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Women’s rights are
human rights?
Stephen Henry Lewis,
United Nations’ envoy for HIV AIDS in Africa, 2006, said:
“[Women's rights have] never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power… it never will be real. The demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident… where freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated. It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.”
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Equality and Religion
Inventors of God
It’s been speculated that man created God because he had to have someone to blame when women weren’t around.
The three major religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—all believe in a male God and attribute similar powers to their supreme entity. Each religion’s God is said to have a male representative of its deity albeit different in form and time of appearance. Another thing these major religions have in common is the subjugation of women.
In my new e-book, Cinderella’s Coffin: How men control the fate of women and girls and what women can do about it, I mention rather briefly how language, like religion, is so skewed in favor of the male gender. In the quest for knowledge and in order to communicate more effectively, most humans learned to speak; but fewer learned to read and write.
Unfortunately, women were in the ‘fewer’ group, having been denied education until very recently. In the meantime, the guys made up most of the words we use today, and then proceeded to write most of the books that have survived down through the ages and that have been accepted as human wisdom.
The good and evil of it all remains to be seen, but masculine definitions saved time and energy; and eased the burden of trying to understand what the heck another person might be talking about. This system of communication, albeit not 100% effective, seems better than having none at all.
God’s Seal of Approval
The Judeo-Christian story writers sealed the destiny of females within the first few chapters of Genesis, the first book of the two-part Holy Bible Christians adopted from Judaic culture. Written by men and translated more than twenty-six times since, the Bible has come to be revered and unquestioned by millions of people (the majority of them women) as the word of God because the writers said it was so.
If man created God in his male image, the door was slammed forever on the possibility of female equality by the penile inventors of God. Religion, more than politics or traditions, is the number one ‘enemy’ of the female gender. Inequality is a function of religion. (Inequality can exist without religion, but religion cannot exist without inequality.)
One of Merriam-Webster’s words of the day this month was truckle. ¹ Women needn’t truckle under however. It’s not too late for women to make up their own language and write their own story on the go.
Religion must have been created from the premise that someone or something is better than the thinker pondering greatness or the lack thereof. Religion was born of doubt, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, and fear. The thinker, convinced that he or she was not good enough (for whatever or because whatever) or complete as is, instantly became unequal with all other beings, real or imagined.
Mrs. God’s Garden?
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God was introduced in the first verse of the Holy Bible, but as most Christians know, there was no reference as to how he came to be. In less than 25 verses however, it was stated and therefore became obvious to the reader that God wasn’t alone!
I’ve often wondered with whom he was speaking—his wife perhaps? In Gen 1:26, the text reads, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image….’” (You know, as in male and female types referenced a bit later in Genesis.) And so it was said by the men who wrote the scriptures that Adam was placed first in line on the hierarchical family tree albeit one of his ribs was missing, which made him no longer perfect as God had originally designed him.
Some readers of scripture may also remember that God placed two trees in the garden: the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Gen. 2:9). He first told Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen. 2:17.)
This first commandment from God to the first man was broken within the first few chapters of the first so-called holy story. But Adam soon had someone to blame for his reckless disobedience when the serpent ribbed Eve into taking the blame for man’s first and most serious mistake.
God wasn’t forgiving, however, and both male and female were cast out of the communal garden to eventually die, leaving the still-sacred tree of life in its midst. Having tasted the delectable fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they left their highest good behind and were well on their way to finding out what evil lurked in their mortal futures.
Most other religions have similar holy books of the same intent: telling humans how to live this life and how to make it to the next, although there is no proof that life exists beyond death. There is however a provable process of recycling chemical elements that occurs and is evident in universal constants. Ironically, this fact is seldom the preferred belief over the supposition of those who choose to believe in heaven or nirvana or other imaginary realms they hope to inhabit after dying.
Haplology without Apology
It’s very apparent how lop-sided language and religion are when one begins to take notice. After awhile, it can even be quite irritating when one begins to realize that it’s mostly females who have been dropped out of the human family’s activities, and therefore its his-story.
Another of Merriam-Webster’s words of the day in February is haplology, ² and after reading its definition, I thought how much and how often women are treated like a mere contraction of men.
Sometimes, it’s just easier for men to drop an entire gender and leave themselves with all the glory and goodies. This example makes it easier to see what a short jump it is from the shores of male and female equality to the barren desert of female subjugation. The guys simply contracted to leave out half of humanity way long ago. In their reality, female happiness can be damned and sent to hell as long as there’s haplology and supremacy in their holy books.
I’d love to wish you a happy Valentine day, but I’m a wee bit stubborn. This special ‘holy-day’ is from a male tale also, and had little to do with romantic love and more to do with the marriage of church and state. Romantic love is wonderful if you’re in it or if it is at least in your world. If love is absent, even hell can sound inviting. And so, I leave you with a biblical commandment instead—one that can solve every problem known to humankind: “Love one another.”
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