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I used to be a leftist. Many life experiences, including a lecture by David Horowitz, turned me into a former leftist. I never thought I’d vote Republican, then I did. I went from being the bleeding heart teacher who bent over backward for my students to being a drill sergeant. Two things have not changed. I was a Catholic before, and I’m a Catholic now. I think I was probably a feminist in the womb. I’m a feminist still.
“Bra burner!”
There’s debate about whether or not bra burning ever happened. If it did, it was a small number of women.
“Man hater!”
Most big name feminists have been married to men they loved, and who loved them. Pioneering eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. When she met William Godwin, she argued with him all night long, and he didn’t like her at all. Yet he fell in love with her. His wife, “dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.” Of their marriage, Godwin wrote, “It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it.” Wollstonecraft died of childbed fever after giving birth to their daughter, who would grow up to write Frankenstein. After Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin wrote to a friend, “There does not exist her equal in the world … We were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.”
“Hairy-legged!”
When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in villages without electricity or plumbing, I used to haul water from a stream, and warm it by the embers of the fire over which I steamed my lentils and rice, and shave my legs.
“Family destroyer!”
I’m a big proponent of the nuclear family and the presence of both biological parents in the home for the sake of growing children.
“Baby Killer!”
Pro-life feminism is a thing. Susan B. Anthony may have been pro-life.
“You feminists are responsible for trans extremism!”
Men invade women’s sports and women’s bathrooms, beat us up, and rape women in women’s prisons, and it is somehow not the fault of those men, but of feminists. Feminist Elinor Burkett published one of the best dissections of trans extremism I’ve read. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, JK Rowling, Maria MacLachlan, and Helen Joyce are just a few of the feminists who have been on the front lines, and been violently attacked for their activism. Trans extremists’ ultimate slur is “TERF,” or trans exclusionary radical feminist.
The feminists who see no difference between men and women are wrong and they are destructive. There are jerks in every group. Most of us, whether we know the label or not, are “difference feminists” who recognize that men and women are different. Two difference feminists are worth getting to know. You may have never heard of Josephine Butler or Bertha Pappenheim, but you should have. Butler was a devout Christian English woman; Pappenheim was an Austrian Jew. Both were born in the Victorian Era, and both campaigned against rampant sex trafficking and sexual enslavement of women and girls.
“Humorless!”
How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
ONE! AND IT’S NOT FUNNY!
I get laughs with that joke, and others, which suggests to me that I am not humorless.
My feminist manifesto is below. See if you don’t agree.
Women should be able to vote, to own property, to have their own bank accounts, to inherit, to bequeath, to choose their husband and to decide when and whom to marry, to use birth control, to leave abusive relationships, to hold jobs for which they are qualified, to receive the same compensation as other equally performing male colleagues, and to travel solo. Women should not be bought and sold. If a woman is raped or otherwise sexually harassed or assaulted, she should receive respectful, effective responses from the law.
Trivialization of women, by men or women, disgusts me. Women are more than the physical features that arouse men. Women who aren’t particularly sexy but who, say, win two Nobel prizes, like Marie Sklodowska Curie, or who, in spite of Nazi torture, rescue 2,500 Jewish children, like Irena Sendler, or who make a contribution to discovering the structure of DNA, like Rosalind Franklin, or light up the Middle Ages with their accomplishments in multiple fields, like Hildegard von Bingen, or who write timeless novels, like Jane Austen, deserve the same admiration that men who achieve such feats receive.
If you agree, by my definition, that makes you a feminist. “But those positions are just normal,” you may be thinking. Alas, the positions listed above are not “normal” at all. For much of history, and over much of the world today, women and girls could not and cannot travel solo, attend school, or choose whom or when to marry. Female infanticide is as old as history and it continues today – see here, here, and here. Statistics strongly suggest that sex-selective abortion occurs in the United States. A doctor recently told me that she knows a pregnant mother whose parents stipulated that if she produced a grandson, she’d receive ten thousand dollars. A granddaughter would bring a one thousand dollar gift. That we think that human rights for women, including the right to life, are normal is a heritage we owe to feminists.
Oh, and by the way, as a former leftist, I can let you in on a little secret. Misogyny is alive and well on the left. Some-not-all leftist men feel personally inadequate. They conduct a perpetual, spiteful war with authority. When a woman speaks or acts with authority, they feel especially intimidated. They attempt to buttress their shaky manhood by lashing out against women in ugly ways. Misogyny is a major, and so far ineradicable feature of the New Atheist Movement, several of whose celebrity leaders have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault. On the other hand, Some-not-all right-wing men feel confident in their manhood. These self-confident men can enjoy, rather than feel threatened by, smart, strong women.
“Okay. You’ve convinced me that a woman can be conservative and a feminist. But Catholic and feminist?”
Yes. Rodney Stark details how the early Christian church was literally a life-saver for women. See his 1994 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, “Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women.” Christianity’s emphasis on imago dei and the full humanity of each person made it, according to Celsus, the religion of women, and children, and slaves. Celsus was a second-century Greek Pagan, and he thought that by associating Christianity with women, children, and slaves, he was delivering the ultimate insult. Christianity granted rights, and full humanity, to those who in the Pagan world had few to no rights at all.
“But don’t the Bible and the Church oppress women?”
Misogyny is a universal; it exists inside and outside the Church. Feminist Christians like me believe that the Bible, as a whole, is a liberatory text. For example, yes, there are verses that appear to offer no resistance to slavery. But if you pull the focus back from isolated verses, and look at the entire text of the Bible, you see that Exodus is the major narrative in the Old Testament, and Exodus is all about God liberating slaves. Jesus is the central figure of the New Testament, and he came to set humanity free; see Galatians 5:1 2 Corinthians 3:17, John 8:32, etc. Given the big themes of the entire book, it can’t be argued that the Bible is pro-slavery. The Abolition movement, unique in world history in its successful opposition to slavery, was a Christian movement.
Just so, there are verses that are used to call for suppression of women. But if you pull the focus back and look at the entire Bible, you see a document that is absolutely unique in the ancient world, a document populated by named, average women – not goddesses, queens, or personifications of abstract qualities like the Native American Corn Mother, or the Buddhist Guanyin, the embodiment of compassion. Flesh-and-blood Biblical women are key players. Further on in this essay, in discussion of 1 Timothy 2, I’m going to demonstrate this to you – I’m going to look at one chapter close up, and then pull back the focus and place that chapter in the context of the entire Bible. I’m no theological authority, and my interpretation is just mine. But I want you to know that, yes, someone can be both a feminist and a Christian.
“But I’m not religious. Why does any of this matter to me?”
I agree with atheists like Douglas Murray and Tom Holland. The Judeo-Christian tradition is one of the sine-qua-nons of Western Civilization. Those of us who inherited and benefit from that tradition should understand it fully, especially now. We diminish ourselves when we allow those hostile to our tradition to define it for us. Christophobes assert that Christians and Jews who support human rights simply ignore the Bible. I believe, along, again, with Murray and Holland, that the West’s concept of human rights is rooted in the Bible, and that the Christian Abolitionists who fought slavery, and religious feminists like Josephine Butler and Bertha Pappenheim work with, not against, a tradition that is millennia old.
