No, you just misunderstand. I didn’t say that Abrahamic religion caused patriarchy. I’m saying that Abrahamic religions were produced BY patriarchal cultures, and still have those assumptions embedded in their ancient writings.
This means nothing. People in cults have 'decided" to drink the koolaid…
Nope- their Moms.
Let’s say you got a Shiite ayatollah, an Opus Dei Catholic priest and a redneck Baptist preacher together. If you asked them all, “Who was it that taught you the basics of your faith, who dragged you to services, who made you say your prayers every day, who screamed in your face about avoiding sin,” it’s a pretty safe bet that all three men would tell you exactly the same thing:
Their mothers!
I know, this sounds completely counterintuitive, but a devout grandmother of a Shiite Muslim family or an Irish Catholic family has a LOT more religious power and influence over a LOT more people than a self-styled Wiccan priestess or even an ordained female Unitarian minister.
Women hold a HUGE amount of power in the so-called patriarchal religions.
It’s also worth noting that reverence for a goddess has never meant reverence or respect for real, live, flesh and blood women. The people of ancient Athens worshipped a patron godddess. They even named their city after that goddess. That didn’t do a dang bit of good for the women who lived there.
The actually reasoning behind the idea that everyone worshiped a goddess until the mean old Jews came along and forced them to worship God is “speculative in nature”, mostly based on archaeological findings of female figurines and assuming that we know what they were used for.
We do know what they were and what they were used for. They have inscriptions which tell us. We don’t have to speculate. Yahweh had a girlfriend named Asherah. Her cult was wiped out after the Exile. This is a fact.
Yeah, but as was pointed out, the fact that Athenians worshipped a goddess named Athena didn’t make them matriarchal.
So what? What does that have to do with whether the Abrahamic religions are patriarchal? Regardless of the nature of competing religious and cultural traditions from antiquity, what survives in modern iterations of the Abrahamic religions still preserves patriarchal/sexist values in its sacred literature, and because fundamentalist factions of those religions revere the literature as unimpeachably authoritative and perfect, that’s why such anachronistic values are still held as valid and perpetuated by fumndamentalists in modern times.
Whether other ancient cultures were patriarchal or not is really here nor there. All that matters is that the ones which produced the Bible and the Koran were.
Of course, the men in those societies are ready to stone or burn any woman who steps out of line with tradition. Kill all the women who question patriarchal authority and the women who survive can be trusted to raise the next generation up in a belief in patriarchal authority.
All that shows (to the extent that a plausible but still totally hypothetical anecdote can be said to “show” anything) is that women often play a leading role in maintaining the cultural and social importance of religion.
It doesn’t show jack-shit about women’s having a leading role, or even a comparable role with men, in determining doctrine and institutional power in a particular religion.
If you asked that ayatollah and that priest and that preacher, “Who was it that wrote the latest official summary of the doctrines of your faith, who decided when and how often services should be held, who published the standard edition of the prayers you say, who decides which cultural innovations are sinful and which are not”, it’s a pretty safe bet that none of the men’s answers would reference their mothers, or for that matter any other woman.
Yes, women are frequently the shock troops, foot soldiers, and palace guards of patriarchal religious organizations, but it’s men who are in the council room making the decisions.
It’s not a “fear” of women. I’ve got a pet fish I keep in a tank, but that’s for my convenience, not from fear. It serves its role at my pleasure and in its place.
Assigning arbitrarily restrictive rules for women is done for the convenvience of keeping them in their place and subjugated. It does surprise me that so many women seem to be OK with it, particularly in most Muslim as well as many orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian-based groups.
I am beginning to suspect there may be innate differences between men and women, on average. Perhaps it’s all just cultural, though.
In responding to his post I said, “You’ve already departed from reality too far to be debated with on an even level.” And yeah - in his post he’d [in his argument] departed quite far from reality. There’s really no other way to describe it (except perhaps to say that he was lying through his teeth).
So yeah - I don’t think this warning was deserved. But on the other hand, woot - my first Warning! I am now truly a man.
I see power as the ability to control outcomes. However, the women are only given this “power” if they adhere to the limited range of allowed outcomes - if a woman chooses not to drag their family to church, or if they choose to casually disregard the percieved moral codes, then they will rapidly fall from the perch you percieve them to be on.
Now, it’s fair to note that the men are by and large in the same boat - they have to follow the expectations set out for them or they too will recieve censure. Whether that censure is executed mostly by women is actually a pretty immateral-seeming fact - it wasn’t the woman’s idea for skipping church to be bad. She is merely a tool in the machine, less a master than a slave to the rules imposed from above, despite her using her position as a cog in a machine to feel that she has inherent authority.
