Many traditionalist clergy
The Anglican Bishop of Fulham is going to switch over to Catholicism because he prefers the Catholic church’s way of dealing with pesky women, which of course is to tell them to shut up and do what they’re told.
The Pope created a special enclave in the Roman Catholic Church for Anglicans unhappy with their church’s decision to let women become bishops.
Too bad all men can’t find enclaves like that, isn’t it. If only. If only there were special enclaves in universities for male academics unhappy with the prospect of seeing women become professors. If only there were special enclaves in law for male lawyers who don’t want to have to put up with women judges or prosecutors; if only there were special enclaves in medicine for male doctors who don’t want to have any female colleagues. If only the whole god damn world were full of special enclaves every few feet for men who are so benighted and greedy and conceited that they can’t get over thinking that women are inferior.
[Broadhurst] is currently the “flying bishop” charged with looking after traditionalist parishes opposed to women priests and bishops in the dioceses of London, Southwark and Rochester.
The Catholic Group said it was determined to stay in the Church of England and fight for a better deal for Anglicans who did not want to serve under women bishops.
These poor damaged people need looking after, they need a better deal, because they have been so bruised and battered and harmed by the mere suggestion of female equality even in church.
…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a woman bishop, but might hesitate in the face of a decision likely to cause them considerable personal hardship.
The level of protection? They’re unhappy with the level of protection? Men need protection from having a woman boss?
What level of protection do I get? If protection is being offered, I want protection from hearing from men who think women are so stupid and weak and incompetent that it’s dangerous to have to work under them. I want protection from this stupid, vicious, taken for granted misogyny.
Imagine re-writing that passage.
…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a black bishop.
…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under an Indian bishop.
…many traditionalist clergy are unhappy with the level of protection so far offered to them from serving under a Mexican bishop.
The disgustingness and social unacceptability is instantly obvious – but when it comes to women – oh that’s a whole different thing. Of course women can’t be treated as equals; don’t be silly.
Don’t worry: there may not be special enclaves left in the academy, but business has plenty.I have to say, the Anglicans attitude to women (and gay men) does confuse me greatly. They only seem to have a problem with women and gays when they become bishops – when they are just vicars, that’s fine apparently. But surely, if this is some kind of principled – or at least religious – objection, it would be to there being women or gays in the clergy at all, not to how far up they get in the clerical hierarchy. I mean, are there Anglicans who don’t have a problem with women being bishops, but would object if they became archbishops? I just don’t follow the reasoning – or the lack thereof, more like.Oh well, I’m an atheist. It’s sad to see misogyny and homophobia from the clergy, but it is kind of fun to watch them tear the church to shreds in the process. They may manage to do more to rid Britain of its established church in the next decade than secularist campaigners have managed for a very long time.
What a bizarre choice of words, “level of protection.” I wonder if the levels are color coded. . . E.g. Level of protection from The Virgin Mary? Green, totally safe. Level of protection from bloggers with big vocabularies, Fire Engine Red, totally high risk.
On the other hand, “flying bishop” made me fall out laughing. I think of other flying things and their consequences, seagulls and their drops of white poop and their screeching, big jets with their large blocks of frozen iced urine falling from the sky. . .
Of course they need protection from women. How else can they focus their undiluted love towards little boys? If the Anglican Church cannot stand up for horny buggers, they must turn to Ratzinger’s umbrage.
Its sad, really. The whole of the UK can be run by a woman PM, like Thatcher, or, more to the point, the Church of England can have as its head the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. Frankly, if Elizabeth were to go out and put some support behind the women bishops, this whole thing might just evaporate once the Anglicans realized what a ridiculous issue this was. Lots of other protestant denominations have women bishops to no ill effect. I suspect its just that the bishops have a boy’s club right now, and are seriously loath to give it up, even though there is no real justification for keeping it that way. Let the converting bishops go to the RCC, I wonder how many of there congregation will follow them, and how many will just quit church all together.
I was so disgusted by this I e-mailed the BBC editors. Much good it’ll do:
What an amazingly bewidlering world we live in! Of course, there has been, for a long time, a part of the Anglican Church which has been very catholic in understanding and orientation. Indeed, Anglo-catholics preserved the Latin Mass during the period when it was against Vatican rules. It is all tied up with traditionalism, following the links in the chain, in principle, back to the apostles.