Further, you may not be a Christian, but people around you, who have an impact on your life, certainly are. When someone wraps a religious cloak around misogyny, that eventually has an impact on you.
***
In the Land of the Blue Burqas by Kate McCord is an almost unbearable read. McCord lived in Afghanistan for five years. Most of the world knows that Islam pressures Afghan women into invisibility. We are all familiar with images of Muslim women entombed in stifling shrouds: burqas, abayas, scarves, and niqabs. In her 2012 book, McCord informs the reader that Islam also pressures women into inaudibility as well as invisibility. An Afghan explains to McCord why a woman should never be heard. If a man hears a woman, “He will think her voice is beautiful and will lust after her. Maybe he will be on the street separated by the wall … maybe he will never see the woman who sings, but he hears her voice. If that happens, he will want her. It’s her fault. She has sinned. She made him want her. The sin is hers. She will be punished. That’s why a woman should never sing even in her own courtyard.” If only the silencing of women were limited to Afghanistan. It is not.
In June, 2023, The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting disfellowshipped churches with women pastors. Women had been pastors for some time in the Southern Baptist Convention. Addie Davis was ordained as a minister in 1964. By 1981, almost thirty percent of Southern Baptist seminary students were female. In 1984, there were 250 women pastors. In 2023, according to Rick Warren, “at least 1,928 SBC churches have women pastors.”
There was a backlash against these women. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ejected its female faculty member. It now offers “special programs” for women. Women are taught to “love and support their husbands,” “donate gently used clothing,” and also “how to conduct a ladies Bible study.”
Rick Warren wrote The Purpose Driven Life. The book was a bestseller for 90 weeks. It has sold tens of millions of copies in 137 languages. Warren’s megachurch, Saddleback, has over 23,000 members. The Southern Baptist Convention ejected that church. Saddleback is not just a model of successful evangelizing; it is also a source of funds. Some of those 23,000 people tithe. The SBC doesn’t want Saddleback’s success in spreading the Gospel; it doesn’t want Saddleback’s money. Saddleback has women pastors. The SBC’s move disproportionately punishes and handicaps black churches, because black churches have more women pastors.
Freedom of conscience is a core value for Baptists. “A passion for religious liberty and freedom of conscience runs in the veins of Baptists … Our forefathers and mothers fought and suffered for this inalienable right because they understood to truly love and worship God is to love and worship Him freely. Coerced love is an oxymoron.” So wrote Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Exactly because of that Baptist emphasis on freedom of conscience, Baptists from one congregation have no authority to pressure Baptists in another congregation to appoint or reject this or that pastor. Forty years ago, there were hundreds of women pastors. Suddenly in 2023, Baptists disfellowshipped any congregation with a woman pastor. What prompted this shocking move, that gives every appearance of violating the cherished Baptist ideal of each congregation’s autonomy?
In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News began exposing sex abuse in Southern Baptist churches. The Southern Baptist Convention published a lengthy report in 2022. “It makes you ill,” one pastor said of the report. “Top church leaders suppressed and mishandled abuse claims, resisted reforms and belittled victims and their families.” The report is “an apocalypse” revealing “a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be” said Russell Moore, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm.
One of the features that allowed the abuse to continue was the Baptists’ commitment to congregational autonomy. There was no central authority to handle abusers. “Southern Baptists believe that the local church in New Testament times was autonomous, and thus our local churches are autonomous,” Executive Committee President Morris Chapman said. Thus, “The denomination’s Executive Committee would not support the creation of a database of sexual offenders.” The same entity that insisted that each congregation is autonomous, and, thus, no congregation can interfere with any other congregation’s hiring of a known sex offender as a pastor, later went on to argue that it does have the authority to disfellowship congregations that appoint women as pastors.
Beth Moore is “arguably the most prominent white evangelical woman in America.” In May, 2019, after the exposure of abuse, Moore tweeted, “I am compelled to my bones by the Holy Spirit … to draw attention to the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC, cloaked by piety & bearing the stench of hypocrisy … we must search the attitudes & practices of Christ Jesus himself toward women. HE is our Lord. He had women followers! Evangelists! The point of all sanctification & obedience is toward being conformed to HIS image. I do not see 1 glimpse of Christ in this sexism.” Pastors subsequently attacked Moore. She left the SBC.
These events broke my heart. I mentioned my heartbreak on Facebook.
Facebook friends “John” and “Gloria” went on the attack. John mentioned New Testament verses attributed, controversially, to Paul. For example, 1 Timothy 2, tells women to be silent, to be submissive to men, never to teach, never to have authority, and to suffer all this because God created Adam first, and Eve ate the fruit and Adam was not deceived. Eve proves that all women are more susceptible to Satan than are men. The chapter goes on to say that women are saved through bearing children. John challenged me to disagree.
I responded, “John, you assert that because you have a penis and I don’t, I am unworthy to so much as speak to you, never mind to teach you, or anyone else, anything at all. And yet you challenge me to speak to you and teach you.” John unfriended and blocked me.
Is John correct? Isn’t it Christians’ job unquestioningly to believe as literally true and to obey whatever a given Bible verse says, and to bash anyone who isn’t on board? No, it is not. There are Bible verses that Christians certainly do not unquestioningly apply. There are Bible verses that, when unquestioningly applied, have resulted in individual or mass death. See for example Matthew 27:25, Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:13, Numbers 5:11-31, Leviticus 18:19, 29, Mark 16:18, and Acts: 4-5.
No Christian denomination obeys the entirety of 1 Timothy 2. In addition to ordering women to be silent and submissive, the chapter forbids women from braiding or styling their hair, and from wearing gold, pearls, or expensive clothes. Mary Kahler Mohler, wife of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, appears wearing gold, expensive clothing, and with professionally styled hair in the institution’s publication.
1 Timothy 2 says that women are not allowed to teach, period. Translations say, as this one does, “I do not let women teach.” Christian denominations certainly let women teach. Without women teachers Christianity would not have continued for two millennia. Every woman who publicly supports the disfellowshipping of churches is herself a teacher. Southern Baptist women are publicly whipping out their Bibles and citing verses to attempt to persuade others of their interpretation of scripture which is that they should not be allowed publicly to whip out their Bibles and cite verses in attempts to persuade others of their interpretation of scripture. Their very behavior contradicts the position they promote.
Gloria supported John. Gloria first contacted me almost thirty years ago. We’ve been in continuous internet contact ever since. Gloria is a Jehovah’s Witness. She is the most aggressive, relentless woman I’ve ever met. In her first emails to me, she told me to become a Jehovah’s Witness. I declined. She’s never stopped. Gloria adduces Bible verses and disseminates them to bring people around to her point of view. She does this to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people a year. I mentioned to Gloria the disconnect between her aggressive proselytizing and her insistence that women are to be silent and submissive and never to teach. She said, yes, she is silent and submissive when in the company of Jehovah’s Witness men. I observed that that policy is a caste system that elevates JW men, and puts me, a Catholic woman, in a lesser category, one Gloria can verbally bully.
