Would a ban on all public religious representations and displays ease religious hatreds and violence?

mecca

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Eventually someone has to take the leader role and someone has to follow. Team work is ideal but not always possible.
"Eventually" is not true... people can maintain equal relationships where one partner is not an authority above the other. If you can't maintain that basic standard of mutual respect and treatment then there's probably a problem.

Either the man or the woman can lead in various situations if the need ever happens to arise but it shouldn't stay that way with one partner overshadowing the other's autonomy and becoming controlling... Anyway, one person taking the driver's seat every once in a while in certain situations if necessary is in no way equivalent to the idea that women have an obligation to "submit" to their husbands who supposedly have inherent authority and superiority over them simply because they were born male.
I cannot think of a single matriarchy I have known personally that has been a happy household.
An equal relationship is not a matriarchy nor is it a patriarchy. Don't you get the concept of equality? One person should not be above the other person, neither one has inherent authority over the other. Anecdotal observations mean nothing.
Men TEND (I know there are always exceptions) to be more levelheaded and reasonable when treated with respect by their wife.
Women TEND to be more relaxed when the man does have everything under control (again, I know there are exceptions - including my father).
Wow, what lovely stereotypes you've got there lol. It's not accurate to real life.
 
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mecca

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Indeed context, you guys just don't realise the cultural gap between today's society and what was considered as the norm back then.
C'mon... What'd I say Wigi?

"The bible was written in a time and culture that said that treating women as property was acceptable and the people who wrote the books believed women to be inferior to them... this is why their idea of god reflects their sexist beliefs and they wrote those beliefs into their books."

This idea is basically what I've been saying since I first replied to this thread...

But, the fact that people are now somewhat less tolerant of treating women as subhuman, doesn't excuse the terrible sexist practices and beliefs that people had in the past. It's not hard to acknowledge that many people in the past were flawed and their ideas and practices were flawed too. The good thing is, now we can see that it's wrong and choose to do better now and in the future... instead of making up excuses and attempted justifications.
 
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justjess

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I don't understand how you get that. The relationship between God and woman is as real as the relationship between God and man.

We do not need a man to get to God, whether priest or husband. I would not be able to "get to God" if that was the case - my husband is an atheist.

The wife submits to God as well as her husband.
The husband is supposed to love his wife as much as Jesus loves the church. (Therefore a Christian man will NEVER abuse his wife like you described above. That story of yours above made my blood boil.)

Women and men have strengths/ weaknesses and different roles. Women's roles in the church are undervalued because worldly standards are too often kept in mind.

Hope I have explained my postion OK.
I understand your position jo, but your position isn’t really in line with what the Bible says.

Submit onto your husbands. Submit:
1.
accept or yield to a superior force or to the authority or will of another person.

According to that you should be following your husbands atheism, but you don’t so you are not submitting to him.

What if your husband is unworthy of submitting to? Women weren’t allowed to read or go to church so how would they know? And in a bible that believes most people are sinners and unworthy that means a whole lot of women would be submitting to men that would lead them to hell. The Bible doesn’t allow for divorce so what exactly were they supposed to do?

Why do men submit directly to god but women submit to men? The more steps between someone and the ultimate the more likely the message will be deluded/corrupted - it’s like the game telephone.
 

justjess

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Too many cooks spoil the broth. Eventually someone has to take the leader role and someone has to follow. Team work is ideal but not always possible.

I cannot think of a single matriarchy I have known personally that has been a happy household.

Men TEND (I know there are always exceptions) to be more levelheaded and reasonable when treated with respect by their wife.
Women TEND to be more relaxed when the man does have everything under control (again, I know there are exceptions - including my father).
You can respect your husband without submitting to him. The two are not mutually exclusive.
 

Wigi

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According to the people who wrote the bible, women aren't created for themselves or their own purpose, they're only created for men
I don't see where the Bible says that women were created for the needs of men. It's written it's not good for men to be alone.

