I guess a duck, in this instance, might not be a duck, but we can’t take a cell sample to test his DNA to prove otherwise.
We had a threae abouty this before where you were trying to claim that dawkins wanted the government to take Christian’s kids away from them. Dawkins is talking about an education curriculum and nothing more. I’m sure you would agree that it’s totally unacceptable for children to be taught that the Bible is a science book.
You’re blatantly contradicting what Dawkins SAYS. or, at any rate, what ITR Champions is quoting him as saying.
You wanna claim that Dawkins didn’t really say what Champion cites? By all means, set us straight and show us what Dawkins REALLY said.
You wanna claim he MEANT something other than what he wrote? Fine, Kreskin, but this quote says PARENTS, not “schools” or “teachers.” Meaning either…
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Dawkins is a very sloppy writer and a bit of a dishonest demgogue (he often is, when he’s not writing about science proper; when he’s actually writing about evolution and biology, he’s generally a very elegant and precise writer).
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He had a lazy, incompetent editor.
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You’re so blinded by ideology that you refuse to acknowledge what’s right under your nose.
ITR is quoting him out of context. We had a whole thread on that quote once before. I’m not interested in doing it again.
I’ll be happy to go along with that.
First of all, the list of churches that I provided is certainly restricted to liberal churches. Secondly, your claim that they “collectively add up to one or two percent of the total number of churches/religious people”, is so far off the mark that, well, it’s very far off the mark. It’s noteworthy that you’re trying to change the subject to the percentage of total religious believers, away from the subject of percentage of total Christians. Here’s what you said: “in virtually all churches the women couldn’t elect a woman to represent them”. You accuse me of equating the Community of Christ Episcopal church with all of Islam, which as usual is not true. I don’t recall mentioning Islam in this thread. In fact, of course, some of the things that you’ve said about Christian and Jewish groups would be pretty close to true if you’d said them about certain Muslim groups.
Actually I have tackled this exact issue over and over again, and you’ve simply refused to acknowledge or respond to what I said. Since I’m too lazy to right it all again, I’ll just quote what I’ve already said.
“Power, using the dictionary definition, means “the possession of control or command over others”. Any member of a church body can walk out the door at any time, and the clergy cannot stop them, so therefore the clergy does not have power over the church body. The more important point, though, is in the decisions about what the church is going to do, how it will lay its priorities, how it will distribute its resources, and so forth. Those decisions come from the church body and the minister is expected to serve the church body by helping them to implement their decisions. If this point sounds familiar, it’s probably because I’ve already presented it several times and you’ve not been willing to respond to it.”
Even those clergy who are not elected are still influenced by their congregations.
Ah, so you’ve just created a new set of rules for debate in this forum where you can say anything you want and aren’t required to provide cites. Well, I’m afraid that I’m going to continue proving you wrong, even if it’s against your rules.
Your point doesn’t contradict the definition. The definition you give doesn’t qualify the possession as being unwilling, the control as not at the sufferance of the controlled. Plenty of people willingly put themselves into the control of others; that they can leave if they so wanted doesn’t mean that until or if they do the person in control has no control over them.
I mean, to go by your interpretation, no-one has power over anyone else, because we can simply kill ourselves and so escape their ability to control us.
Beyond that, the clergy most certainly could stop a member of a church body walking out the door, by, for example, providing emotional or theological pressure to affect their decision.
Nope, I described the context correctly. The Humphrey quote comes after the first pages of chapter 9, where Dawkins says that raising religious children is worse than child abuse, and before a section where Dawkins justifies his desire to have the government forcibly intervene in private lives by comparing the situation to an Inca girl being sacrificed. But Dawkins specifically acknowledges that Humphrey is arguing for censorship “of moral and religious education, and especially the education that a child receives at home”. (Emphasis mine.) So Dawkins and Humphrey do not only want the government to intervene in school curricula, but also in what happens between parents and their children at home. All of this is in section 2 of chapter 9, and he doesn’t even mention school curricula until section 3.
In any case, your fellow atheist uzi has squeezed his proud endorsement for government child-snatching between his normal list of personal insults aimed at me. If you think that Dawkins doesn’t endorse child-snatching, why don’t you explain it to him?
This is the OP of this thread:
This thread was NEVER just about Christians. No matter how damaging that little fact is to your argument (such as it is.)
And it’s also not about the USA.
The amazing part is, you can type this with a straight face. If you can leave, then the group has no control over you? Not even during the time you’re not leaving? Absurd. By identical logic, if a slave is able to kill themself, then they are a completely free and unhindered man, by virtue of the fact they don’t choose to make their escape.
I simply don’t believe that this is is the case, in the vast majority of churches anyway. I don’t think that the Catholic population can just decide that having orgies in church will be okay, and thereby change official Catholic church policy. They could all leave and have orgies elsewhere, but this does not equate to having control over church policy.
Now, if you wanted to argue that over centuries some churches have modified some of thier policies due to external or internal pressures, then I’d concede that immediately. But one of the things that has clearly not happened is all churches christian and pagan that have more women than men becoming, quote, “feminized organization[s]”. Which is the statement that you’re trying to defend here, right?
