Madeleine Bunting please note
Ha – eat your heart out, Maddy – here’s someone who understands what we mean by asking if God hates women. She understands it perfectly, and has been there.
An article from the UK’s Guardian, God is merciful, but only if you’re a man, reminded me of the subservient role women played in the fundamentalist Christian churches I came to know as a believer…[T]he church would make me shed bitter tears for my inability to be sweet, submissive, and sheeplike. Religious circles just aren’t friendly to a woman who thinks herself an equal. The Guardian’s article brought back the awful church memories. In those days and during my earlier de-conversion phase, I was just angry and couldn’t understand why fellow Christian women would often tell me, “You shouldn’t say that,” or “You shouldn’t do that.”…Is it any wonder that at some point during my Christian life I started to feel as if God hated me?
Told you so, Madders.
Read the whole thing, and the comments; it’s stirring stuff. Sing it, Lorena!
As I think I mentioned before, I am just rereading a popular history of the papacy (by Peter de Rosa, former priest of the Roman Catholic Church, now laicised and married). As de Rosa makes very clear, the hatred of God for women is so evident in Chritian understanding that it is hard to thin that women still belong.
The Christian ideal is the virgin mother. Every other woman is a derogation from that perfection. Mary conceived without sin because she herself was conceived without sin, and besides, she didn’t have sex. The ideal woman conceives without pleasure, and depending on the pleasure of the act of sex, the womnan is either less or even less worthy, first for submitting to the beastly advances of a man, and second, for taking pleasure in the act. The man, of course, is in some sense unredeeemable, since, in order to perforn the sex act at all, he must be aroused with concupiscent lust. Augustine spends much more time on woman’s lustfulness, such was his Manicheaean horror of women. It’s such biazrre idea and could only have been thought by depraved men, trying, and almost always failing, to live lives of sexual continence. Men on the other hand, must fail, and their failure is due to women. So they are vilified for being what they are. Women need to be more than sweet, submissive and sheeplike. They must actually be cold and immoveable. Marriage is her only vocation, but marriage itself is sinful, and the very act of sex itself, if taken pleasure in, turns the marriage bed into brothel. And still people listen to the pope. And people call your book stident!
Of course, God doesn’t hate women. Only women could filfl his purposes. But, God hates everything about them, their femalness, even though it is supposed, God created them that way. It’s the confident unashamed innocence of this theology that gets me every time. If, in response, one was not a little strident and shrill, there would something peculiarly inhuman about it. Madder’s point is a compliment. But how does she manage to believe? It can’t be just a matter of comfort on a dark night.
“even though it is supposed, God created them that way.”
Well that’s one of the chief reasons for agreeing with Kingsley Amis, of course (‘It’s more that I hate him.’). God created us all this way; some of us, using our reasoning faculties as best we can, do not believe God exists; for this God would burn us in hell forever. It’s disgusting.
Yup. Catholicism in particular is screwed up about female sexuality. I think I mentioned on CiF one of my great-aunts on the Catholic side of the family. She was widowed in WW1, leaving her with a daughter. She then had a brief relationship with her deceased husband’s brother (who looked very like him). Of course, it was then illegal for them to marry. She got pregnant, he went to Australia. Her illegitimate daughter (who was a surrogate big sister to my mother) died after an accident when she was 11 or 12. Such was the religious brainwashing to which her mother had been subjected, she sincerely believed her daughter’s death was God’s way of punishing her for her sin of fornication and having the child out of wedlock. Sick, isn’t it?