Part of it is just that the Old Testament is a lot larger than the New, so if you’re looking for Bible verses to justify any particular view (good or bad), you’re more likely to find them there.
Those are conveniently not among the Noahide Laws.
Which they have only read in bad translation. Sometimes paraphrase, and mistake made in the gospels or by Paul are always reproduced, at the expense of the original.
Can we refer to it as Jewish bible and Christian bible or something? calling the Torah and Prophets the “OT” hurts me.
I think it depends on the context, but if we’re referring to what Dominionists or Christians are quoting, I think that “Old Testament” is the clearest and most accurate term. The “Jewish Bible” can, depending on context, refer to just the Torah, or to the Torah combined with a variety of other books, which may be more or less than the set of books referred to as the “Old Testament” (though even “Old Testament” still has some ambiguity, depending on whether you include the deuterocanonical/apocryphal books like Sirach and Malachi). Case in point, you refer there to “the Torah and the Prophets”, but a Christian referring to “the Old Testament” would also include the Psalms, Proverbs, the history books like Judges and Kings, and so on.
I think “the Jewish Bible” and “the New Testament” works. The Christian Bible includes the Jewish Bible. The split i suggest leaves out some apocrypha included in the Catholic (and some other) versions of the Christian Bible, but i don’t think they are generally germane to the discussion.
The phrase “Old Testament”, though, is somewhat offensive to Jews, since it implies that some other Testament of equal worth exists. I refer to the “NT” as “the Christian scriptures”. I usually call the Bible just “the Bible” or “Tanakh”, but I’ll use “the Jewish scriptures” if the context calls for disambiguation.
Nitpick: Jews divide the Bible into three sections: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Psalms and Proverbs are Writings, but the historical books are considered part of the Prophets.
Hm, I didn’t know that. The categorizations of the books I’ve seen (mostly written by Christians) break them up into a lot more categories than that: Torah, Prophets (in which category Christians also include Revelation), Histories (in which category Christians also include Acts of the Apostles), Wisdom Books (I can’t remember if Psalms were in there, or their own category), Epistles and Gospels (these last two being found only in the New Testament).
Still, “the Jewish Bible” can mean different things in different contexts, such as just the Torah, the Torah plus Prophets (obviously not including Revelation), the Torah, Prophets, and Writings (mostly the same set of books as what Christians call the “Old Testament”), all of those plus possibly the Talmud (which most Christians don’t even know exists), etc. And the context in which it’s most often relevant is Christians and Dominionists quoting it, and both of those religions refer to “the Old Testament”, so that’s why I think that’s the clearest term in those contexts.
As I understand it, the Torah actually has different translation and even some different books. The Catholic and Protestant Bibles contain different books as well, and the Gnostic and Ethiopian even more books that are not included by any of the others. So, to me, the OT of a Christian Bible, and the Torah, are two different things entirely. Does that help?
And honestly, if these “Christians” who spend their lives justifying horrors by quoting scriptures could somehow be forced to read the Talmud on the subjects, then we wouldn’t have any of these problems. Because it’s always quite clear that they don’t understand the scriptures they are quoting.
Heck, even “the OT of a Christian Bible” varies, quite a bit, depending on denomination. The canonical Catholic OT contains 46 books, the Eastern Orthodox OT contains between 48 and 54 books, and Protestant OTs usually contain 39 books.
Naw, the “Jewish Bible” pretty much means the Tanach. Torah, Prophets, and Writings. The Talmud is a different beast. The Torah is the Torah. And it’s unusual to talk about specifically the Torah plus the Prophets.
It’s not the same as “the old testament” partly because of the different perspective, but also because every Christian sect picks which books go into their Bible, and most pick differently from the Jews. And also, they always order the books differently from the Jews.
But we are wandering pretty far down this rabbit hole, which isn’t closely related to which religions treat woman equally.
Such shade exists in other religions.
In Buddhism there are two dominant paths known as the Great Vehicle (Mahayana Buddhism) and Lesser Vehicle (Theravadan Buddhism.) Seems to me that Mahayana is a bit big for its britches considering Theravadan Buddhism is the oldest practice, hewing most closely to the Buddha’s teachings, and Mahayana came later and added a bunch of shit.
Mahayana is all over the place. Zen is Mahayana but strikingly different in its absence of deities and absence of, well, what I would consider magic. That’s because Zen developed in China and in order to survive adapted the widely practiced Daoism to get bodies in temples. It has a different lineage than a lot of Mahayana practices.
Do the practicioners of theravada Buddhism call it that, “lesser vehicle”, or do they use other names?
Definitely not— it is a kind of diss term given to [at least some] old-school Buddhists by the Mahayana. In any case, A History of Indian Buddhism asserts that “No Buddhist groups ever referred to themselves as [Lesser Vehicle]”.
As for how differences in how women are regarded between groups, as was mentioned before (correct me if I am wrong!!), it seems very difficult to generalize, even if we restrict ourselves to Theraveda traditions.
From what I have read, it seems to me that Buddhism wasn’t originally a ‘religion’ at all, in the sense of having one or more deities?
Isn’t there a passage somewhere in which Buddha is asked about a deity and says something to the effect of “I make no pronouncement about such matters.”
The central tenet of Buddhism is not “worshipping god”. 
Now, there is an elaborate Buddhist cosmology with “lower” and “higher” beings , such as humans and animals but also gods and Brahmas. On one hand, this is not supposed to be a literal description— e.g. maybe one can imagine “hell” as a kind of mental state. On the other hand, it is not that simple, either; I might as well quote from The Foundations of Buddhism, Oxford University Press:
The Buddha indeed refused to give categorical answers about the nature of the universe. However, note that he did tell a lot of stories and parables, including ones that mention “devas” and so on. As the quote at the end indicates, this kind of stuff existed in Indian mythology.
Technically the previous Supreme Governor of the Church of England was a woman (being QE II, of course). But then you get into the niggling about how much the monarch actually heads the Church.
An interesting question is how much of the sayings ascribed to Buddha are in fact anything like verbatim?
If I’m reading Wikipedia correctly, the first written references were something like 3 centuries after his death. Substantially longer than the time between the life of Jesus and the gospels.
Time enough for a lot of exegesis and mythology to creep in….?
I’ll just add to DPRK’s excellent reply that Buddhism is organized around the Four Noble Truths and believing those things are true is pretty much what makes you a Buddhist. This is the shorthand as I’m in a diner:
- Life is suffering, loosely translated, I think the original text means something like an axle on a cart misaligned.
- The reason we suffer is desire, or craving. We pin our happiness on getting the things we want and avoiding the things we don’t want.
- There is a way out of suffering - the extinction of desire.
- This is achieved through following the Noble Eightfold Path. Buddhists love them some lists. You can’t imagine how many lists.
So I guess you could call those articles of faith, of a sort. It’s not faith in deities that makes you a Buddhist but whether or not you believe these four things.
And I guess I would add that another common factor is whether or not you believe that the Buddha achieved enlightenment and thus that he knew what he was talking about when he dispensed this advice.
Beyond that - atheism, God or gods, knock yourself out. Thich Naht Hanh was famously a Zen Buddhist and a Catholic.
In that case, wasn’t QE I the Supreme Governor of the COE at one time? following her father and brother? I’m not sure who would have been head during the reign of Mary I (Bloody Mary), but Elizabeth would have been head during her own reign.