In fact Jesus said that the man and the woman should become one flesh. I would like to know how you could become one without a form of equality/complementarity.

Now you say women weren't created for their own purpose. It's a bit strange because when I read the Bible, it's written that the posterity of the woman will crush the serpent. I haven't found anything of the sort for men.

As far as I know, maternity is also a purpose on its own.

Maybe your problem is with 'stereotypes'?
 

Wigi

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You can respect your husband without submitting to him. The two are not mutually exclusive.
There is no need to complicate things that are simple.

"Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband."
Ephesians 5:33
 

Wigi

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I’m not the one complicating things, your Bible is.
It's only complicated when you want to twist the scriptures to follow a specific narrative.

Those who wants to mistreat people will twist scriptures to find justification, those who want to please God and love their neighbors as themselves won't try to take advantage of anything and will actually follow Jesus teachings.

"Do to others as you would like them to do to you."
Luke 6:31

You don't want to be treated as a thing? Don't treat people as things.

Do you want to find reasons to elevate yourself ? Be careful:

Jesus said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.
Luke 16:15
 

justjess

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It's only complicate when you want to twist the scriptures to follow a specific narrative.

Those who wants to mistreat people will twist scriptures to find justification, those who want to please God and love their neighbors as themselves won't try to take advantage of anything and will actually follow Jesus teachings.

"Do to others as you would like them to do to you."
Luke 6:31

You don't want to be treated as a thing? Don't treat people as things.

Do you want to find reasons to elevate yourself ? Be careful:

Jesus said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God.
Luke 16:15
When I decided to actually read the Bible I was a practicing catholic who’d never questioned it before. I read it front to back, didn’t skip a word, didn’t read any opinions to influence me. It took me a year. I was horrified. I wished I had never read it. I certainly didn’t start the process of reading it anticipating or wanting that result. I have a cross tattooed on my back for chrissakes ..

And yes, the golden rule. Which is truly all you need to know about god. Yet the Bible itself breaks it a million times. This is the problem.

The problem isn’t with god, it’s with the books and religions that claim to represent him.
 

Wigi

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When I decided to actually read the Bible I was a practicing catholic who’d never questioned it before. I read it front to back, didn’t skip a word, didn’t read any opinions to influence me. It took me a year. I was horrified. I wished I had never read it. I certainly didn’t start the process of reading it anticipating or wanting that result. I have a cross tattooed on my back for chrissakes ..

And yes, the golden rule. Which is truly all you need to know about god. Yet the Bible itself breaks it a million times. This is the problem.

The problem isn’t with god, it’s with the books and religions that claim to represent him.
The reason why the infamous golden rule was broken countless times in the OT, it was because of men's selfish desires.
All this originate from sin. When you're fine with sin, you want to please yourself alone.

For example, romans never saw any problems to conquer lands so they could increase their own well being.

What's interesting when I read opinions of non-religious about the Bible, it's too see how people omit all the times where God was disgusted by Israel's immorality. It's almost like these things doesn't exist just because it don't serve a narrative they want to push.

I've read the entire Bible and my first reaction was 'wow' it's all there but we repeat the same mistakes centuries after centuries.
 
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justjess

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The reason why the infamous golden rule was broken countless times in the OT, it was because of men's selfish desires.
All this originate from sin. When you're fine with sin, you want to please yourself alone.

For example, romans never saw any problems to conquer lands so they could increase their own well being.

What's interesting when I read opinions of non-religious about the Bible, it's too see how people omit all the times where God was disgusted by Israel's immorality. It's almost like these things doesn't exist just because it don't serve a narrative they want to push.

I've read the entire Bible and my first reaction was 'wow' it's all there but we repeat the same mistakes centuries after centuries.
Disgusted by Israel yet commanding them to break the golden rule himself. That is the problem. You can not justify bad actions because someone else’s actions were bad first. Men try, but god should be above that. And I truly believe he is, I just think your Bible is wrong.