Revelation is very insecure, and the only way to pretend (at least) to secure it, is to have an unified voice which reaches right back to the beginning. Of course, it can’t be done, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Yet it seems clear that, at the beginning, women played a much more important role in the church than they did after the first three or four centuries. Records from the first two centuries are very unreliable, and there is no reason to think that women did not play an important role in the early church, especially since baptism was usually of adults who were first unclothed, immersed in water, and then reclothed in white raiment. It is almost certain that women did this for women, and if they did this, then it would be surprising if they did not play other roles within the liturgy.
Eventually, however, with the canons of the ecumenical councils, women were second listed, and, in the end, were bound by so many restrictions that it would have been difficult for a woman to appear in church for a significant part of the year. Of course, eventually, too, priests and other religious were not allowed to marry, which removed women even further from the playing a central role in church affairs. An interesting side story here is the time when priests were required to put away their wives, and, when they didn’t, priest’s wives were enslaved and sold! The church has a pretty chequered record when it comes to relations with women. Too bad Julian didn’t take a look at this sort of thing before he unfriended atheists and befriended believers.
This case is quite bizarre. Bishop Broadhurst, apparently said in his speech to Forward in Faith that
What nonsense, when he is a “flying bishop” whose task it is to “minister” to those who do not want to serve under a woman. The truth is that the very thought of a woman in orders is repugnant to them. It makes some of them physically ill, their sense of disgust is so intense.
But this is the point that I needs to be made. Every church — indeed, every religion — has people like this, and every church and religion expresses itself in little or big ways that are immoral. To be a member of a church or religious association is at least tacitly to endorse these immoralities. Certainly, to fail to register one’s disagreement implies acceptance of the positions these associations officially take as a matter of faith. If this is the way Broadhurst and his gang feel about women’s participation in the church, probably better for them to hie themselves off to Rome, pack themselves all into one identifiable group of narrow-minded intolerants, and then the whole lot can be publicly condemned as incorrigibly antediluvian.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by athinkingman, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Many traditionalist clergy http://dlvr.it/7BmY9 […]
Cooties – it brings back memories of primary school again….
Hey man, this is the organization that is seriously talking about what “level of protection” child molesting priests should be afforded from criminal prosecution. This is one of their lesser crimes.
Although… in Africa, they mostly oppose protection, don’t they? Hmmm….
Certain other archbishops in the wider Anglican communion do in fact have a serious problem with this – their attitude to the possibility of potentially having to attend the same meetings as US Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is somewhere between ludicrous and despicable. (Not that they approve of women bishops, but they can apparently ignore subordinates much more effectively than equals.)
You won’t find much mention of this sort of thing online, but it does get reported in the church media (I occasionally glance at the print editions of the Church Times and the Church of England Newspaper, to which my parents subscribe – the online editions of both are behind paywalls for the most part). One example can be found here:
Ophelia writes:
If only the whole god damn world were full of special enclaves every few feet for men who are so benighted and greedy and conceited that they can’t get over thinking that women are inferior.
The problem is not that women are inferior to men but that there is arguably less variance in female than in male intelligence — i.e. more retarded males (IQ under 65), more male geniuses (IQ over 150). Hence more male Nobelists, chess grand masters, great mathematicians, etc. Add male drive and motivation as a result of sexual selection and the result is a society run by alpha males — i.e. approx. all 4000 societies for which a historical or anthropological record exists. Darwin 101.
As regards bishops, no doubt they don’t attract geniuses anyhow. But condamning churches for following the argument wherever it goes doesn’t make much sense. If the premises run: ‘God says that only males shall be bishops’ and ‘Sharon is not a male’, then the conclusion ‘Sharon may not be a bishop’ is at least logically consistent. You can’t have it both ways — if a church were both to accept the first premise and conclude that Sharon may indeed become a bishop, it would be BOTH empirically incorrect AND incapable of logical argument. Many Anglicans seem to fall into that category.
So it’s not so surprising that some of them seek refuge in the Roman Catholic Church, which at least can’t be accused of being undogmatic on the women issue:
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law.” (1 Cor 14, 34.35).
QED, no RC women priests, not to mention bishops.
