Tuesday, May 24, 2011

"What is religion’s role in gender discrimination?"

"The truth is that the Abrahamic religions fear women and therefore go to extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control them, constrain them, and repress them in every way. Show me a non-religious society that feels so threatened by the thought of female sexuality that it will slice off the clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure. Show me a non-religious society that feels the need to cloak women from head to toe and force them to experience the outside world through a slit of a few square inches. All three Abrahamic religions share the myth of Adam and Eve, the myth that it was through woman that evil was let loose in the world. They share the heritage of Leviticus, which declared a menstruating woman unclean, to be set aside, untouched, a revulsion that remains even today among some orthodox Jews, who will refuse to shake a woman’s hand for fear she may be menstruating. What kind of lunacy is this? It is the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized by the reactionary forces of religion."

UPDATE: For some reason, people who try to post a comment on this post are getting their comments deleted. If you tried to post a comment here, I assure you I didn't delete your comment. My dad, Richard Lawrence Cohen, emails this comment since he wasn't able to post it (and I wasn't able to post it in the comments section either):

Female genital mutilation is a horrible crime, but it's an ancient cultural practice, not a modern religious one. A papyrus from 163 BC, as well as evidence on mummies, indicate that it was begun in pharaonic Egypt, not in "Abrahamic" society. Today, while it's mostly done in Islamic parts of Africa, it's been condemned by high religious authorities including the Supreme Council of Islamic Research and the Coptic (i.e. Egyptian Christian) Pope. It's practiced by many sub-Saharan African peoples, notably including the Dogon, who are animistic, and the Bambara, who though predominantly Muslim still strongly maintain aspects of their powerful pre-Christian-era Mandé culture. In the colonial era, the Kikuyu of Kenya reinvigorated their practice of clitoridectomy as a protest against Christian missionary indoctrination and in favor of their traditional beliefs; indeed the Mau Mau rallied around the practice during the independence movement of the 1950s.

However, as we know, Western civilization is responsible for all the world's problems. Especially "Abrahamic" civilization.
Well, that blog post is extremely critical of Islam and burqas, which aren't exactly "Western civilization."

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