Religion as an instrument to deprive women and make them dependant, right?

Question

Christian kings commonly endowed their barons with the phrase, "Take that woman and her fief." The early centuries of the Christian conquest of Europe were largely occupied with acquisition lands from the pagan women.

a man shall "leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife" (Genesis 2:24).

Naomi told her daughters-in-law to "return each to her mother's house" (Ruth 1:8) because houses were owned by mothers, not fathers.

A marriage agreement permitting removal of a woman from her maternal home was a violation of ancient laws. Therefore Abraham, seeking a bride for his son, had to give many gifts to the bride, to her mother, and to her brother (not to her father!) as compensation for taking her away from her home (Genesis 24:53).

Retention of property in the hands of a patrilineal clan was the purpose of the so-called Levirate marriage commanded by the patriarchal God (Deuteronomy 25:5). If a man died, his brother must marry the widow rather than allow her to take her property and depart from the family.

Answer 1

Excerpts below are from http://ffrf.org/fttoday/1998/jan_feb98/walker.html

<< In Christian history, the real human sacrifices have been women. More than nine million women were sacrificed to the Christian god during the so-called Burning Times. Women's bodies, minds, and fortunes were sacrificed to that god's church for many centuries. Women's legal freedoms, reproductive capacities, and intellectual accomplishments continue to be sacrificed to male interests as a result of attitudes promulgated by that god's church.

Modern American women are justly proud of the social and political progress they have made in the last century; but many enlightened women --even women who call themselves feminists--are still locked into a religious worldview that cannot serve, and has never served, the feminine spirit.

Nearly every American woman now alive was taught in her childhood that God is male. She was indoctrinated into one or another brand of Judeo-Christianity. As Ernestine L. Rose remarked more than a century ago, "All children are atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so."1 We are not born to believe in a deity of either sex; but we are born to need the devoted attention of a parent, to bond with a larger, benevolent, competent person who will take care of us, a person whose nurturing behavior is essential to our lives. For the vast majority of human beings, this person is Mother; so, for the vast majority of human history on this planet, the only recognized deity was the Mother Goddess.

Our mothers and grandmothers may have been strong or spiritual women, powerful in their individual hearts and minds. But from the advent of patriarchal religions, roughly five thousand years ago, the images of female divinity and power have declined to the point where our mothers and grandmothers had no such images to pass on to us. Yet it has been only a very small fraction--one six-hundredth--of our three million years on this earth that father gods have been postulated in any form at all. The Judeo-Christian god is such a Johnny-come-lately that his adherents have had to turn much of their attention to discrediting his greatest and oldest rival, the Great Mother.

Many contemporary scholars have shown that our traditional religious organizations have been dedicated to denial or demonization of the Goddess, all the way from biblical times to the present. Bible writers referred to the great Mother Goddess of the Middle East as an abomination (2 Kings 23:13), even though it is clearly acknowledged in the New Testament that "all Asia and the world" still worshipped her (Acts 19:24). Even Pope John Paul II has issued warnings against what he called "the cult of the Earth Mother." During all the centuries between the former and the latter, no heresy so aroused patriarchal religious authorities to heights of vituperation and violence as any hint of feminine divinity. Epiphanius, the fourth-century bishop of Salamis, indeed defined every heresy as "a vulgar woman," and "female conceit and womanish madness," existing because women are "easily mistaken, fallible and poor in intelligence."

There is no doubt that the rampant sexism of western civilization is the product of its religion. Fathers of the church were bitterly opposed to women, who had been seen so long as made in the image of the Goddess. St. Augustine declared that his god made man to rule, and woman to obey. St. Anthony said, "When you see a woman, consider that you face not a human being, but the devil himself. The woman's voice is the hiss of the snake." Other theologians insisted that no savage beast is as harmful as a woman; that the social subjection and enslavement of women is essential to a Christian salvation; that "although the dragon is fierce and the asp is cunning, woman is the malice of both."