1 Timothy 2 says that women are especially guilty because Adam was created before Eve, because Eve ate the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and “Adam was not deceived,” and, therefore, women are more susceptible to Satan’s lures than men are. There are two creation stories in Genesis; in the first, God creates male and female at the same time. Genesis 3:6 reports that Adam was deceived. 1 Timothy 2 disagrees with Genesis on two points.
1 Timothy 2 says that women are to achieve salvation through having children. This passage, controversially, and not universally attributed to Paul’s authorship, directly contradicts Paul elsewhere, for example in Romans, where Paul insists that the sin of Adam is erased for Christians through the sacrifice of Jesus. The idea that women need to have children to achieve salvation is heretical. No one takes it seriously, including Gloria, who has never had children. Baptists are Protestants, and Protestants believe in sola fide. Faith in Jesus alone, rather than any works, saves the sinner. 1 Timothy 2 contradicts foundational Protestant theology, Genesis, and Paul’s own statements.
1 Timothy 2’s insistence on silent and submissive women is repeatedly contradicted by the Bible itself, and by early Christian tradition. It is hard for us in the twenty-first century to recognize it, but the New Testament smashes conventional attitudes towards women. Anna, a childless woman, identifies the baby Jesus as the Messiah. Mary, a woman suspected of giving birth to Jesus illegitimately, orders Jesus to perform his first miracle. He obeys her, and turns water into wine at the Cana wedding feast. Jesus allows a ritually impure woman with a constant hemorrhage of blood to touch him. Jesus’ longest recorded conversation is with The Samaritan Woman at the Well. After they finish conversing, she returns to her village and evangelizes the population. They believe because of her speech and her teaching. Jesus saves a woman from a stoning she earned according to canonical understandings of the law. Mary Magdalene was the first to witness Jesus after his resurrection. She is the first to share that good news; she does so by speaking to and teaching male disciples. She is dubbed “The apostle to the apostles.” Priscilla, a woman, “explains the way of God accurately” to a man. She speaks; she teaches. Paul mentions Junia, a woman, as an outstanding apostle. Thecla, a early Christian saint, was called an apostle and praised by men. Acts 2:17-18 calls men and women equally to public testimony to God’s greatness.
This is amazing stuff. Mary, Jesus’ mother, could have been stoned to death for becoming pregnant outside of her betrothal to Joseph. The Samaritan woman was an adulteress and a member of a despised group. The woman with a hemorrhage rendered Jesus ritually unclean just by touching him. Anna would have been looked down upon because she was barren. That Mary Magdalene, a woman, was the first to witness the resurrection is actually used to support its historicity. No one inventing such an outlandish story would make a lowly woman the first to see and the first to report.
In elevating a barren woman and an unclean woman, and in protecting a prostitute from stoning, the New Testament’s revolutionary rescue of women from misogyny is stunning. This rescue is dramatically depicted in numerous works of art, including Rodolpho Bernardelli’s statue of Jesus protecting the Woman Taken in Adultery, whom the elders attempt to stone.
Rodney Stark writes,
“In Romans 16:1-2 Paul introduces and commends to the Roman congregation ‘our sister Phoebe’ who is a ‘deaconess of the church at Cenchrea,’ and who had been of great help to him. Deacons were of considerable importance in the early church. They assisted at liturgical functions and administered the benevolent and charitable activities of the church. Clearly, Paul regarded it as entirely proper for a woman to hold that position. Nor was this an isolated case. Clement of Alexandria wrote of ‘women deacons’ and in 451 the Council of Chalcedon specified that henceforth a deaconess must be at least 40 and unmarried (Ferguson 1990). From the pagan side, in his famous letter to the Emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger (1943) reported that he had tortured two young Christian women ‘who were called deaconesses.'”
Given that Paul himself salutes women who speak and women who teach men, it’s clear that one must carefully interpret 1 Timothy 2 in the context of the whole Bible. One such careful approach is available here.
Those who insist on unquestioning obedience to 1 Timothy 2 are selective. Acts 4-5 states clearly that early Christians lived in a communist economy. “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had … those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed.” A husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, contribute only some, not all, of their money. Peter reprimands them. They both immediately drop dead. I’m unaware of any Christian church that demands that its congregants adhere to a strict communist economy in the model of the first century church as described in Acts 4-5.
“But, wait! Aren’t you Catholic?” someone asked during the Facebook fracas. Yes, I am Catholic. Like the majority of my fellow Catholics, I yearn for the day when women are recognized as priests (see here, here, here). The Catholic Church has suffered, and has caused much suffering, in recent years because of sex crimes committed by men. As we Catholics confront these atrocities, it’s unclear how anyone can argue, in line with 1 Timothy 2, that women are more susceptible to Satan than men are. In any case, I say that women should be “recognized as” rather than “allowed to become” priests because women do much, if not most, of the pastoral work in Christianity. Histories of what nuns have accomplished in the US are awe-inspiring. See a short version here. The question is not when women will be allowed authority. The question is when women will be recognized for the authority they have long exercised.
Meanwhile, as a Catholic girl, in church and school, in the home and in the wider community, I was surrounded by powerful women. Nuns were ten feet tall. In church, in front of me, was a statue of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, the Woman Clothed with the Sun, standing on a globe, crushing a serpent with her foot, crowned with stars, see here and here. I used to gaze at a stained glass image of Saint Cecilia, calmly playing the organ as a blade pressed against the abundant hair on her neck. I always thought she was getting a haircut; it’s only recently that I realized she was being martyred. In the wooden carvings depicting the Stations of the Cross, Jesus was shown interacting with women in the fourth, sixth, eighth and fourteenth stations. Veronica wiped his face with her veil, thus comforting him and also “photographing” the event. In the final station, women prepared Jesus’ body for burial. In school I learned about Therese, the Little Flower, Bernadette of Lourdes, Kateri Tekakwitha, and Joan of Arc, who weren’t just female, they were young girls like me. No, we don’t yet have women priests in Catholicism. But we have always had plenty of powerful female role models.
“I’m not a Southern Baptist. Why should I care about any of this?”
Because misogyny can’t be contained within the walls of a house of worship. When I walk in my city’s Muslim-majority neighborhoods, I confront street harassment. I’m not a Muslim, but gender apartheid affects me. The insistence that women must be silent and submissive because they are more susceptible to Satan’s lures was a key support for the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, a 1486 book written by Heinrich Kramer, an Inquisitor. Malleus Maleficarum helped spark the witch craze and the murder of tens of thousands of innocent victims, mostly women.