We will never ever find a common point of discussion. You can not see things from where I am coming from, and I cannot unsee what I’ve seen myself. The good news is I firmly believe it does not matter in the end. If my salvation hinges on believing verbatim a book written by man then so be it. My brain was not created in a way that allows me to do so, let the chips fall where they may. I personally believe god to be better than that, but if you believe me doomed to hell for disbelieving a book because I believe god to be better than his depiction in it and you are right, then it is what it is.
 

Wigi

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Disgusted by Israel yet commanding them to break the golden rule himself. That is the problem. You can not justify bad actions because someone else’s actions were bad first. Men try, but god should be above that. And I truly believe he is, I just think your Bible is wrong.

We will never ever find a common point of discussion. You can not see things from where I am coming from, and I cannot unsee what I’ve seen myself. The good news is I firmly believe it does not matter in the end. If my salvation hinges on believing verbatim a book written by man then so be it. My brain was not created in a way that allows me to do so, let the chips fall where they may. I personally believe god to be better than that, but if you believe me doomed to hell for disbelieving a book because I believe god to be better than his depiction in it and you are right, then it is what it is.
When?

Let me ask you two question:

Do you think that the golden rule implies that you should accept injustice and refuse to fight when your oppressor refuse peace ?

How do you practice justice without firm measures?

We will never found a common point of Discussion
We could but I simply disagree with your premise that God shouldn't prescribe any form of harm so He could please us at all cost.
 
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We could but I simply disagree with your premise that God shouldn't prescribe any form of harm so He could please us at all cost.
Destruction/harm is not an expression of omnipotence/power, it’s an admission of powerlessness. In other words, an entity who destroys because there was “no other option” is the opposite of omnipotent by very definition.
 

justjess

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When?

Let me ask you two question:

Do you think that the golden rule implies that you should accept injustice and refuse to fight when your oppressor refuse peace ?

How do you practice justice without firm measures?



We could but I simply disagree with your premise that God shouldn't prescribe any form of harm so He could please us at all cost.
Men are vengeful, I don’t see how god withholding harm from his (Israel’s) enemies would actually please man in any way. If anything it would anger them.

But god doing so is not a godly trait, it’s a manly trait. It also breaks the golden rule and breaks the edict that the sins of the father will not belong to his children.
 

Wigi

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Destruction/harm is not an expression of omnipotence/power, it’s an admission of powerlessness. In other words, an entity who destroys because there was “no other option” is the opposite of omnipotent by very definition.
Yet some sickness can't be cured without harm.
When people don't want peace and commit injustices, what will you do? Either you restore Justice or you let injustice.
 
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Wigi

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Men are vengeful, I don’t see how god withholding harm from his (Israel’s) enemies would actually please man in any way. If anything it would anger them.

But god doing so is not a godly trait, it’s a manly trait. It also breaks the golden rule and breaks the edict that the sins of the father will not belong to his children.
Okay but I want to know your opinion :

Do you think that the golden rule implies that you should accept injustice and refuse to fight when your oppressor refuse peace ?

How do you practice justice without firm measures?
 

mecca

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Actually all mainstream definitions for misogyny include "dislike" of or "contempt" for women as the primary qualifiers.
It doesn't matter... I'm talking about sexism, which as a basic idea simply means treating women unequally...treating them wrong. This does not have to be complicated. You're going off topic.

And by the way, if you treat women as if they're sub human, I think it's safe to say that you "dislike" them... and treating women in that way is the exact the definition of contempt.
How are you determining what is universally sexist or what could be felt by the women at the time as oppressive instead of normality to them?
Even if being held as property of one's father or husband felt normal to women in the past (because it's all they ever knew), that doesn't change the fact that considering women to be property is completely sexist. It will never not be sexist to adopt the idea that men are worthier than women. That's what sexism is, any manifestation of the idea of superiority of males and inferiority of females is sexism against women regardless of the time period.

