Skip to main content

Men, Women, Sex, Religion

By Carl S. ~

As a follow-up to "Why Male?" of 2/21/15... From the "Anthology of American Humor," 1949, printed by the Magazine Digest Publishing Company, comes this gem:

A father trying to read was constantly interrupted by his small son. Finally he tore out of the magazine he was reading a page on which was a map of the world. He then took a pair of scissors and cut the map up into a jigsaw puzzle. "Now," said he, "when you get this all put together, I will give you a dime." Presently, the son brought the map to the father. "It was easy" said the son. "On the other side of the page, there was a picture of a man and a woman, and when you get the men and women right, the world is right."

Sixty-six years later, I am about to take that boy's observation much farther than he intended. The world is still suffering upheavals because the relationships between men and women still aren't "right" wherever religion dominates.

Send one donation to any of the world's charities to alleviate or end hunger and severe social inequality and you will receive requests from others. And they all tell the same stories: Mostly they are about women with four, six, or more children, without birth control, unable to feed their children. Then ask yourself: Where the hell are their husbands/lovers? Have they moved on, promiscuously spreading their seed, in imitation of the wild beasts about them? Have they, according to eyewitness reports, spent their earnings on drinking and gambling, instead of in supporting their families? Obviously their fundamentally religious cultures and traditions don't give a damn about making things right between men and women, for women. In fact, they don't see what's wrong about keeping the status quo going.

Predominantly, those countries in which things are mind-boggling not "right" are fundamentalist Christian and Islamic. Those cultures, impregnated by the spreading virus of religions, are infamous for denying women's human rights. At their heart are theologies and dogmas which regard women as inferior to men and under male control.

Perversely, while Christianity and Islam both condemn the spilling of sperm, the aborting of fetuses, contraception, and adultery, their scriptures praise the spilling of blood and stockpiling of corpses, and the rapes and enslavement of girls and women in" holy" wars.

But it is in the interpersonal relationships between men and women where the most damage is inflicted, in the lack of respect and support for women's needs, their feelings, their rights to opportunities men take for granted for themselves. And then there's this sick nonsense: How would men like it if they had to live their lives outdoors in the heat all day long looking through a slit, deprived of sunlight's vitamin D? Women are not only denied the liberty of displaying their beautiful hair (a pleasure for both sexes), they don't even have the aggravation of a "bad hair day." What about, "Do unto others?" Fascinating, isn't it that no one brings these things up for discussion in the Islamic world?

In every single country where women are truly respected and supported, men are better off, children are better off, and society prospers. As has been verified in third world societies, give a mother financial support and the family is sustained.( Too often, giving financial aid to the men doesn’t work.)

What the hell is wrong with Islam anyhow in keeping the sexes apart up until marriage takes place? What is virtuous about boys and girls being raised separately, not sharing their different viewpoints, feelings, experiences, learning to respect each other, and getting to know one another before they become intimate?

Also, it's really wrong that they don't teach each man how to please a woman. That knowledge is essential, for both their sakes. No wonder things aren't "right" in the Islamic world, or anywhere else where these religion-derived denials reign. (By comparison, Hindus see sexual relationships as participating in the divine. Hindus like their women.)

These cultural, religion-driven traditions need to be overthrown, considering the sexual misunderstandings alone that they cause. No wonder the sexually repressed and frustrated men and women are joining fundamentalist Islam militancy. They are willingly, physically, and psychologically, mutilating themselves. They are going so far as to kill themselves and others. Are these their only religiously-sanctioned options to repressed sexuality - the promised rewards of a world paradise, culminating in the orgiastic destruction known as the "End Times?"

Perversely, while Christianity and Islam both condemn the spilling of sperm, the aborting of fetuses, contraception, and adultery, their scriptures praise the spilling of blood and stockpiling of corpses, and the rapes and enslavement of girls and women in" holy" wars.Human beings need to have and give love, affection, and respect. Gods and holy words are no substitutes. They do not touch nor caress, nor offer comfort, do not even give looks of understanding and empathy. Gods are abstractions. The gods do not respect.

How can there be any lasting peace on Earth without mutual respect between men and women and teaching it to their children, while religions inhibit them? We, who are the non-religious, must speak out and act for women. No Christian openly denounces the rigid sexuality-ignorant and misogynist St. Paul or his exhortation to women: be subjugated to men. No cleric dares to denounce God/Allah for hating women in simply being women. (These dogmas are in the cellular structures of their religious genes.) No believers will openly reject all the hateful words spoken against the female sex in their "divinely inspired, eternally true, and unquestionable sacred" texts.

Religions, which dominate so much of the world at present, have gotten something "wrong" from their very beginnings: the emphasis they place on being "right with God/gods” makes faith thicker than blood. That's perverted. What's important is that things must be right between men and women, and that this is passed on to their children by word and example. Will this make the world right? Well...it works.

The world needs this child's observed "rightness" for men and women, if the world is ever to be right. It should defeat the religious fundamentalist future that's nothing more than a repetition of the fundamentalist past. Any success by fundamentalist religion will only bring more repression of women than ever.

Does reading this make you want to support women’s and girl’s rights, including their education and empowerment? If so, I'm happy that you understand. And maybe my wife wouldn’t need to be so long-suffering with my typing if she knew about this.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two