So. Who does make the decisions in the religion (if anyone!), and who has the greater latitude within those rules? As noted many decisions are imposed from above, as it were, but of the remainder the substantive decisions seem to be held by the men. Additionally, of course, the rules seem to be a little laxer for men as well, while women are held to a rather more rigid standard.
Actually your fly analogy works much less well than your Afghanistan analogy, for a reason that’s even more obvious. Flies and humans are not part of a common society, a fact which I think should be fairly obvious. Hence an analogy that depends on the assumption that flies and humans are part of a common society, in the same way that men and women are, is absurd. (Also some women may not take kindly to being compared to flies, but I’ll let them complain about that if they feel it’s necessary.)
This is the complete opposite of the truth. The way it really works is the opposite of what you describe. In my church, there are three annual meetings in which a treasurer from the diocese and the preacher are present. The meeting is open-door, and anybody can show up at the meeting and have a vote. Every item on the church budget is subjected to popular vote. Other churches may do things differently; for example, in large churches there will usually be a vestry that makes general day-to-day decisions, but since the vestry is elected by the church body it’s still a communal decision. Smaller churches that aren’t part of an organized body presumably do things on a less formal basis, but the idea is the same. In any case, your claim that “there is a hard line between those who decide policy, and everyone else, who get policies dictated to them” is utterly false.
Actually it was a personal insult, but since a moderator has stepped in I’ll say no more about that.
If I ever meet anyone who wants to give the church more power of people’s daily lives, I’ll let them know your opinion. As it is, however, your logic would fail even if such people existed. As I already explained, the minister, priest, or deacon at a church does not run the church or boss around the church members. Rather, they are a servant of the church members. The church members decide what committees, support groups, charities, and outreach programs the church is going to run, not the clergy. The church members decide how resources will be distributed, not the clergy. The church members run the show.
All of that, however, is irrelevant to the main point. Women choose to attend church voluntarily, and can stop attending at any time. So to claim that women are somehow “oppressed” by the church would mean that a large majority of women are oppressing themselves voluntarily, and that means that a large majority of women have somehow been manipulated into hurting themselves and not even knowing it, and that means that a large majority of women are stupid. So, to summarize, saying that women are oppressed by churches is merely insulting women.
Some clergy are elected directly, others through a vestry or some other indirect process.
I will assume that descending into meaningless sarcasm is your way of admitting that you’re unable to bring any facts or cites forward to support your flatly false claims.
He didn’t assert that. He merely asserted that children should be taken away from their parents by the government. Since the government is dominated by men, therefore Dawkins would have the process of raising children be dominated by men. And since I explained to you this earlier in the thread, you obviously know what I’m saying, so you’re obviously not going to accomplish much by distorting it.
The only number I’ve posted in this thread is 50%. Specifically I said, “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.” So if you think that “my numbers” are incorrect, then you apparently believe that 1 out of 2 is not 50%. Perhaps you’re using some special math that only atheists know.
Actually that’s not what happened. What happened is that the OP posted saying that Christians force women to wear certain clothes and that Jews stone women to death for wearing red and other claims of that sort. You then posted in response: “what you’re seeing is the result of…” (in#10) So since you’re offering reasons for what albi saw, you must believe that what he saw is actually taking place. To clarify, I asked the following.
albi didn’t respond at all; he appears to have deserted the thread, but you quoted that exact paragraph and responded starting with: “Your ignorance/selective denial of history matches your ignorance/selective denial of the rest of reality, I see.” So, in short, you have posted twice in defense of what albi said in the OP. Now it appears that you’re backpedaling and pretending that you never defended the OP. Unfortunately for you, this is the Straight Dope Message Board, and your posts stay around.
Then you’d be correct, for the first time in this thread.
That so, eh? Well, since the other people who claimed that Christians and Jews are currently stoning people to death, perhaps you’d like to fill in with a cite for your claim that this is a current practice among Irish Catholics? It seems somewhat unlikely that Ireland would have the world’s lowest murder rate if that were true.
If you think deeply reliigous Christian, Jewish and Muslim women are mindless sheep who just do whatever the male clergy tell them, think again.
If the preacher at a Baptist church suddenly started speaking in moderate tones, suggesting that maybe the Bible should be interpreted less literally and wondering aloud if, perhaps, prohibitions against homosexuality should be re-thought, do you honestly think the old ladies in the pews would smile, nod and say, “Whatever Reverend Jim Bob says must be right”?
