Hmm, with all due respect, I guess this shows why I could never be a Christian. In my Tantric faith, the Goddess Kali certainly spreads Her legs and ecstatically welcomes her husband Shiva’s erect lingam into Her Yoni. And what’s more, She’s on top! Sorry, I just don’t get what’s the point of a religion that denies this sacred ecstasy for its principal figures. I’m not Christian-bashing, I honestly do not get it.
I personally feel there’s something wrong with elderly churchmen defining doctrine on the basis of a holy woman’s most intimate feminine bits. First they indoctrinate their followers that there’s something dirty and shameful about those intimate bits—this is the real offense. But then for those churchmen in their miters and croziers to turn around and make formal pronouncements about the condition of said despised vulva belonging to Mary… is just… eeew. I don’t know how to put this in a nice way. It squicks me that they even make it their business to talk about Mary’s vulva.
I know, I was just talking about Kali’s Yoni in Tantrism. How could I turn around and criticize Christians for talking about Mary’s Yoni? But for Tantrics, sex is sacred, and the female body is the most sacred of all. We love Kali for having an ecstatic Yoni, it has a positive spiritual meaning. But when you denigrate women’s bodies and accept the Yoni only when its ecstatic nature is shunned, then… it doesn’t seem right to make the negation of its ecstasy a cornerstone of the religion. The fallout from this fetishiziation of virginity has placed a heavy burden on women, to be under the control of men’s power, because of this idealized virginity.
I stated a new thread because this post belongs in GD but the thread that provoked it was in GQ. Polycarp, I guess I have carped much. But thanks, bro, for your detailed and patient explanations of such abstruse matters. Us non-Christians sure demand a lot of explanations from you, and then we pick them all apart.
In my picking and choosing from the smorgasbord of world religions, I have always preferred an ecstatic yoni to a despised vulva.
While I cannot escape the indoctrination of my youth regarding sex, in adulthood I have much preferred the Kali/Shiva paradigm to the Joseph/Mary paradigm.
I’ll be following this thread with great interest, and probably participating in the discussion later. I am jumping in now merely to note a strange and I’m sure unintended parallel to mswas’s comment above. In one of the less-often-sung verses of Adeste Fideles, the song says of the Baby Jesus, “Lo, He abhors not the Virgin’s womb.”
Well, multiple different books put forth the idea that god had a wife equal in stature to himself named Asherah. I recall past posts about this. The torah records an effort to erase the concept from history, and deny there was every any such thing, that might have been the missing link you were looking for. http://www.matrifocus.com/LAM04/spotlight.htm#1
I didn’t read the other thread, but you are plainly conflating some Christians (who were acting based on their own cultural & gender biases, not scripture, IMO) with Christianity per se. In other words, your OP is the equivalent to “Why does Islam oppress women and make them all wear Burquas?”
I would remind you that the Bible has a whole book devoted to erotic poetry.
Roman Catholicism is only one part of Christianity. Protestants do not teach the perpetual virginity of Mary, and our discussions of and interest in her yoni are rather limited.
I always assumed Mary’s perpetual virginity and the celibacy of priests went well together. To maintain celibacy a priest can tough it out, which takes more strength than most guys have, or find a way to make sex unappealing. And what better way than to imagine his parents screwing? Ewwwwww! He cannot completely justify away his parents staying “chaste” but Mother Mary, in the RCC already a supernatural creature, is easy. She didn’t actually give birth, either. She and Joseph were kneeling by the manger and Baby Jesus materialized before them. You didn’t think she spread her legs in front of the donkey and cow and grunted and screamed until Jesus popped out, did you? Ewwwww!
Personally, I figure Joseph was either a real nice guy or a total maroon, falling for that “An angel appeared” story.
“Some Christians” with gender and cultural biases? Some Christians? Dude. I’m talking about the venerated Church Fathers, the original patriarchs, who defined dogma for the ages.
When I got up this morning and showered, I reflected in calmness on what I had so rashly posted last night. OK, OK, in the early days Christianity had it wrong about women. Now, the hip new 21st-century Christians like Polycarp and tomndebb are all enlightened and I want to give them their props.
Plus, who am I to come in here talking about Kali and leave out mention of the human sacrifice once practiced by some of my fellow Kali devotees. The Thuggees. Some GD debater I am, huh? Straining at the Christian gnat while happily swallowing my Thuggee camel, with a nice Chianti. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. We do not practice human sacrifice any more, honest. (If we did… I’d be keeping a list of names…)
I just want to say, please don’t judge all Kali devotees on the basis of a few bad apples (Thuggee murderers) when most of us have all along been peaceful folks who never killed anyone. In turn, I will not judge all Christians on the basis of abortion clinic assassins and bombers, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland; any more than I would judge all Muslims on the basis of al-Qa‘idah. I much prefer this enlightened form of religion in which Hindus take after Mahatma Gandhi, Christians take after Martin Luther King, and Muslims take after Rumi.