This quote describes some of the ways in which women were treated as inferior with a lesser status according to the bible:

"The social and legal position of an Israelite wife was inferior to the position a wife occupied in the great countries round about... all the texts show that Israelites wanted mainly sons to perpetuate the family line and fortune, and to preserve the ancestral inheritance... A husband could divorce his wife; women on the other hand could not ask for divorce... the wife called her husband Ba'al or master; she also called him adon or lord; she addressed him, in fact, as a slave addressed his master or subject, his king. The Decalogue includes a man's wife among his possessions... all her life she remains a minor. The wife does not inherit from her husband, nor daughters from their father, except when there is no male heir. A vow made by a girl or married woman needs, to be valid, the consent of the father or husband and if this consent is withheld, the vow is null and void. A man had a right to sell his daughter. Women were excluded from the succession."

-Roland de Vaux, archaeologist and priest

These are clear examples of the sexism that they built in to their society and religion. Just because it was seen as acceptable by many people in that culture and time, doesn't mean that it's not sexist. It's clearly placing women into a second class status with greatly diminished autonomy and humanity. Their society was historically deeply patriarchal which naturally translates to women not being afforded the same level of status and power as men. They were physically seen as worth less than men and did not have the same rights to property or even their own body and autonomy. And according to the quote, they treated women much worse than the other countries and cultures in their own time period.
Eve was not the only one to be held responsible for what happened, all parties present were punished.
Yeah... but as I pointed out, in the story of genesis, god cursed all women so that men will "rule over them". This means that god is allowing men to subjugate women. This gives men a convenient "justification" for the way they mistreat women. The fact that other characters were also held responsible is not relevant to this specific idea. I don't believe god to be sexist and I recognize that human men were the people who wrote the bible, so this is an example of sexist men writing sexist ideas into the bible. A just and moral god would not curse all human females for eternity with being forced to undergo sexism, especially not as a punishment for the actions of one person. What makes more sense is that the people who wrote the bible could see that they mistreated women in their society so they incorporated an origin for why they did these things into the bible. And they also wanted an excuse for the way they mistreat women.
Impurity in this context is not intended to imply sinfulness or inferiority; rather, it emphasizes the tremendous importance of holiness within a woman’s body and the power to create a new life through union with her husband.
That's not correct. They considered menstruation and a woman's body after childbirth to be ritually unclean which meant that the woman had to be separated and could not enter into holy places of worship. And the word "unclean" does not hold a positive connotation or meaning in any way. It's not possible for the idea of uncleanliness to be translated into holiness. Holiness is associated with purity which is associated specifically with cleanliness... certainly not uncleanliness. And they associated the blood from menstruation and pregnancy with death and associated death with the fall of humanity... it did not have a positive connotation.
this period is twice as long to account for the purity of both the mother and the daughter. Therefore, the time period is twice as long as when a mother gives birth to a son.
No, the only reason why giving birth to a female baby resulted in a longer span of "uncleanliness" was specifically because females were seen as lesser... female babies caused more uncleanliness. Since female babies rendered the mother more "unclean" than male babies, this required more time for ritual purification before the "uncleanliness" of the female baby was removed. The male baby required less time for purification because it was considered less unclean... i.e. more clean, therefore better.
And even if this held some kind of spiritual significance due to the Fall, how is that sexist?
It's sexist to value female babies less than male babies. Many societies have had this problem in the past and present (due to sexism) it was also obviously a problem in biblical times.
Try this in South East Asian countries where birth rates were plummeting because baby girls were aborted as families wanted sons -that's sexism at play in childbirth.
They're both examples of sexism... but we are not talking about Asia or the modern day, we're specifically talking about ancient societies that followed the bible. They unfortunately also had this problem of devaluing women and female babies in ancient biblical societies.
You're throwing a lot of conjecture into why that time period existed and what people's thought processes were around it.
As you just did.
A wife is to submit to one man (her husband), not to every man.
So? Just because it's not every man, doesn't mean it's the right thing. Husbands are said to have inherent "authority" over wives simply because they're male... this is an example of sexism. The only reason ideas like this have found their way into religion is because they are a reflection of the sexist beliefs of the men who create these religions. They want to have more power over their wives and they want to feel superior, so they proclaim that god has given them more authority and they require that their wives submit to them and follow their every whim or else they'd be disobeying god. This is not moral. Either both submit or neither do, otherwise it's inherently unjust.
Submit is not a bad word. Submission is not a reflection of inferiority or lesser worth.
That's just plain wrong. Submit is defined as "yield to a superior force or authority". This explicitly means that by definition if you are submitting to someone, you are inferior to them and you obviously have less authority. If men are granted more authority and women have less to none, what does that say?... It says that women are less, women cannot be at the same level as men.
The bible has commands for slave-owners as well on how to treat their slaves within the ALREADY-EXISTING slave system, but of course that won't matter to you.
Shouldn't the existence of slavery have mattered to god enough for him to at least ask people not to do it? This is just another example that flawed humans wrote the bible... Of course there are rules for slaves and slave owners in the bible, because the bible was written by people who lived in a society that condoned slavery, therefore the bible also allows for slavery. If a moral god wrote or dictated the bible then I would expect there to be absolutely no condoning or allowing of slavery whatsoever... but there is which shows me that people who probably owned slaves had a hand in writing the bible. They had a vested interest in getting their slaves to submit to them... why not proclaim it as a command from god. This allowed them to use god as a justification for slavery, but in reality god had no hand in it... it was simply people's own horrible practices that they claimed were allowed by their god.
Paul actually does differentiate between when he quotes from divine scripture and when he gives his own opinion or advice about something.
Oh, good for him then... it's still in the bible and people still follow it as the divinely inspired word of god. Also as I said, the rest of the bible is written in the same way that Paul's writings are... people wrote in their own ideas and traditions. Men wrote the entirety of scripture... sure they claimed to be divinely inspired but that's literally an unverifiable claim and if you read some of the things they wrote, there is a lot of immoral stuff that's promoted such as the things we've already discussed. If the holy books were truly and completely divine and perfect, then there would be no moral corruption... but unfortunately there does seem to be some. And this is due to the fact that the books were written by humans and humans can be immoral.
The modern versions we have are corrupted.
Right... so why are you defending a corruption? lmao Specifically the corrupt parts too.
They do not. It's lazy to just assume that because evil and flawed people manipulated scripture to fit their own agendas, that scripture itself must be evil and that these men were truthful and genuine in their use of it.
I never said scripture was evil... my entire point this whole time since I first commented was that the people who wrote the bible were the ones who were flawed and they incorporated their majorly flawed beliefs into their religions and their ideas of god. I think you're agreeing with me here now.
 