The association of women with Satan is not a thing of the past. August Boto is “one of the most powerful men” in the Southern Baptist Convention. In an internal email, he described the work against sex abuse in his church as a “satanic scheme … the devil being temporarily successful.” He cited Christa Brown and Rachael Denhollander. Christa Brown was sexually assaulted by her youth pastor when she was a teenager. That pastor has been accused by others, including church officials. When teenage Christa Brown attempted to defy her pastor’s demands for inappropriate intimacy, he called her Satanic and said it was “God’s will” that they be intimate. After Brown reported him, he was simply moved to another congregation. Boto was also referring to Rachael Denhollander as “Satanic.” Denhollander is an attorney and author opposed to the sexual abuse of women and girls. Denhollander was the first to publicly accuse gymnastics coach Larry Nasser of sexual abuse.
***
In May, 2010, operators received a series of disturbing 911 calls. In one of the calls, a man reports that “There’s a young girl, about 14 years old, running around screaming and there’s some guy trying to follow her.”
In previous 911 calls, a woman is heard stating, “There’s somebody after me,” “They’re trying to kill me,” and “Please stop.” That caller was Shannan Gilbert. She was not, as a caller thought, 14 years old. She was a 24-year-old prostitute.
In December, 2010, police searched Gilgo Beach on the South Shore of Long Island, about forty miles from midtown Manhattan as the crow flies. Police were seeking the fate of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared after making frightening 911 calls months before. Instead searchers found the remains of four other women. All were prostitutes.
On July 13, 2023, Rex Heuermann, a 59-year-old architect, husband, and father was arrested and charged with murder in connection with three of the corpses found on Gilgo Beach in 2010. He may be charged in connection with the fourth corpse as well, and police are currently investigating whether or not he is connected to killings in New Jersey, South Carolina, and Nevada.
When news like this breaks, women shudder. We know, whether we verbalize it or not, that there is a force in the world that wants to hurt us. I call that force misogyny. We tailor our movements to keep ourselves safe. We have nightmares. We wonder if men we know could commit such acts. We pray we never meet the man who is so driven.
Heuermann is reported to be six feet four inches tall. He is overweight. In arrest photos, he towers over surrounding officers. David Schaller encountered the customer one Gilgo Beach victim was last seen with. Schaller said that the man was a huge “ogre.” Three of the Gilgo Beach Four, as they are known, were under five feet tall and about or under one hundred pounds. According to a former employee, Heuermann hired women who were short and petite. The gigantic Heuermann seemed to delight in humiliating his tiny female employees, this male employee says. Clearly, the Gilgo Beach serial killer preferred women he could render submissive.
The Gilgo Beach killer strangled his female victims. He wanted them silenced.
After Heuermann’s arrest, New York City media, both left- and right- leaning, from the New York Times to the New York Post, from WNYC to WABC, all asked and answered the same question. Why did it take so long? David Schaller gave police very specific clues, clues they took a long time to act on. All sources provided the same answer. The victims were low priority because they were prostitutes. The New York Post, famous for its unambiguous headlines, reported that “Gilgo killings unsolved for 13 years because ‘bad dudes botched the case.'”
Gentle reader, do you think I am reaching to draw connections between my friend John, and his insistence on silencing women, and forcing them to submit, and a serial killer? If you think that, please do this for me. Go to Google. Click on “image search.” Type in the words “silent woman.” Examine the images that search turns up. You will see women wearing gags. You will see quite a few images of decapitated women. You will see a woman struggling to scream, but unable to. You will not see images that reflect the Judeo-Christian tradition’s emphasis on the dignity of each human being. Now let’s take it up a notch. Perform a Google image search of “submissive woman.” You will see one S&M image after another. Tortured women. Begging women. Women on dog leashes controlled by men. The women are naked or semi-naked. The men are clothed.
I would never join a church where men were required to be “silent and submissive” to anyone, least of all me. I love men. I love their bodies, their voices, their masculine gifts and perceptions that I can’t replace because I’m not a man. I would never join a church that would silence and force into submission St. Francis, John Paul II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Billy Graham. It saddens me that John or anyone wants to belong to a church that would silence, and force into submission, Catherine of Siena, Sor Juana, Dorothy Day, Fanny Lou Hamer, and Beth Moore. I would never join a church that demanded that black people, or children, or handicapped people, or any segment of the population be silent and submissive to some other segment of the population. The idea chills and sickens me.
I used to be a leftist. We leftists have big problems with hierarchies. I became more conservative as I realized how hierarchy was necessary in teaching. When I was teaching class, I practiced a hierarchy. But I wasn’t at the head of the class because of the anatomy I was born with. I was at the head of the class because I had devoted years of my life to mastering subject matter and pedagogy, and proved that mastery through publications and evaluations.
I never demanded that my students submit to me. I informed my students that for a successful class, they needed to cooperate with me to create a learning environment that would nourish them intellectually and professionally. No identity prevented my students from someday becoming PhD professors just like me. I was thrilled when students said that my class made them want to be teachers. As I age and face my mortality, I am gratified to know that men and women who once sat in my class will carry forward the knowledge and the skills I learned from my mentors, male and female.
I strive to be a good student of my own teacher, who said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
The reason Danusha Goska is free to INTERPRET Holy Scripture any FEMINIST and LIBERTY-LOVING way she wants in our modern times and every other Christian is free to interpret Holy Scripture any way they individually desire in our modern times is NOT because of Holy Scripture. It is not because of FAITH.
But because the Renaissance (the rebirth of reason), the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment (the light of reason) put reason in the ascendancy over faith. The introduction of Aristotle’s philosophy of reason, logic, and science to the Christian Dark Ages by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century slowly and tortuously, over the course of the next 400 to 500 years SECULARIZED and eviscerated Christianity. Modern Christianity is an eviscerated version of Christianity, eviscerated and leashed by the ascendancy of reason over faith.
Notice how Danusha Goska, Rodney Stark, and most Christians today IMPLICITLY if not explicitly INTERPRET and are eager and adamant to INTERPRET Holy Scripture in the most rational, individual, personal, and modern way possible (even the homosexual Christians are eager and adamant to interpret Scripture their own personal way today to defend homosexuality). Today’s Christians are implicitly submitting to the conviction that reason is superior to faith. They are implicitly LEASHED by reason. If the INTERPRETATION of Scripture is too literal and therefore IRRATIONAL, they reject the interpretation, and switch to an interpretation more closely aligned with reason and reality. Or they reject this line or paragraph of Scripture which is too irrational and embrace a more rational line or paragraph of Scripture. This freedom of interpretation would simply not be possible without the ascendancy and supremacy of reason over faith. It was not possible to Tertullian, Augustinian, or even Lutheran, or Calvinist, Christianity, not in their pure form where reason was viewed as the mere handmaiden of faith. When faith was viewed as superior to reason and if reason contradicted Scripture and faith, reason was rejected and silenced….
Your repeated endless and childish bitterness at the failure of the so called Aristotlian Renaissance and the enlightenment tears at your soul, what there is left of it.
Actually, if people took their conflicting and opposing theologies “seriously” again, you would be in big trouble. You act like the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment was the be all and end all in Western Civilization. It wasn’t. Christians have never stopped taking their faith seriously, much as you would like to propagandize that they do. I guess it makes you fell better about the empty husk that is Objectivism
Greek philosophy, your foundation and bedrock of the rational and scientific beginnings and aspects of Western Civilization, folded like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes. Your heroes worshiped many Gods. So what is your problem with God? Without Christianity Greek history would resemble those ruins that everyone takes selfies at. Without Christianity no one would remember or care about the Greeks.