Feminist theology has made great strides even within Christianity (now there’s a hard row to hoe), and this deserves recognition. I’m looking forward to when the new pope officially pronounces that the early Church was wrong about the denigration of women’s bodies and women’s sexuality, just as the last pope admitted they were wrong about Galileo. In turn, I admit we Thuggees were wrong to murder our fellow humans in the name of religion.
I don’t mean to slam Mary, either. On the contrary, I love Mary very much. She is the best feature of Christianity. In this, I think the Catholics have it right and the Protestants have it woefully wrong.
Many of us really don’t care if Mary remained a virgin all her life. It is irrelevant. Sure, we’re are taught that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that doesn’t have to mean Mary and Joseph never ever made love afterwards. They were married, they loved each other, so why not. There’s nothing wrong in it.
I believe the reason was most people consider her a virgin-for-life is due to thwe fact she is reffered to as “the virgin mary” Considering that she is in our past, if she gave birth, it would make more sense to call her “the once was a virgin, till she gave birth” mary.
To address the ‘dirty and shameful’ bit, the Catechism (am I going round beating people with this thing? It’s just that I’ve recently read it) says:
In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and a pledge of spiritual communion… The acts in marriage by which the intimate and chaste union of the spouses takes place are noble and honourable. The truly human performance of these acts fosters the self-giving they signify and enriches the spouses in joy and gratitude. Sexuality is a source of joy and pleasure.
-CCC, 2360-2362
I’m a blossoming almost-Catholic Marian, but I still haven’t completely sorted out and can’t articulate my understanding of the Perpetual Virginity. I can say definitely that I do not understand it to be any kind of slam against the goodness of sex. I’ll think about it today and maybe come up with something coherent.
At the risk of stating what seems to me obvious, there is no particular morbid fascination with Mary’s privates in Roman Catholicism, contrary to what a reading of the OP might suggest.
Mary’s virginity is important because it shows that Jesus was born to a virgin, and thus his origins are divine, not wordly. This is the fulfillment of the divine promise from the prophet Isaiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
This is not held out as a model for all women to follow - obviously. The Holy Spirit is not avaliable for dating services Friday and Saturday nights. You may not validly impute the reverence we feel towards Mary and her unqiue position to a suggestion that all sex is somehow dirty. To the contrary:
It’s probably also worth mentioning that Christianity is not the only religion which has a story of divine intervention in the reproductive process to produce an earthly being from an (otherwise) virgin mother. The Egyptians, Greeks, and some Buddhists each believed in such a thing. ISTR that there were also some instances in Hinduism but I can’t recall specifically enough to say for sure.
The method, of course, varies, with the Egyptians being all over the place including some instances which are similar to the way Christians believe their god did it, the Greeks having their gods assume bodily form and impregnating people the old-fashioned way, etc.
I always find it interesting to see how the New Testament values women. Jesus seems to have treated the women around him with much greater respect than they usually got. The Samaritan woman at the well, the women he healed and/or associated with, the woman taken in adultery, and showing himself to Mary (not his mother, I think it was Mary of Bethany) first after the Resurrection–which gave her the office of witnessing and giving the news to the apostles, in a day when a woman’s testimony was not valid in court, and of course she was not believed–all show a great respect and concern for women. It’s too bad that a lot of this was lost over the next few centuries, but I don’t think the Bible itself supports those theories very well–though traditional Greek, Middle Eastern, and Roman attitudes probably did. (One example might be Paul’s directions to the Corinthians about women in meetings–it makes a lot more sense when you know that women with uncovered hair were assumed to be prostitutes, and Greek women were virtually housebound, and that Corinth was a Greek city with a prostitution-based economy.)
I’ve never seen anything resembling an unhealthy interest in Mary’s anatomy (from my own church or from Catholics)–except on behalf of the people who try to twist my church’s theology to accuse us of something. (Not that I am saying Johanna falls into this category–this is a different case.) My own church does not endorse the perpetual virginity idea–though we do have a lot of respect for Mary, and for Eve as well.
Some examples in other religions, including the one manhattan is alluding to in Hinduism, of virgin birth may be found on this page from the middle down: http://www.athmaprakashini.com/virginbirth.htm