You think if an Iranian imam told a crowd of elederly Muslim women that it’s unnecessary to wear a chador, the old ladies would meekly bow to the imam’s wishes?
NO!
They’d rise up and demand the immediate ouster of the heretical clergyman. And while those ladies aren’t elders in their church/mosque, they’re married to the elders, who would follow orders and run the heretics out of town on a rail.
The old church ladies Dana Carvey made fun of are NOT timid, and they’re NOT cowed by authority. The men who are SUPPOSED to be in authority are regularly cowed by them.
And, hard to understand as you may find this, women around the world have their OWN reasons for embracing what you think of as male-dominated religions. Reasons that make perfect sense to them, if not to you or me.
You’re talking about adults. You set up a preacher to tell a group of children that gays are a-okay and they’ll nod along and accept it. You get those same children when they’re old men and women and a preacher telling them gays are evil and they’ll shout him down.
What people do as adults is irrelevant when we’re talking about indoctrination. That they maintain what they are told from back when they had no ability to analyze it, is just creepy, but not evidence of anything.
The clergy and the populace aren’t at the same level of society, either. And I not that you’re still explicitly missing the stated point of the analogy, probably because even so much as referencing it would be tantamount to admitting that you’re completely wrong.
To repeat myself: “specifically you are equating voluntary attendance with authority.”
Argument by anecdote! Welcome to the rest of the world. Like the part of it where women can’t be elected to the vestry. And the large parts of it where no election of the clergy occurs at all. (In the church I was made to attend as a youth it was by appointment from above.)
I wrote it, and I know exactly what I was insulting. Unless you’re claiming to know more about my intents than I do?
Your anecdote is uncompelling. I think the majority of churches do not work this way.
Don’t project your desire to insult people on me, buster - I never said that you have to be stupid to be manipulated. Particularly when the manipulation is built into the culture that the person has been raised in since birth.
Seriously: high-heeled shoes. Those things are dumb as all get out - women who wear them are hurting themselves. (And they’re hardly the worst things a culture has gotten women to do to their feet.) But does the fact a woman wears high heels make her stupid? I dunno about you but I’m not saying that. Culture is a powerful motivator.
And lots of them aren’t elected at all.
That’s meaningful sarcasm, as you well know - but tell you what. I’ll concede that in some little nooks of humanity there are elements of the church who allow their members to never elect women into their clergy.
And there are probably a few tiny crumbs of religion that may even allow that. Religion isn’t monolithic and it takes all kinds. But that said, there are certainly trends, and the trend exists despite your anecdote-fest.
Unless he asserted that the goverment should be dominated by men (not that it is, that it should be, since we’re in should-land), then you are obviously misrepresenting him. As you probably know, since you’re now trying to backtrack from the argument.
Your posts are still here, buddy. You posted “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%.” For this 50% to be true, you must be assuming that governement is 100% men, which you pulled out of your ass.
No, what happened is you failed to respond to what I actually said and dumped irrelevent spewage instead, so I completely ignored the spewage you vomited out and instead called you to task for spewing it. I’m so sorry that I’m not fulfilling the role of the strawman you wish you were arguing against - but I’m not sorry enough to play along with it.
Projecting again, are we?
Please tell me you are not an accountant, and if you are how do I avoid making the mistake of hiring you to do my taxes?
As atheists are made up of men and, oddly enough, women, or people if you will, and because we don’t have the baggage of the old testament telling us to treat women like property, I fail to see how you can figure that men, in an atheistic society will have any more say than women.
I guess if I want to use your reasoning, women now have the most say in the raising of children and have had for the amount of time religion has been around. If I want to follow this reasoning, then they are the ones responsible for all the wars and misery that people inflict upon each other due to not raising the kids properly. Of course, I’d never use that reasoning as it is ridiculous. I want you to see the results of your reasoning, though.
ps. I’m using some of albi’s spare commas!
There’s also the argument that that specific form of genital mutilation is primarily about older women reducing the competition from younger women; women who can’t enjoy sex are less likely to provide it.
Do you have a cite for any studies supporting this argument? If the older women themselves have had clitoridectomies and consequently can’t enjoy sex, why would they care about competition from younger women to obtain sex?
Pulling from my nether regions, but if you were a guy and had to chose between a willing sex partner and someone who was at best indifferent who would you pick and want as a wife? And if a guy doesn’t follow this sort of reasoning, then we’re back to the OP’s question of why certain cultures or religions fear women.