I wonder, where are the great works of music and art based on the teaching of Ayn Rand? Without Christianity there would no “Messiah” by Handel, no Passion Oratorios by Bach, no Mass settings by Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd and hundreds of other Renaissance and Medieval composers. It would be a pretty empty world bereft of art and music.
So you lash out at Goska because she didn’t respond, at all, to your hyperbolic B.S. You are getting nowhere with your revisionist ideas about Christianity because no one cares about them. As if you are free to interpret scripture from the never ending river of hate and jealousy you spew
Oh yeah, she will never date you, either.
“I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it’s perfect… As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.” (Sarah Dessen)
You never even got as far as “unrequited”. You were ignored entirely.
Talk about never getting off the ground. But hey you never had a chance anyway.
Swing and a big miss.
Do you not “interpret” Rand’s novels? Our discussion about Fountain Head’s hero is evidence of that surely.
Ayn Rand’s non-fiction work leaves no room for interpretation, her non-fiction philosophy and commentary are clear cut. But people still choose to misinterpret her meaning mostly from fear and loathing of reality. From fear and loathing of death, of independence, of self-reliance, of the facts of life.
As for her novels people are always misinterpreting certain scenes and aspects of her fiction. For example, the alleged rape scene of Dominique Francon by Howard Roark, how she leaves Eddie Willers stranded in the wilderness at the end of “Atlas Shrugged”, and why she chose to have Kira Argounova die at the end of “We The Living”.
But, for anyone who cares to investigate and find out that the alleged rape scene is not a rape at all and that Eddie Willers is left stranded for a very good reason that has nothing to do with any kind of contempt for the average Every-Man, and why Kira has to die, Ayn Rand left complete explanations in her non-fiction work.
This can’t be said of Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed. Moreover, the Bible and the Koran are ultimately based on a supernatural, mystical, otherworldly, fantasy dimension that violates all the laws of reality. How did Moses part the Red Sea? How did Jesus resurrect from the dead? No one can explain it by reality-based observation and reason, logic, and science. How did Mohammed fly in a chariot to Paradise? Same thing.
The ethics of Jesus such as turn the other cheek, or love your neighbor as yourself, make no sense whatsoever in reality. In order for them to make sense life would have to be eternal, which it is not. Or in order to make sense Jesus’ ethics have to be interpreted in a rational way to square with the facts of life and reality. Which is what Christians actually have to do if they value life more than death.
To be a consistent Christian is to be a consistent self-sacrificer, a consistent altruist. You would have to turn yourself into a Shmoo ready to be eaten by a tribe of cannibals. To the degree that you love yourself and you love your life you must cheat on the ethics of Jesus or interpret them in a more rational way.
Guess what. No one cares to investigate and find out that the alleged rape scene is not a rape at all and that Eddie Willers is left stranded for a very good reason. We don’t care about the reason either.
As to being a Shmoo, your obsession with it is rather pathetic because you seem to tie your own explanation to what being one is to your usual anti-Christian diatribes.
I don’t think Al Capp said any of that when he invented the character and none of the definitions of Shmoo even mention Objectivism.
Next thing you know you will tie driving a Ford or a Chevy to being an enemy of Objectivism.
As to your usual list of biblical horribles, where faith is concerned I am under zero obligation to explain it you or anyone else. I do not need your reality-based observation and reason, logic, and science, because I believe it. And since you don’t know the ins and outs of the entire universe where our physical laws may not apply, you don’t know either.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ — Hamlet
I would rather engage in speculation of the beautiful and unknowable that submit to the drab knowable world you would force us into.
In your hellscape it is obvious why you can’t come up with a thought of your own and rely on the works of Objectivist hacks to get your points across.
The same would be true today of Islam, if Islam had been eviscerated and leashed by the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. But it wasn’t. Islam had its brief Golden Age when Avicenna and Averroes introduced and championed Aristotle in the Muslim world. But the hardcore, fundamentalist, religionists, the Augustines and Tertullians of Islam, like Al-Ghazali, were more powerful and influential and put a stop to Aristotle’s influence on Islam.
You actually think throwing around a few names makes you an expert in anything? It doesn’t. No one is impressed.
Stick to what you think you know.
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Self-sacrifice…..bad
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
Repeat ad infinitum. The Big Lie in practice.
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
“Even taking the Gospels at face value does not solve all the problems of interpretation. The teachings of Jesus are unsystematic, and many of them, particularly those related in parable form, are notoriously obscure. This unclarity has resulted in a wide spectrum of opinion among Christian scholars as to what Jesus really meant. Despite these divergent interpretations, however, it is interesting to observe that Christian theologians unanimously agree that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher in history. Considering the widespread disagreement over the content of Jesus’ teaching, this unanimity of praise is highly suspect.
Many Christians feel that Jesus, regardless of what he said, must have been the greatest moralist because he was, they believe, the “Son of God” (however this phrase may be interpreted). Few Christians reserve judgement, read the Gospels and, on the basis of objective evaluation, conclude that Jesus was outstanding. Instead, believing as they do that Jesus was a divine figure, they assume beforehand that whatever he said must be vitally important, because to believe otherwise would be to cast doubt on his divinity. And this is tantamount to blasphemy.
It must be remembered that the sword of heresy looms as a constant threat over the heads of Christians, and this applies equally well to liberal Protestants. While liberals are perfectly willing to concede that the Bible contains many errors, and while they may go so far as to concede that Jesus was no more than a man, they are unwilling to admit that Jesus advocated principles which, by any reasonable standard of human decency, must be judged as morally repugnant. To overtly disown or condemn the teachings of Jesus – this is the line that no Christian, fundamentalist or liberal, dares to cross, because to cross it would be to define oneself out of Christianity. It is the limit of heresy for even the most liberals of liberals.
To avoid disclaiming the teachings of Jesus, theologians continue to do what they have done for centuries: they INTERPRET. Passages unfavorable to Jesus are reinterpreted in a more favorable light, or they are dismissed as unauthentic interpolations. Anything will do as long as it permits the theologian to profess agreement with the ethics of Jesus; the minute he ceases to conform in this respect, he is no longer a theologian, nor can he continue to pass himself off as a Christian.” – George H. Smith
I always get a laugh when miserable atheists like yourself attempt to tell Christians what they are supposed to think and how to think and interpret the Bible.
It is especially amusing when you quote an atheist whose big accomplishment was his book Atheism: The Case against God. So little Georgie gets to decide who and when someone ceases to be a theologian.
Do you really think any one will read this spam or care at all what George H Smith has to say, any more than what John List did to his family?
My guess is no.
But George Smith did play for a while with the Red Sox, didn’t he? Was that the guy you are referring to? No?