Christian authorities blamed women for the natural fact that some day their own precious selves would have to die, and their own allegedly "sure and certain" promise of resurrection didn't seem to do much to alleviate their fear. The Fathers insisted that the very existence of death in the world was Eve's fault. She "conceived by the serpent and brought forth death," and in her "the whole female race transgressed." Tertullian added that every woman is another Eve, the devil's gateway, endlessly guilty of bringing death even upon the son of God. None of the church fathers seem to have had courage enough to suggest that God was the one really responsible for his son's death, since he had decreed it, as a peculiarly ugly and cumbersome way of inducing himself to forgive sinners--particularly since, even after the sacrifice, the sinners were still condemned to hell anyway. What then was the point of such fatherly cruelty?

Certainly women would never have evolved a religion so cruel and so obsessed with death, but the sexism that vilified the life-affirming, nurturant sex and deprived women of basic human rights was a result of the unremitting efforts of churchmen.6 The first generation of American proto-feminists understood this well enough. Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote, more than a century ago, "The most stupendous system of organized robbery known, has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment; her own conscience, her own will." She pointed out that "it is the church and not the state, to which the teaching of woman's inferiority is due: it is the church which primarily commanded the obedience of woman to man. It is the church which stamps with religious authority the political and domestic degradation of woman."

In 1919, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner said, "The independence of women and the equalization of their rights have come only little by little; every step has been gained in defiance of the Church and the teachings of the Scriptures, and in no way through their aid."

More than twenty years earlier, the redoubtable Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: "The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation. . . . The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading. . . . The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences." Stanton spent many years exposing the biblical foundations of our civilization's woman-hatred in The Woman's Bible, which would have been even more devastating if she had known some of the facts about our "good book" that scholars have unearthed more recently.

The early feminists were groping toward a nonpatriarchal spirituality that would support their human rights; but they got only as far as rejection of the patriarchy that they perceived as their ideological burden. They had little to put in its place. It would take a new generation of feminist scholars to demonstrate how the patriarchy attacked and finally managed to overthrow ancient established religions of the Goddess, the Mother- Creatress, who preceded male gods in every mythology of the world. That ideological battle extended over thirty centuries and caused some of the worst manifestations of man's inhumanity to woman, including the Inquisition's five-century reign of terror and male political usurpation of nature's most sacred bond, between a mother and her offspring, creating a society in which interpersonal violence is considered routine. ...>>

Answer 2

You mention religion, but you only give examples from pre-Christian Judaism. It is certainly true that many organized religions contain doctrine specifically intended to subjugate women (the Yahweh cults are excellent examples of this), but to claim that this is the purpose of religion in general is limiting and erroneous. The Yahweh cults were patriarchal BECAUSE they were born out of matriarchal societies. The subjugation of women was a political maneuver.

Generally speaking, organized religions are systems of wresting power from the many and placing it in the hands of the few. Those few tend to be men, as men tend toward higher levels of competitiveness. By glorifying themselves, they glorify manhood, thus denigrating womanhood.

I applaud your research and appreciate the information, but I feel that your conclusion is in error. Characterizing religion as only an instrument of male domination ignores a great deal of injustice and diminishes the truth of churches' crippling effects on all people and societies.

Answer 3

True religion recognizes the equal value and dignity of both sexes. So, if Christianity or Islam oppresses women ...well, I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

Krinvanto Vishwam Aryam - Satyam Eva Jayate

Answer 4

You might like Robert Graves 'The White Goddess' .. which suggests there may have once been an epoch where the opposite was true .. It (this text) was once a rich mother's milk to me .. but one would need to travel back over two thousand years to find this epoch and cultures ...

Answer 5

Your as twisted as the way you are twisting the word of God

God said for husbands to love thier wives the way Christ loves the church.

1 Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

2 Colossians 3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them

Thats a lot of love and a wonderful way to be loved.
Women played a very important role all through out the bible. and there is no need to have a spotlight placed upon them, for God will bless them for their role in life in His time and according to His will. LIfe is not about us. It all about God and His son Jesus.

Answer 6

The answer to your question depends on which religion you are talking about. Some religions do not treat women and men differently.

Answer 7

Any female that believes in or gives money to churches whose version of god is the mid-east degrading females (Judiasm, Christianity, Islam) one needs their heads examined.

Answer 8

Very good question. Cheers

Answer 9

OK- you gave several examples, but what the heck is your question?

Answer 10

Whats your question?