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Yet some sickness can't be cured without harm.
Says who? Allopathy? I don’t agree. Actual healing (as opposed to just suppressing symptoms) never requires harm, on the contrary it requires the addressing and removal of repressed trauma for the proper mental nutrition, and also secondarily quality eating habits for proper dietary nutrition.
When people don't want to be healed, what will you do? Either you restore Justice or you let injustice.
Since when does omnipotence have inherent limitations? I wasn’t aware. ;)
 

Wigi

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Says who? Allopathy? I don’t agree. Actual healing (as opposed to just suppressing symptoms) never requires harm, on the contrary it requires the addressing and removal of repressed trauma for the proper mental nutrition, and also secondarily quality eating habits for proper dietary nutrition.
Yes maybe some cancers can be treated without harm and others actually cause a lot of pain.

Since when does omnipotence have inherent limitations? I wasn’t aware. ;)
About Justice, I don't really know what you want to say with omnipotence here. For me, either you restore justice or you let injustice but maybe a third option like forgiveness restore Justice by itself for you.
 
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“No human mind can accept the dogma of divine despotism and the doctrine of eternal justice at the same time; they contradict each other, and it takes two brains to hold them. The cardinal is right: freethought does logically lead to atheism, if by atheism he means the denial of supreme authority.”
Voltairine de Cleyre
 
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