Or as the Evangelicals like to quip “Don’t blame me — it was God’s idea, not mine”.
There’s strong opposition among conservative Christians for liberalization of any kind, because there lies secularization. Recall Al Mohler’s admonition that evangelical Christians should commit themselves to young earth creationism, even though, as he himself acknowledges, it makes no goddamned sense. Similarly, since scripture makes plain that God hates women, so must we. It’s an odd kind of desperation.
Here’s Mohler expressing regret for the folly of his youthful support for women in ministry. The first comment is great.
This is so alien to me, because I want the exact opposite. I want all my co-workers to be female. I want my bosses to be female. I want to be the only male around. And I don’t mean anything untoward or kinky about that. I prefer working with women. I can communicate better with them. They are generally more team-oriented and less ego-oriented than men. The same applies doubly to female bosses, who are generally less stubborn and less authoritative, focusing more on the problems at hand rather than at getting ahead themselves. Sadly, that ideal attribute of a boss probably contributes to women not advancing up the corporate ladder as much as they deserve.
And, I just like women. I prefer to spend time with a female face and a female voice. I am happier with women around. Catholic clergy must be a sad category of people; perhaps they don’t even know what they’re missing.
An afterthought:
Perhaps it’s not so much that men dislike having women in charge as that women dislike having women in charge. After all, Christian churches seem to attract more women than men. So if there was a demand for women clergy, a church catering thereto would probably have arisen in the religious marketplace. But perhaps devout women just prefer the sight of a male on the altar and in the pulpit and ‘running the show’. Female clerics just don’t ‘turn them on’. At any rate, it would be interesting to determine the male to female ratio of renegades driven by dissatisfaction with perceived female infiltration of the Anglican church.
My guess, based on fairly long experience, is that Anglicans who oppose women in ministry are largely male. Conferences which attract traditional Anglicans are largely male in composition. The reasons given are various, usually scriptural and theological.
The idea of the masculinity of God tends to be inherent in Christian professions of faith. The priest stands as the representative of Christ in the Eucharist, and it has been held that only a man can stand in persona Christi. (Just ask Ann Widdecombe about that.) But women were also excluded for biblical reasons, since they were considered, for a long part of Christian history, as unclean during certain periods (pun intended), as well as after childbirth. Many a woman was forced to watch her child being baptised from outside the church door, becuase she had not yet gone through the ritual of purification, which in the English Church came to be called the Churching of Women.
At the time when this was being debated in a rather lively fashion in the Church of England there were screaming headlines in some of the “quality” newspapers proclaiming the horror of “SEX AT THE ALTAR”. As in Muslim culture, women in Christian culture were often accused of being the cause of men’s arousal and temptation to sin. A wonderful complaint from a monk during the medieval period blames a housewife for deliberately trying lead holy men astray by hanging her underthings on the line for everyone to see.
Of course, those who object to women in ministry will harp on about the Fatherhood of God, and the Sonship of Jesus, and the canons of the undoubted ecumenical councils (which consist, I believe, in the first seven: Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constaninople II (553), Constantinople III (680-1), and Nicaea II (787). The problem of the secure foundation for the revelation of God in Jesus is bound up in these considerations, and they are considered life and death matters by those who take them seriously. Don’t forget that Cardinal Newman, who was just beatified, became a Roman Catholic because he did not feel that his salvation was secure in the English Church, and these will be the precise concerns that many of those who continue to oppose women’s ordination will have.
This is why the kind John Haught nonsense that Ophelia picks up in the next thread is so comical. Christianity was about salvation, not about feelings of
That mystery, supposing there is one, was bound up closely with the means of grace, in patricular, the sacraments, through which one achieved sacramental unity with Christ in his sacrifice, and thereby was made one of the company of heaven. John Haught’s romantic gobledygook, which bears a close resemblance to Wordworth’s nature mysticism, is really, from the Christian point of view, irrelevant, and only became popular when it seemed that the Christian evidences for things like resurrection, and other supposedly salfivic events, was no longer taken as unquestionable cultural data.
