
“where all rules and organizing are determined collectively.”
Uh-huh.
Also, helicopters are excellent for personal transportation because when you get to your destination, you can fold them up and they fit neatly in your pocket!
I’ve never read Dawkins, since I’m not all that interested in the views of extremists. But frankly I don’t believe that he asserted that women wouldn’t be allowed to be a part of whatever government childraising program you imagine he’s imagining.
Plus I’ll just add, your numbers here are completely made up. Good show!
You responded to:
The fact that you spattered your response with random spewage and calls for irrelevent cites that had no bearing on the subject doesn’t change how wrong you are. Nice try, though.
ETA: Oh, and please provide a cite that atheists eat babies while worshipping large cheese-demons. If you don’t, I’ll have to conclude that you’re unable to do so.
It’s not religion or genes. It is societies (largely agricultural) where property is passed down through male blood lines. In these cultures, it is important that a man can be sure his son is his- and one way to do this is to make sure your wife isn’t having sex with anyone else. Religion can be an easy way of enforcing this, but the same thing would exist even without religion.
In cultures with different social arrangements, including our own, you see different patterns.
What matriarchal societies did patriarchal societies wipe out? Because as near as I can tell nobody really has any evidence of a matriarchal society ever existing. Marija Gimbutas has her theory about the Kurgen invasion of Europe but it’s based on pretty shaky evidence.
Pretty much what I was going to say. Society as a whole used to oppress women. Christianity, for example, used to be considered egalitarian towards women because it would treat them as second-class citizens - at a time when they were generally treated as property.
But society moves on and religions tend to maintain their traditions. Nowadays, men and women are regarded as equals in secular society so a religion that treats women as second-class citizens is less egalitarian than the society it’s in.
As were religions not centered on goddess worship. The Abrahamic religions don’t tend to be very tolerant of non-Abrahamic religions in general. But I don’t know if societies that worshiped goddesses were any less patriarchal or discriminatory than societies that worshiped gods.
Here’s something you may not realize, or that you may not have thought of:
In most of the religions you regard as “patriarchal,” it’s the WOMEN who teach the kids the rules of the faith, and enforce them. And it’s typically the WOMEN who insist on the strictest interpretation and enforcement of the rules against “indecency.”
In Muslim countries, it’s frequently the WOMEN who’ll scream bloody murder if they see a girl exposing too much flesh.
In a Southern town, it’s the church ladies who’ll be out in force protesting if “dirty” books are available at a school library.
In any Southern fundamnetalist church, you’ll find that it’s the women who are dragging their men and their kids to services. Not the other way around.
Perhaps, but not especially relevant to my point that patriarchal anachronisms exist in modern religious fundamentalist traditions because it is embedded in the archaic scripture that fundamentalists (by definition) revere as authoritative.
When I lived in West Africa, I learned from a medical doctor serving as a missionary that the practice of clitorectomy was more fiercely defended by tribal women than men. I wouldn’t say that therefore made it a non-sexist practice, only that women can be enculturated to believe their own self-worth and honor depends on submitting to male authority.
If we look around the world and through history, I certainly don’t see a strong correlation between Abrahamic religion (or monotheism) and patriarchy. India, Japan, China seem to be pretty patriarchal, right? Classical civilization wasn’t noted for gender equality, neither were northern European paganism.
It seems to me that hunter-gatherer societies tend to have more gender equality than agriculturalists, but that’s because they have more equality in general–there’s no opportunity to accumulate the sorts of surpluses that lead to social stratification.
But the correlation between Abrahamic religion and patriarchy is simply false.