Well, basically, who cares. Georgie was an idiot libertarian anyway
“I always get a laugh when miserable atheists like yourself attempt to tell Christians what they are supposed to think and how to think and interpret the Bible.”
For one thousand years of Western history it was no laughing matter when Christians persecuted and murdered other Christians forcing other Christians to believe their interpretation of Christianity or be persecuted, imprisoned, ex-communicated, burned at the stake, forced to recant, or murdered.
Christianity unrestrained and unleashed by reason is as evil and destructive as Islam.
Atheist Marxism is derived from Christianity. Marxism derives all its philosophical essentials from religion then merely gives those religious essentials a cover-up of pseudo-scientific jargon. It is no mere coincidence that Global Warming/Climate Change pseudo-science comes from Marxists. Just as the nonsense of Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and the Second Coming come from religion.
“Socialism is really helping religion. The bigger the statism, the more people are accustomed to government rule over everything. The more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead away from the more secular side… the socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over….
I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it. And the people in the rising religious movements today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor in history but philosophy and culture [are the crucial factors that determine the course of history]….
Religion was the root of all evil from the beginning. It has ruled in disguised forms and still is. And now the disguise has to be stripped off for if there is to be a lasting totalitarianism. For a lasting totalitarian state, religion is the only means.” – Leonard Peikoff
What a sophomoric pile. The same old garbage as always, especially the part about Marxism being derived from Christianity. I always get a laugh when you write that, for the one millionth time.
And the part about Christianity “unrestrained and unleashed by reason is as evil and destructive as Islam” is a doozey too. It seems there is no level of lie, no exaggeration, obfuscation you will not sink to in furtherance of your version of Marxism, which is Objectivism.
I notice you never source your silly claims except for those of the hack Leo-tard Peikoff. Your re-hashed opinions are simply the extension of his insanity.
Sorry THX but your Christian Dark Ages, if they ever really existed at all, aren’t coming back. Western Civilization experienced the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all with the cornerstone of Christianity and science as its foundation.
Greek philosophy, your foundation and bedrock of the rational and scientific beginnings and aspects of Western Civilization, folded like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes.
That is why, today, we have the perfect blend of religion and reason in the modern world.
And you aren’t going to be able to change one damn thing. You are wasting what life you have left on this nonsense.
Intrepid says, “That is why, today, we have the perfect blend of religion and reason in the modern world.”
“The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence….
Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation….
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Christianity has a vested interest in human misery. Christianity, perhaps more than any religion before or since, capitalized on human suffering; and it was enormously successful in insuring its own existence through the perpetuation of human suffering….
Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
You have a vested interest in human misery, with every pile of garbage you post.
But I can see why a miserable nobody like George Smith appeals to you.
I think you are the most miserable of failures I have ever run across in my life. How’s that “PhD” working out for you, anyway?
I found myself going along with you and your manifesto…until you made it to the Bible. That’s where you made your mistake. The Bible is the holy, inerrant, infallible word of God, transcribed by men but dictated by God Himself. There are NO mistakes. There are NO inconsistencies, only misinterpretations by misguided people.
The trouble you seem to be having is 1) your ability/willingness to follow and 2) your need to lead, especially when it comes to marriage-related scripture. As Christians, we all follow someone. Christ Himself follows God’s leadings. The Bible is an instruction manual on how we are to live, bringing order to the chaos of our lives. It took me joining the military to completely appreciate some of the hierarchical aspects of it, as some portions resemble an M4 operations manual.
My wife is probably the smartest person I know. She’s also Vice President of a bank, in charge of daily operations. She’s kind, wise, loving and a firm believer in the infallibility of the word of God. She’s not only displayed her faith daily in adherence to verses like Ephesians 5: 22,23 [“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.”}, but that adherence forces me to act wisely, seek her council and pray for wisdom. Many husbands don’t realize the two-edged sword those verses represent, but with God there is a hierarchy. There is order.
The modern definition of feminism usually brings up thoughts of the Proverbs 21:9 woman: “It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.” Don’t be that woman. God demands better of you.
One could just as easily you have an inability to follow / need to lead.
There is no evidence that the Bible is the infallible word of God. I am not trying to be edgy.
The New Testament presents a different God by differing degrees (depends whose word you value more – Jesus or Paul) than the Old. The New Testament presents different human interpretations of Christ with Paul successfully steamrolling ancient Christianity to the point that we have a religion that follows Paul over Christ.
Case in point.
Which God are we talking about? The Muslims believe in God, that God tells them it’s good to do all kinds of things that by a common sense, rational, standard are stupid and/or evil.
Jews and Christians will counter that their God is a different God from the Muslim God and that he only tells believers to do things that are good by a common sense, rational standard. But in that case if common sense and reason can guide us to the common sense, rationally good thing to do, why do we need the Judeo-Christian God to tell us what to do?
A God based; religious, moral code, is essentially an obedience to a higher authority moral code. A mysterious, hidden, unperceivable, supernatural, otherworldly, higher authority. So if God were to command you to kill someone you have to obey if you wish to be moral. God tells you to kill your child, if you want to be moral, you kill your child. But then right before you’re going to kill your child God tells you don’t kill your child, you have to obey if you want to be moral and so you obey and don’t kill your child. Reason and the facts of reality must be ignored and evaded in a God based moral code.
If Abraham had been truly moral in a rational, common sense, definition of morality, he would have told God, “No, I refuse to even consider murdering my innocent, beloved, precious, child just to obey and please you! What kind of a sick and depraved God are you to even suggest such an evil?”
Since there is no objective reality we can all point to and agree upon when it comes to this supernatural God existing in his supernatural dimension with his mysterious ways, what logically follows is the emergence of shamans/mystics/priests/reverends/pastors/mullahs/rabbis/theologians who claim that they somehow KNOW what the will of God really is, and you eventually get the hierarchy of a theocracy.
A drastically different kind of hierarchy than a hierarchy based on observation-based reasoning of perceivable and demonstrable reality.
You know nothing about what Christians and Jews will counter with. But keep trying. I haven’t seen that tired argument from you in over a year.
More spam from our rezidentura atheist fraud. It’s going to be a long weekend for you isn’t it? No new articles….the days just slipping away.
Dragging yourself out of bed each day, flipping through that worn out database trying to find some way, any way to insult us without looking like a fool.
Meanwhile, in the words of rock singer Steve Miller: Time keeps on tickin’ tickin’, into the future. Except you won’t be flying like an eagle. More like an extinct Dodo.
Well said sir. But he won’t agree with a word of it.
Everyone is certainly free to believe what they choose to believe. That’s the beauty of freewill. It was postulated by Billy Graham in his book, ‘Angels: God’s Secret Agents’ that freewill came into existence after Satan and his formerly angelic followers were cast out of heaven, long before mankind came into being. Graham postulated that freewill was paramount to man’s existence, not only to prove we would choose to freely serve God, but to also show the heavenly host that they didn’t need to serve out of fear.