It was at the time of the Reformation and counter Reformation that religious experience began to be taken seriously, and arguments began to be mounted for the veridicality of religious experience. Haught is still trying to trade on this tradition. It’s not very successful, because there is no clear way of distinguishing between imagined and real religious experiences (supposing there is something like the latter). As Don Cupitt points out in his book Only Human, if an experience is remarkable enough to be interesting as a religious experience, then it immediately calls for some type of reductive explanation — as happened, for example, in the case of near death experiences, which are now thought to the product of a surge of electrical current in the dying brain. Since we now have ways of resuscitating people like this, more and more people are reporting having these NDEs, but they are rightly so called, since they did not, in the event, die, and were called back just in the nick of time. All religious experiences probably fit into some reductive category of this sort, so it is hard to see how religious experience can be used to verify the objects of that experience, no matter how deep they go, or how mysterious they are. The stranger they are, the less likely they are to be helpful in making legitimate cognitive claims.
Galations 3:28:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians in one of the authentically pauline epistles and since paul was the founder/creator of christianity his word should be good. There is then no scriptural justification for excluding women from the priesthood at any level including ABC or pope (just another bishop after all). Other “pauline” epistles, purporting to put women in an inferior place are pseudepigraphic (a scholarly word for “fake”).
BTW: I have quoted above the KJV, which as any fule kno is the completely accurate, divinely inspired word of doG – all others are flawed imitations and not to be relied upon, lest one goes to hell!
it never ceases to amaze me that women are still religious (atleast in the western countries) inspite of hearing nonsense from their bishops and popes.
@Carolus I actually rather doubt that the percentage of geniuses is a big factor in men tending to dominate societies. For one, there have been some arguments that people who tend to score moderately high on IQ tests generally achieve higher social status than the “geniuses”. For another, many societies are organized on such a local level that not very many unusually intelligent people are going to have the chance to play a role in its development. Both would mitigate differences in variance in talent. Not to mention that variance in IQ (and the utility of the IQ measure generally) is generally studied in developed countries, where there are lower incidences of disease and malnutrition, and literacy rates are high. And there are so many other factors that could play in.
My bet would be that traditional male status is an artifact descended from the interplay of polygamy, female child-rearing, and tribal warfare, which would make the relevant biological factors physical strength, level of aggression, pregnancy, and the attendant wide difference in variance of child numbers between men and women. But don’t quote me as saying I have any answers (I’m just a <a href=”http://xkcd.com/793/”>physicist</a>).
I agree with you on the rest of that post, but then disagree with you again about who does or doesn’t want women clergy. Whenever I see arguments about this, it’s almost always between male critics and male clergy, and occasionally between female critics and male clergy. I think that the male clergy are more just being unresponsive to popular opinion (because, as you note, strict adherence to the Bible demands sexism), rather than that their flocks are pushing them really hard to keep women out.
As for why women are more likely to be in church? I’m thinking that stronger social pressures to conform and a lower chance of entering higher education (at least among older generations) prevent them from leaving in the same proportions as men. Women are more likely to put family first and thus continue going to church even if they have doubts, and to be invested in a church as a primary social outlet, such that they would lose quite a lot from leaving.
Some quick points, Carolus:
1. The argument that men are more represented at the extremes of IQ is not well supported by good evidence — there are likely to be just as many women geniuses as men when you allow women access to good education.
2. IQ is the best available measure of intelligence, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good test.
3. Even if women were on average less intelligent than men (which I reject categorically), it would be still be an act of bigotry to prevent women from reaching positions of authority on this basis.
4. This isn’t about intelligence anyway. This is about moral authority, and essentially the Bishop of Fulham is saying that women are congenitally incapable of providing moral guidance to the laity and he needs protection from having to treat other bishops who happen to be female as equals.
5. While there will be some women who do not want female bishops, this was a statement by a male bishop in a church that has traditionally been patriarchal and is only now (with a great deal of resentment) opening itself to women. And that bishop is saying that he is so upset about the thought of working with women that he would rather join a church that lies about HIV prevention, argues that abortions should be banned even in cases of rape or where the mother’s life is at risk, interferes with lawmaking in democratic countries, protects child rapists, looks for opportunities to reassert creationism, and is quietly reappointing neo-Nazi bishops who had been excommunicated under John Paul II. But I guess all that is unimportant compared to keeping women out of the ministry.
