I, too, certainly agree with at least most of the things that Alcyone said. When it comes to myself, however, I have for many years been interested in trying to understand as much as possible about religions and religious societies. It has not been enough to me to say that we are probably a bit bad all of us, and we should just be tolerant of one another. That sort of reasoning tends to blur all differences, and it will make it harder to draw conclusions about reality. But I absolutely agree that it is devastatingly dangerous to concentrate only on other people's faults and never on your own. Jesus put it like this in Matthew 7:5 (New American Standard Bible translation):
"You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
One conclusion that I myself have drawn is that
all major religions are probably more or less sexist. I feel very confident that that is the case when we talk about Christianity, Judaism and Islam, because I know the Bible quite well, and certainly well enough to say that the Bible gives men an elevated position compared with women, and I while I know the Koran so much more imperfectly than the Bible, I do know it well enough to say the same thing about the Koran, too.
I know the holy books of Hinduism hardly at all. But many years ago I read a few pages of Bhagavadgita. I stopped when I came to a passage that described women very disparagingly - if I remember it correctly, this passage said that women are weak and untrustworthy. Clearly the Indian society does not treat men and women equally.
I have never read any important Buddhist literature at all. I do know that there are Buddhist nuns as well as Buddhist monks. I once came across an article that claimed that Buddha himself hadn't wanted women to be "full members" of the religion he founded - he wanted the turning away from life, which Buddhism really is about, to be for men only. I don't know if that is true, but I don't think that Buddhist societies treat men and women equally.
Similarly, judging from the treatment of women in China, certainly when it comes to the large-scale killing of girl children, traditional Chinese religions don't value men and women equally.
I don't absolutely
know, but I think I have good reason to
believe, that all major religions treat women as if they were secondary to men.
Karl Barth , an influential Christian theologian, put it like this (I'm quoting from memory:
Man is A, and woman is B. And if woman does not want to be B, she can't be anything at all. I think that is the general approach to men and woman of all the major religons. The question is why all important religions would view men and women this way. My short answer to that question is that men can dominate over women because of their greater physical strength, and by cooperating to secure their own power over women, men everywhere have created patriarchal societies, where men have a greater say than women. Men have also written the holy books of all the major religions, where they have declared that they themselves are the glory of God, created in his image. Paul the Apostle put it like this in 1 Corinthians 11:
But I want you to know that Christ is the head of every man, and a husband the head of his wife, and God the head of Christ.
(1 Corinthians 11:3)
In 1 Corinthians 11:7-9. Paul writes:
A man, on the other hand, should not cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
8
For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
9
nor was man created for woman, but woman for man:
This doesn't mean that Paul thinks that women are worthless. This is what he says in 1 Corinthians 11:11-12:
Woman is not independent of man or man of woman in the Lord.
12
For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God.
Woman is part of God's creation, and man is not independent of her, and he can't do without her. But for all of that, Paul clearly believes that man is A and woman is B, just as Karl Barth put it. This view of man's and woman's place in creation, shared by all major religions, is, in my opinion, a consequence of the fact that we all live in patriarchal societies.
Ann
