Loren:
Metacrock, could you please tell us the biggest good thing about our culture that you think that Christianity cannot be credited with.
Meta:
The basic principles that you are not getting, 2 fold:Loren:
(1) Christians are human, some times they do bad things, sometimes they do good things. You can always find stupid narrow minded one's that feel bigotry and oppression, but you can also always find good one's who sacrifice themselves for the struggle of human liberation. But you only want to look at the bad ones. you refuse to give an credence ot the good as though they don't exist.
(2) there is no reason why the former group should define Christianity any more than the latter.
I could just as easily as you and Rex to name one thing that you don't Christianity has caused that is bad and evil and negative.
to answer your question. pornography. I don't think you can blame Christianity for pornography. that and diet cola.
As to feminism, most Christian clergy have been blatantly misogynist for the last 2000 years.Meta
Consider how feminist John Knox was when he denounced the "monstrous regiment of women". Also consider the feminism of all the pastors who denounced women getting the vote in the 19th cy. Like Horace Bushnell, who wrote of "Women's Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature"
there is an unbroken line all the way to Paul of women having authority in the church, serving God striking on their own and even Christian women fighting for woman's rights. The first woman suffrage group in America was Methodist women.
Problem with that topic s half the world is men. So men have male egos. males egos are sensitive and easily bruised by women. That is not a Christian problem it's a male problem. But the tradition of egalitarianism in the chruch has always been around.
see my chart on Doxa showing women in positions of power and responsibility from the Ministry of Jesus to 6th century. There were a lot of them.
Loren:
19th cy. feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton had noted: "In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the Bible. It was hurled at us on every side."
Meta:
It was also used to support woman's movement. There was even a pro woman's rights translation made in the 19th century, and women like Katherine Bushnell who went to Northwestern and learned Greek and Hebrew and wrote on the egalitarian translations have been celebrated in the recent decades and even though she died in 1942 she had a major impact on the chruch in just the last 2 decades.That's in the original essay. Look at how many women in that essay are mentioned as taking a major role in the Nicaragua revolution and hey were all Christians.
Bible:
see my essay on female teachers in the Bible. Female teachers in the Bible are a big deal because they establish the precedent that women can have authority. See all of my women pages on Doxa where I dispell the myths of sexism such as the idea that the Bible forbids women to speak or have authority in the chruch. There are two different essay on women teaching, the other one is linked here.
Loren
She was right. The Bible certainly does not command "thou shalt burn thy bras". Look at the Catholic Church's argument at why women cannot be priests -- because priests must be like Jesus Christ, who was male.Meta:
that's the result of male ego. It's not what the Bible says it's how men have translated it.
Loren
Feminism is a mostly secular movement -- nonreligious without excluding religion.
Meta
this is what I complaint about in you. You are a bright person you stick with a few little bigoted myths that you have heard you don't research and you don't dig to find the truth. if you new the history of the woman's movement you would know how wrong that is.
Loren
Even the civil-rights movement was largely secular.
Meta:
ahahahah who the hell do you think Martin Luther king was? how old were you when they marched on Selma? Were you even alive? (1963)? I was! I remember it.
the major oranization was THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE. WHY DID THEY CALL IT "CHRISTIAN" DO YOU THINK?
the major leader THE REVEREND mARTIN LUTHER KING, WHYD ID THEY CALL HIM REVEREND?????
learn some history man you don't know anything!
I covered all of this in the essay you are commenting on.you didn't read it did you?
Loren
As Susan Jacoby notes in "Freethinkers", there were a lot of secular Jews from big cities who participated, and some black-church elders considered them too irreligious and disrespectful.
Meta
she's just a bourgeoisie rich person trying to take credit for other people's blood, sweat and tears. next she will be claiming that it was really Middle class Jews who suffered form Jim Crow laws.
if the civil rights movement was not black wha the hell was it? it was black Chrisitans. 90% Christian, over 90% black. Something like four Jews died, hundreds of blacks died. like 20 Jews went to jail, thousands of blacks whent to jail.
learn history!
Learn about Katherine Bushnell, a Christian Missionary who saved women from forced prostitution in China and in India, and unbound woman's feet in China. She also wen tto Northerwestern and learned the Biblical languages and disproved the ancient mistranslations that fuel sexist interpretation. She recorded her lessons in the book God's Word to Women. A modern Website pushes her view and is very successful (ran by women in Dallas). A famous Welch devotional writter and Biblical expositor Jesse Penn-Lewis's attempt to popularize Bushnell's God's Word to Women. Penn-Lewis adds her own original insights which are well worth reading. Magnacharta of Women.
There are organizations working to distill the message of egalitarianism in Christianity, such as Council on Biblical Equality. There are several others. see my women pages on Doxa.
8 comments:
John Wesley in the 1700's and Charles Finney in the 1800's were leaders of two of the largest Christian movements in history, the First and Second Great Awakenings. Wesley was very much for the freedom of women to preach and teach publicly-- a number of women became very famous preachers and attracted huge crowds-- larger than the crowds attracted by many of the male preachers. Phoebe Palmer was one of them; there is plenty about her on the Internet.