While the concept of hierarchy is fresh to some, the idea (once understood) helps explain scripture to it’s fullest. Just as a platoon sergeant is responsible for the actions of his platoon to his company commander, and the company commander to the brigadier general, so too is the husband and father responsible for the actions of his wife and children, whether he committed the offences or not. That’s the part that Christian “feminists” conveniently choose to leave out.
To better understand this, Matthew 8:5-10 gives us the example of the Roman Centurion and how, by Jewish standards, this “heathen” understood better than most the importance of biblical hierarchy. As Jesus entered the city of Capernaum, he was approached by a Roman Centurion, begging Jesus to heal his servant. Jesus agreed to go and heal this man. The Centurion’s response is worthy of study.
Matthew 8:8-10 {emphasis added by capitalization} “The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but SPEAK THE WORD ONLY, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a MAN UNDER AUTHORITY, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this and he doeth it. When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.”
The Centurion understood his place in the hierarchy of God and the power contained therein. Wouldst we all come to know it.
Years ago, I read the Billy Graham’s book “Angles.” Bill Graham was absolutely right about humans and free will. The Gospel without free will is not good news.
Your “misguided”, “misinterpreting”, Christians were called HERETICS and BLASPHEMERS back when Christianity was taken SERIOUSLY, back during your Christian Dark Ages, and they were imprisoned, persecuted, forced to recant, or ex-communicated, or burned at the stake for their heresy.
Wow, when no one listens or cares what you say try the tried and true….fear mongering. Except that no one is being tried for religious heresy and blasphemy these days, except maybe in the case of Pakistan where blasphemy trials seem to be the order of the day among your Muslim pets. I know, why don’t try your act in Islamabad.
Now that little rant will certainly make me want to quit the faith because of what happened 700 years ago. NOT! Guilt by association really doesn’t work anymore. Only Leftists like you seem to like it.
Like I said, it’s going to be a long weekend for you with no new articles, and everyone else off and doing weekend things.
Ad then on Monday you have to post the same garbage all over again. Great life you have carved out for yourself. I guess you couldn’t get that date with Danusha could you.
Talking to the teenage daughter of a friend about personal security in public places: Never be reluctant to get loud. “STOP! LEAVE ME ALONE! STOP!”. Nine times out of ten, an average, ordinary guy will hear it, follow it and…you’ll be okay. Guys who harass women aren’t the baddest dudes in town and aren’t likely to want to mess with another guy. It will be over.
You’re welcome.
Great post. Thank you.
Danushka, men are violent crime victims 2 times more often than women are. Did you know that?
Richard, that tactic doesn’t work for men that are assaulted by women. Studies have shown public apathy and contempt towards men that are battered by women in public.
Amber Heard mocked Johnny Depp when he complained about her violence towards him. She said, “Nobody will believe a man:”.
One of the best “No way no how could this ever be a sermon, because a woman gave it” was Janet Mefferd’s “Why we need God’s vioce” a response to the pro LBGxyz “Revoice conference.”
I read Marg Mawczko’s article on women and church authority. The article was informative, and confirmed what I already believed/understood to be the truth.
If you pick and choose which Bible verses to follow, you really shouldn’t say that you follow the Bible.
We don’t have to like what it says; but Romans 3:23 identifies us, Romans 6:23 identifies the cure, and Romans 10:13 tells us how to get it…
Choose life.
Those modern, Cafeteria Christians, will be the death of Christianity, I tell ya.
Where’s the Christian theocracy when you need it.
Bitter, table for one. Christianity in today’s world is just fine. Your pathetic attempts at ridicule just doesn’t seem to be getting it done for you, does it.
But keep it up. You only make yourself look more pathetic and irrelevant.
And you won’t get the girl, either. Looks like she liked Aubrey’s post, though.
Intrepid, feminists like the men that cater to women, and dislike the men that stand up to feminism. Maybe you will be in the position of having to defend yourself against a woman……while trying to stay out of jail. Feminists have long since conned the cops into believing that all domestic violence is male-on-female, which explains why jails are filled with men with bloody noses.
Advocating for women ‘priests’ destroys your credibility as a Catholic speaker.
According to the bible verses that the author quoted, it would appear that Jesus encouraged women to be priests.
The Quakers have a better idea; get rid of the priesthood altogether. If God exists and he gave man free will and a reasoning mind then there is no need for other men to speak for God.
The premise of Quakerism is each individual with a functioning brain can be reached by God individually, no need for other men to tell a man what God’s will is.
But ya gota be careful ’cause that idea is mighty close to deism and deism properly speaking is not a religion, it represents the atrophy of religion. Deism is one step away from outright atheism.
Is there no one you won’t try to destroy with lies.
She’s a Cafeteria Catholic, a HERETIC, but it seems she doesn’t want to admit it.
If I were a Catholic I would petition the Pope to force the witch to recant or burn her at the stake as a good warning to all other heretics.
See a psychiatrist. You definitely need one at this point.
At this point I’m starting see vestiges of totalitarianism oozing out of your pores as you make life and death judgments on everyone.
I always knew you had the capability.
THX also needs a time machine to bring him back from the days of the inquisitions.
I think he likes it there in the past, since the past can’t be changed. He can always rely on it to suit his purposes.
Another heartfelt, scholarly, and informative post from this author.
I am a terrible with biblical hermeneutics, because my grasp of the epistemology is just not up to it. So I walk that fine line that divides appealing to authority and deferring to authority on many things, along with a lot of amateur research. I appreciate the way you shine your light on various issues, it gives me new perspectives to consider.
There are a couple of clues, and you mentioned one of those clues in this piece, dignity. Big ‘D’ dignity; Imago dei. That intrinsic quality dignity that is derived not from an office, but from our humanity, and our relationship with that which created us. Maybe the problem is that it is not recognized?
The other clue is hierarchy. It is my theory that dignity and hierarchy must go together. If you want to get anything done, you must have hierarchies. Flat organizational structures do not build great things, like medical research, bridges, roads, houses, universities and other things. I think that the recognition of human Dignity can temper the pathologies of hierarchies. Do we choose to recognize it? I don’t see a lot of recognition of dignity today, but I do see a lot of ‘othering.’ That’s conditional dignity, not intrinsic dignity; “Think and act like me and I’ll let you inside.” Most humans have a sense that inside is good, outside is awful.
Bureaucracies use hierarchy for its structure, and one of the ways they try to keep order is by endless training. Sensitivity training, ethics training, goals, mission statements, covenants. My company introduced ‘Company Covenants’ some years back. They had to change it because someone said that one of the meanings of covenant is “an agreement with God.” Then the attorneys said it wasn’t good because it implied it was legally binding. I have seen mission statements and training changed, re-tooled, swapped, discarded, resurrected, renamed faster than a large family goes through toilet paper. Dignity does not seem to require this kind of assistance. Thank you for writing and sharing this with us, I liked it.
It astonishes me again and again how Dr. Goska is able to discern the broad stream of culture and how it affects everything, even things that seem not to be connected to it at all. Case in point-misogyny.
No,not some metoo hoax, the real thing.
