Not even close. Many Buddhist sects are deeply misogynistic. Many don’t even allow women to be monks.
I attended a talk for Buddhist women in which a monk went out of the way to find a translator so that he could tell a visiting woman she had no chance of enlightenment, but with discipline she might earn her way to being a man in the next life. It’s also common for monks to equate sex (attachment) with women, you know, because we cause so much temptation.
Now I’m not saying there are no Buddhist traditions that support women’s equality, but it’s usually certain lineages. For example the Plum Village Zen tradition founded by Thich Naht Hanh fully supports women’s equality. There are many female Zen and Theravadan teachers in the US. My own Sangha fully supports women’s equality. But globally there is much work to do.
Both the two main Presbyterian churches in Britain - the Church of Scotland and the United Reformed Church - also currently have women in their top jobs, the Moderators of their General Assemblies. Neither of them are the first women to hold those positions.
True … that often leads to an internal debate about which branch has been “holding true” vs “bending”, within those religions or denominations where it is expected that the True Way never gets it wrong.
(And also to outsiders deriding the “accomodating” believers for not simply abandoning the religion altogether.)
If Emo Phillips had written his “religion” joke about Judaism instead of Christianity, the punchline wouldn’t be “I said ‘Die, heretic!’ and pushed him over”- it would be “I said ‘Feh!’ and walked away.”
Confusing religious belief with racism is completely ridiculous. And for the record, I was telling you what other belief systems espouse, not my own. I am a Quaker.
Yeah, my dad was fond of saying things about men and women’s “appropriate roles”. Like, sewing is women’s work, because they’re better at fine detail like that. To which my mom always replied “So why aren’t all the surgeons women?”.
Dad was also oblivious to the fact that every one of the “manly virtues” was something that Mom was better at than him.
I did a tiny bit of research, and the results were interesting.
I did DDG searches for “role of women in…” Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahai’ism.
For the first three, I got a diverse group of hits. There were sites espousing feminist interpretations of their scriptures, sites defending traditional patriarchal interpretations, sites offering allegedly unbiased surveys of the diversity of opinions within the religion, and sites expressing the SmartAlec perspective of “It’s all just irreemably evil”. AFAICT, most of the hits returned were not officially associated with any denomination or religious organization.
For the Baha’i, EVERY SINGLE SITE for the first several pages were official organs of the Baha’i Faith, all presenting a completely sunshine-and-rainbows view of absolute commitment to gender equality. I don’t know about their theology, but these people clearly have SEO down to a science.
I think that’s what almost all sexist religions would say. Nobody explicitly says “We think women are inferior to men”, it’s always “God has made men and women with unique roles, and women just happen to achieve holiness by cooking, cleaning and keeping their mouths shut”.
There are some strains of Christianity that are pretty explicit that men achieve holiness by obeying Jesus and women achieve holiness by obeying their husband.
I would think that if you’re going to describe someone else’s religion as being “what people believed when they lived in the darkness”, you should be really careful to explicitly declare that this is not your own belief. In which case, I’m curious as to why you decided to bring these other people’s repugnant beliefs up at all.
Is it common for Quakers to accept the Gnostic gospels as authoritative?
If you mean a modern religion with a world wide spread, there probably isn’t one. But humans have almost certainly had religions since long before anyone was literate; certainly had religions with no written scriptures before societies with written literature came along and “discovered” them; and I expect there are survivors today. It’s not an essential feature of human religions; which is the apparent assumption I was replying to.
There are some strains of Christianity that handle venomous snakes. That doesn’t make it a tenet of Christianity in general.
The only thing this thread has established is that any religion - Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and others we haven’t discussed yet like Islam - has at best a handful of core beliefs every practitioner agrees on, and an almost limitless variety of interpretations about everything else.
Oh sure. I am posting right now from a church with prominent signage about their progressive values, including the equality of men and women. I even took a photo which i might post here if i have the spoons to upload it on some photo hosting site. I was just responding to the claim that all religions claim equality, some just lean into separate-but-equal.
"As a progressive Christian Church, we believe everyone has a right to dignity and respect, including immigrants and those in marginalized communities
We provide spiritual enrichment
We support social justice
We nurture community
We support LGBT+
We practice environmental awareness
I could truthfully write that “Many people feel that it is psychologically healthy for toddlers to have sexual relationships with adults”. But, like any decent person, I would find it extremely difficult to type that sentence without clarifying that those people are evil and wrong. So why did you think it was OK to quote anti-Semitic hate speech without such a qualifier?
And why are you going on about the fucking Gnostic gospels? If the best you can do to argue that Christianity doesn’t suck is to point to the Gnostic gospels, you have definitely lost the argument. But you don’t have to make that argument, you can just point to all the actually existing non-sexist Christian denominations. One of which you claim to belong to, so obviously their existence isn’t news to you. That being the case, I have no idea why you posted this OP, but I think the chance of it having been in good faith is small.