Charles Finney was a champion of the rights of women and would not permit anyone to join his team unless they signed document endorsing women's suffrage.
William and Catherine Booth were a husand-wife team who founded the Salvation Army. They considered one another equal partners and Catherine wrote a series of papers defending women's rights.
The Abolitionist movement against slavery was also foundationally Christian in outlook and was comoprised largely of Christians.
The point is that religion is a powerful force in society. It can be either a powerful force for good or a powerful force for evil.
But did the churches that John Wesley and Charles Finney have a significant fraction of female pastors? Not that I'm aware of.
Mainline Protestant churches only started getting female pastors in significant numbers in the 1970's or so - decades after those great heroes.
But did the churches that John Wesley and Charles Finney have a significant fraction of female pastors? Not that I'm aware of.
Mainline Protestant churches only started getting female pastors in significant numbers in the 1970's or so - decades after those great heroes.
yea they did. Methodists have had women pastors all along. the Phoebe Palmer who started the first woman's suffrage group in American and the first abolition group (outside of Quakers) was a Methodist pastor in woman's association.
Not sure about Finney but he wasn't mainstream. He also had Methodists helping him. He was rabidly anti-slavery. He was also pro revolution. meaning he supported revolutions where they happened.
Finny didn't start a denomination although the Church of the Nazerines grew out of his revival.
"Christians are human, some times they do bad things, sometimes they do good things."
And consequently the good or bad things they do should properly be attributed to their humanity, not to gods.
"You can always find stupid narrow minded one's that feel bigotry and oppression, but you can also always find good one's who sacrifice themselves for the struggle of human liberation. "
Yep; for every Martin Luther King Jr. there's a Father Poole out there.
Atheists tend to focus on the Father Poole's because Christians tend to try and sweep them under the carpet...
Loren said:
"Mainline Protestant churches only started getting female pastors in significant numbers in the 1970's or so."
With all respect, that is entirely beside the point. The point is that John Wesley and Charles Finney, William and Catherine Booth, and Christian Abolitionists fought against the status quo in the name of Christianity, seeking increased rights and freedoms for marginalized people. The fact that the changes they endorsed were slow in coming has nothing to do with it. There were, as there always have been, all kinds of beliefs used to support the status quo-- including, btw, those of Charles Darwin, who believed that women were evolutionarily inferior compared to men. Some people used religion as a tool to keep slaves and women down. For others it was a driving force for justice and equality. But it is inaccurate to paint a picture of the Christian religion as inherently misogynistic and racist.
Metacrock, what you consider Christianity must be an awfully wimpy religion if it cannot overcome nearly 2000 years of "fragile male egos".
It's curious that it's only in the last few decades that female pastors have been common. Yes, common instead of isolated examples. It seems just so *convenient* that defenders of female pastors have discovered that the Bible 100% agrees with them.
Susan B. Anthony had noted
The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
Metacrock, what you consider Christianity must be an awfully wimpy religion if it cannot overcome nearly 2000 years of "fragile male egos".
Meta:
Loren that's a rather suprizing statment for a woman. you must be under 30. Anyone woman over 30 would know, as many have told me, how overwhelmingly in charge the male ego has been since way back when Zenjanthropus first started usign rocks to break open mollusks.
So absurdly absurd to pretend that it would be an easy matter to just throw off the male ego while living a middle eastern society, a slave owning society where women had no rights and no precedent for rights.
You are a puzzlement. you are obviously well read and I don't think you could be stupid but some of the ways you see things are just totally unlearned and unsightly and well, just gullible. You speak like you have never given five minutes of serious thought to the concept of social evolution. Social evolution is hard, things like gender and social status are slow in changing, you might not know that if you grew up since 1990, it took thousands of year to get where we are are.
It's curious that it's only in the last few decades that female pastors have been common. Yes, common instead of isolated examples. It seems just so *convenient* that defenders of female pastors have discovered that the Bible 100% agrees with them.
There are been people with egalitarian views all along. we can find them in chruch history going all the way back. They were never very well received or successful becuase it took a long time for women to make progress anywhere. the things you are arguing are so naive it's obviousness you didn't grow up in the eara when feminism was just getting started.
what you are saying is like if say "O stupid feminsits they think t's a big deal that they had to struggle, why didn't the women a long time just ell the men they were unhappy and wanted to do things differently?"
one of the most puzzling things about what you say is that it's odd that you can't see the relationship between the problem of the chruch and all ofsociety adn humanity as a whole. How obvious could ut be when men dominated everything and all women were relegated to the women, barefoot and pregnant and all that--the chruch was turned into a social institution you know. when it stopped being a radical sect of a fringe group that was under persecution it started being an appendence of society as a whole.
Susan B. Anthony had noted
The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
why would you think egalitarianism coincidences with my desires? If I had not had exposure to strong women of God who set me straight about the lot of women I would just be a regular Texas redneck in my attitudes toward women. I would probably write off feminists as all embittered lesbians who hate men and not think about it.
The egalitarian thing didn't coincide with my desires it changed my desires by educating me and exposing me to justice.
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