Dr. Goska shows clearly how prevalent it is. From a “women are not allowed to speak” (obviously missing the historical context), to the SBC’s disenfellowshipping congregations that still have female pastors to seeing women mainly as adornment-“good” women are praised, “bad” women are discarted.
“Good women” don’t sleep around, i.e. (I think that is actually a good idea-FOR BOTH genders)
“Bad” women, like prostitutes, are deemed”worth less”. If they are “worth less” police is less willing to take cases of them disappearing or being murdered seriously.
This is how I.e the Green River Killer or the Gilgo Beach Killer were able to get away with their serial murder spree for so long. With good police work, they could have been caught after their first or second murder.
One could say-ok, but it is their own fault, so why should i.e prostitutes be excluded from the circle of what we deem the worthy part of humanity?
Because it matters-see above. We share the same humanity. And, with regards to our soul, the same spiritual dignity. It is high time that churches of all brands/flavours realize that.
Beautiful. Thank you so much for seeing and caring. No, I don’t like prostitution. yes, I do think prostitutes are human beings.
Excellent piece, Danusha, but …………………… toooooooo long!
In this era of mass communication and bombardment from all sides, amidst too much electronic communication, brevity is essential if you wish to influence people.
1. Never, ever, more than 800 words. Beyond that, you exceed people’s attention span.
2. State your conclusion in the opening paragraph. Get your point across, justify later on.
3. Don’t give your reasons first. Not many people will read as far as your conclusion.
Peter Arnold, Professional editor, Sydney
Beautifully written as always. I appreciate your deep thoughts in such fraught and difficult issues. Thank you.
I contend that feminism is entirely unconcerned that men face the same issues as women, and that misandry – hate for men – is hard-coded in feminist ideology. Back in the mid-1970s, Straus, Steinmetz and Gelles found that women batter men as often as the converse in domestic violence. Radical feminists made death threats against the three to try to silence them. The media and feminists have covered up this reality ever since.
Feminists in Human Resources openly discriminate against men, because they know they can get away with it. Sometimes the feminists in HR discriminate in favor of women. A good example of that took place in 2007, at Rose Medical Center in Denver, when they KNEW that surgical technician Kristen Diane Parker had Hepatitis C, but they hired her anyway. (Parker went on to steal post-op patients’ pain meds, then inject them with saline from her now-contaminated needles).
Feminists in Congress, along with their male enablers, created the Office of Women’s Health, but ignored men’s health. As one result among many, many times more taxpayer funds are spent on breast cancer than prostate cancer. Which is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Boys are lagging in schools, doing poorer in life, health, and many other metrics. Yet feminists have opposed interventions to help the boys.
Men are required to register for the military draft, and are subject to conscription in wartime. Women are exempt. Funny how feminists are silent about this inequity.
Women can refuse parenthood, but they can also impose parenthood on men – even fraudulently. I remember Gil Garcetti going on 60 Minutes back in the 1980s, and grinning from ear to ear that men were being forced into paternity after getting a default order of paternity, because the notice was lost in the mail, or sent to the wrong addr4ess, etc.
There are 4 times more male suicides than female suicides, yet there are no governmental efforts underway to address that tragedy. Despite the lopsided suicide stats, the psychology profession runs with the mythology that women suffer two times more depression than men.
There are numerous female-only programs on college campuses, which are violations of Title IX. Needless to say, the Title IX offices on campus are complicit with these injustices.
Men account for 93% of industrial accident fatalities, yet you will never hear that from the folks that talk about gender equality.
Feminism made men the enemy, in much the same way that the Nazis made Jews the enemy. In case that seems like a stretch, consider the fact that feminist lawyers destroy men in divorce courts every day. Men that go through divorce face an 8 times increase in their suicide risk.
Frank, your mentioning these things reaches my empathetic ear, although I personally have never lived with any women like the types you allude to.
I gave up the pracitice of family law almost 20 years ago because of how unfair the system is against men. – non-violent ones, that is. Criminal law is a walk in the park compared to the terrible stress of a family law practice for lawyers.
Thank you, Johnhenry. I knew another male family law attorney that also had to walk away from practicing family law, due to the widespread misandry and corruption in that field.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Hear! Hear!
The best book I’ve ever read on male/female relations, the male/female traditional roles, how they came to be and why they came to be, from a historical, biological, financial, material, psychological, survival, and cultural perspective is Warren Farrell’s book “The Myth of Male Power”.
Everything you say is true and is documented in “The Myth of Male Power”.
One of the best things about the book is that Warren Farrell doesn’t blame men or women for how we got traditional sex roles straitjacketed upon us (the fault does not lie with either patriarchy or matriarchy but the harsh facts of life and survival) and gives solutions for peaceful and equal co-existence between the sexes in a modern, industrialized, economy.
Without the MEN who were the titans of philosophy, science, technology, industry, and capitalism Western mankind could not have arrived at a state of enough advanced technology, enough comfort, and enough abundance, prosperity, security, leisure and freedom to allow men and women for the first time in history to escape the traditional sex roles needed for mere survival.
I wish I could give that book to every woman and man in America!
Fortunately for us, you can’t. Is it any wonder you actually need a book to define for you the relationship between men and women.
Intrepid, it was feminism that redefined the roles of men and women, and for the worse. Men went from husbands, fathers, and brothers to “oppressors”. Women went from cooperating with men to competing with them. Rates of marriage, datijng, and sex are now at historic lows.
The silver lining to this cloud is that there are a growing number of women that reject feminism, and validate and respect men as a group. These are the only women that sane men will want to associate with.
You can only get caught up in Feminism if you let it. I never bought into it
I’m glad there are a growing number of women who reject it and those are the ones you should be spending time with.
I have never been involved with a feminist. It’s waste of time. My marriage has lasted 34 years. Happy as a clam.
Thank you, THX 1138. I borrowed liberally from “The Myth of Male Power” in this post. Feminism and the culture that supports it have kept the facts about male disadvantage well hidden; their common term for men that raise these issues is “whiner”.
Danusha Goska aside (exceptions proving the rule), I have nothing but contempt for the ideology / religion of feminism, even that of “First Wave” femmes – including Wollstonecraft. I’m not decided on Florence Nightengale. Again, Danusha aside, what man would ever want to live being chained to one?
Danusha’s “manifesto” set forth about 50 – 100 paragraphs into this piece – is a rank example of loading the dice against good faith points of view by people such as St Paul.
I shall now pull out and take comfort from my copy of Sir Robert Filmer’s “Patriarcha” (1680) before continuing to read this essay; and that said, may God bless the author
One of the problems with all of this “men” versus “women” talk is the lack of discussion about the fact that the groups of men and women cannot be judged at all. They don’t exist in reality.
Men and women are human beings – one species. They can only be judged by their individual character, not their group. If we treat and judge every human being by their own individuality instead of putting them in groups there will be no need for any “feminism.”
Feminism fails because it puts all women into a group and collectively compares the group to men. This inevitably leads to trying to elevate one group above another. All women are a collective of individual human beings who are biologically female. They cannot be grouped and judged as one homogenous group by anyone without denying the truth about the individuality of every human being.