Easy to assert, isn’t it? And certainly they react to their congregations to some degree, if only to call down their community’s wrath down upon deviants. But you asserted that the inflence was so strong as to automatically “feminize” any religion that had more women than men attending. That’s a tall claim, and that’s the claim you made.
Burden of Proof. Something new I created? You’re wrong again.
Why should uzi care what Dawkins supports or argues? You’re not entertaining the silly idea that Dawkins is some kind of leader of atheists, are you?
Bingo! I will quote Dawkins when I agree with him. He isn’t my leader. I don’t bow down to him. If he is wrong, then so be it. Prove it. I’d be surprised if he didn’t agree with that. He’d love for you to prove him wrong. Emphasis on ‘prove’, though. No magic sky pixies and their imaginary pronouncements in ancient books. If you have a real sky pixie, produce it or shut up about it and what it says.
What is currently child abuse today, wasn’t necessarily child child abuse previously. Putting children to work in factories, I’d consider child abuse. Yet it wasn’t always so. Dawkins has his opinion on what constitutes child abuse. I agree with him for the most part. Just because you screwed some woman and she popped out a kid, doesn’t give you the right to program that kid in any way you like. Society has a say on how children should be raised. At least enough to ensure that the rest of us are protected from the result.
My solution would be to ensure that all children must go to a public secular school. No religious schools allowed until a child is over 18. No homeschooling unless there is no way for a child to attend regular school due to distance, or special circumstances. Special circumstances are not to be religious or culturally based.
Yes. I wish I knew. Particularly the good looking ones. They intimidate me.
Whenever someone argues to me that religious leaders possess power that they exercise not through force but rather through some other, non-forceful means, I reject it. As far as I’m concerned, power wielded through emotional pressure or social pressure or whatnot is not power. Power is what can be forced. People may wield influence through channels that don’t involve force, but not power.
But even there, I don’t think there’s much grounds for complaining about the tremendous influence of the clergy, especially on women. In my experience, church ladies are just about the group of people least likely to allow their beliefs to be changed by anybody. Individuals can have the most influence is situations there are no fixed core beliefs. Hence some people like politicians, executives, radio hosts, and so on can say nearly anything and have a good percentage of their followers accept it. George W. Bush, for instance campaigned in 2000 on a promise not to invade Iraq, then invaded Iraq in 2003, yet his followers agreed to what he said both times. Similarly Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to only support a health care bill with a public option, then supported one without a public option in 2009, yet his followers still followed him. By contrast, the clergy cannot simply say anything and expect their congregations to follow them. Every church has a doctrine. People join the church because they’ve decided that the doctrine represents what they want to follow, or close enough. If the clergy start differing from the doctrine too much, the congregants will head elsewhere. Even on questions of implementation that aren’t strictly spelled out in the church documents, the same still holds true. If the congregation wants to build a shelter for the homeless, the clergy had better do it or else the congregation will find someone who will.
However, the main case for the fact that the church is a feminized organization is observation. Most everyone agrees that there are broad differences between how men and women approach the big questions in organizing a society; men think large scale while women think small scale, men prefer specific and direct instruction while women prefer more informal guidance, women give more credence to emotion, and so forth. (But if you’re among the ones who doesn’t agree, feel free to start a thread on that.) So by observation, the church upholds values and ideas more commonly desired by women, and which go against the more masculine organizations such as government and military.
Some people have promoted the line of thinking that every group must consist of at least 50% women or else that group somehow dislikes and fears women. Based on this idea, they jump to the conclusion that churches which don’t allow women in the clergy must dislike and fear women. But of course there are many other reasons why a church might not allow female clergy. One obvious one is protection. Secular governments have often committed violence against clergy, as when Adolf Hitler had Catholic priests rounded up and sent to the gas chambers or when the founders of the Portuguese Republic violently persecuted the Catholic Church. So one reason why the Catholic Church and some others don’t allow women to become priests may simply be because they don’t want women to be killed.
In that same Southern town, it’s also the women who will hold a counter protest against censorship of bestsellers and classics.
What then would you say to the idea that there is no power, since suicide, as an escape from power, is always an option?
I would argue that emotional and social pressure can be as forceful as physical pressure. That you can with words or with societal actions have just as much of a hold over someone as you can by literally locking them up and holding them. More so, in fact, since physical actions can only affect someone physically, while emotional and social pressures play on the mind and can change it. Lock someone up and you have to keep them locked up. Use the right words, and you can have them lock themselves up.
A person with entirely fixed beliefs is just as open to manipulation. They’re predictable. They won’t be moved by ethical concerns. They won’t agree to the idea that perhaps there might be a grey area, that their beliefs might be wrong, even in part. You have to use the right words, of course, to affect such a person; but once you know what those words are, they can’t escape. A cage of one’s own making may protect one from the dangers of change, but it keeps one from changing, also. A person with fixed beliefs is like a computer; garbage in, garbage out.
Some may. But it seems to me your analogy is a poor one. People may become followers of Bush or Obama due to their support of the doctrinal ideas of the Republicans or Democrats. They may well disagree already with some of the doctrine - but it is better, perhaps, than the alternative. And after a time, adherence to that doctrine may become adherence to the leader, or adherence to fellow followers. The clergy cannot say anything and expect to be followed. But they can change things. Perhaps subtly, perhaps not. And people may go because they’re old friends with the pastor or with their fellow churchgoers, or because it’s habit, routine, or because they are convinced that the change is correct.
I’d be interested actually in seeing some kind of cites for congregation change. I’m not sure they’d be all that easy to find, so I wouldn’t accuse your argument of lacking without them. But it’d certainly be interesting to see some statistics on the matter, if you have them.
I’m afraid that not only do I disagree with that idea, I’m not convinced that “most everyone” would agree with you, and on that I will have to demand a cite.
I’m afraid that your argument doesn’t follow, by the way. If you are correct, you haven’t shown there that the church upholds values and ideas more commonly desired by women, but methods and procedures. Quite a considerable difference, espcially considering that using methods that a person agrees with is a very good way of convincing them of something. After all, I would imagine that you would be more convinced by an argument that took into account your own beliefs and feelings about Christianity and Jesus than one which outright denied them.
I’m afraid i’m going to disagree once again. I don’t think that the point promoted is that each group must consist of 50% women or that group fears and dislikes them; after all, there are practically no groups which contain that balanced of a number. All organisations would fall under that rule. Rather, I believe the complaint argued is that the group should make it avaliable for 50% (or, a fair amount) of women to be in that group, or to share the power of that group. Not that there actually is, but that the possibility exists that there could be, that it is allowed, that it is something that a woman or women could choose to try and achieve and have the chance of succeeding.
But that’s still a problem for you, because it indicates a seperate view of men and women. That the Church doesn’t consider them equal. And I would add that governments, secular and otherwise, have often committed violence against Christians full stop. In fact, I’ll make you a wager; I bet you that if you look through the statistics, far more Christians have been killed or otherwise had violence comitted against them than have clergy. Your argument only works if being in the clergy is a guarantee of greater harm; I don’t believe that you will be able to prove that it is.
I disagree with your rejection of the use of the term “power” to mean anything but physical force - and I think that it’s irrelevent anyway. If men weild all (or most of) the influence in an organization, and use it preferentially, then the organization is still not “feminized”.
As I (very) briefly mentioned a moment ago, there are three players here: The populace, the clergy, and the Canon. If you say that the power is held by the Canon instead of the clergy, that doesn’t help grant it to the populace - it grants it to the (usually) dead people who designed the Canon.
For a thought experiment, let’s suppose you had a church with no clergy - 100% of the rules are taken directly from the scripture. Presuming for a moment that people aren’t “selectively interpreting” (translation: ignoring) the assertions in the scripture, where does the power/influence/whichever lie? Well, with the text, obviously. And what if the text says that menstruating women are unclean and should be locked in small unlit boxes for the duration? I dunno about you, but I’d say this (hypothetical) religion doesn’t sound too “feminized” too me.
Personally, I think that the Canon is the largest part of the problem, because as I’ve been saying this whole thread, the reason religions “fear women” is because they’ve encode the attitudes of the primitive male-oriented societies that engendered them, and have carried these attitudes forward to the present day. If the priests are sexist then that probably doesn’t help matters, but realistically it’s the sexist canon, not priests or parishoners that is the dictating authority in the matter. For most religions, anyway.
There’s nothing in here I agree with.
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Your description of a “feminine way” to organize a society sounds dubious and sterotyped to me. I’m reluctant to accept that it’s true, despite your bald and unsupported assertion that “most everyone” agrees with it.
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But let’s say you’re right, and there is a “feminine way” to run a show. I don’t think that most religion as a group can generally be characterized as doing it that way. For example, some religions are way into the specific and direct instruction thing, with none of that namby-pamby informal guidance schtick. (Cite: orthodox jews.) Remember, just because your Orthodox Church of the Holy Anecdote does things one way doesn’t mean that you can generalize that to religion as a broad class.
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But ignoring that and pretending that all religions are touchy-feely and feminine in their way of guiding their followers - that doesn’t even slightly suggest that the organization itself is not hateful to women, which is kinda the meaning of “feminized” that we’re talking about here. If they informally and emotionally guide their women to think that they’re lesser creatures willed by god to be servants and sex slaves to men, the feminists aren’t going to be handing out any awards, even if the handbooks are printed in pink with curly script.
Naw. It’s more the harsh and/or overtly predjudiced attitudes or treatment that some religions have towards women, membership priviledges in the priesthood only being one example. Another might be those sects that still hold it against Eve for being the one to first bite the apple.
This is sort of like saying that the reason it rains is to fill up reservoirs. Most religions’ attitudes towards women predate everything you reference here, and thus cannot possibly be caused by these later events.