The Rt Rev Broadhurst was good enough to make a guest entry on my blog on this very subject.
http://www.platitudes.org.uk/platblog/index.php?entry=entry101017-084228
Carolus:
Other commenters have responded, but I just wanted to add re ‘women are less likely to be geniuses’: there was an interesting book written fairly recently (I found it – ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell) which reported that the quality of ‘genius’ has been found to be related to around 10,000 hours of practice at one’s chosen subject. Looking at it this way, you can see why men are more likely to be geniuses – they have historically had much greater opportunity (and still do, in some fields) to practice and develop their particular talent at this kind of length. In addition, most people only know about those who have received recognition for their works of genius, and recognition, as well as opportunity, tends to disproportionately fall upon men. Two words: Rosalind Franklin.
@Sean, @Chris Lawson
re average IQ – let’s say the jury is still out:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_study_claims_men_have_higher_average_I.Q._than_women
re variance:
I think this is pretty clear cut. More men at both tails of the IQ distribution, regardless of education system and cultural background. In all societies know to man and woman, no exception, ever, anywhere.
re bishops:
Indignation is not my strong suit — anyhow I find it hard to criticise the Bishop of Fulham for following what I presume are the dictates of his conscience. In material terms he will probably lose out from converting to RC, while many clergy who share his views in camera prefer the cushy number of a wealthy parish, even if a woman bishop is part of the package.
BTW from an evolutionary perspective, patriarchal religions are clearly a success story. And the more a religion moves towards matriarchy, the more its believers defect (e.g. from CoE to Evangelicalism or RC). I suppose you could say that the CoE has lots of nice people. And, as Dawkins (I think) once said, nice guys finish last. I cast a cold eye. Such is the way of the world.
I don’t think that the Anglicans (or Muslims, etc) hate women. They just see women as something like children. Would you want a child bishop? Especially seeing how freaky the child evangelicals are?
Carolus:
1. Since the concept of IQ was only invented in 1912 and since the application of IQ tests has only been widespread in affluent Western countries, it seems rather optimistic to claim female:male variance in IQ has been constant throughout all of human history.
2. On the other hand, it is true that throughout human history there has never been a society that welcomed female scholars until the last 50 years in the West (and even that is far from perfect). Remember Hypatia.
3. Your Wikisource article about a single paper from 2005 is unconvincing, especially since one of the lead authors, Richard Lynn, has a less than stellar record as a reliable researcher on matters of IQ. See http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf. Take particular note of how Lynn arrived at an average IQ of 63 for children in Equatorial Guinea based on IQ tests performed on Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled. That’s the quality of the research you rely on.
4. “Indignation is not my strong suit — anyhow I find it hard to criticise the Bishop of Fulham for following what I presume are the dictates of his conscience.” So it doesn’t matter what the bishop’s conscience dictates, it only matters that he has one? Why are you even posting on this site?
I forgot…
5. The historical success of patriarchal religion is no more an argument for its continued support than the historical success of slavery was.
6. Actually, Richard Dawkins called his chapter “Nice Guys Finish First.”
@Chris Lawson
You write:
“The historical success of patriarchal religion is no more an argument for its continued support than the historical success of slavery was.”
I was not arguing in favour of patriarchal religions — merely pointing out that they appear to be adaptive in evolutionary terms. So it’s likely they are not going to disappear in the near future unless human nature changes radically. Whether or not they are a ‘good thing’ in terms of some transcendent moral values is of course a different matter.
@Chris, again
re: IQ:
The scientific community of differential psychologists have different views as regards average male-female intelligence. Most believe that there is no difference, but there are some exceptions (such as Richard Lynn). That was my point: the jury is still out, or at least not completely in.
As regards variance, there is AFAIK absolutely unanimity. Male variance is greater. Whether this is due to nature or nurture is a different matter, and of course an ideologically very hot potato. Don’t expect reason to triumph over passion, subjectivity and wishful thinking on this front.
Irish Charles
What’s your point? That churchy horror of opening the jobs to women is based on the belief that there are fewer female geniuses? If it is, so what? That’s a crappy basis for systematic a priori discrimination.
That’s an oddly self-regarding thing to say. Who cares what you find it hard to do? The issue isn’t what you find it hard to do, the issue is the morality of gender discrimination. As for “the dictates of conscience” – that’s just the purple language that clerics use to duck the opprobrium that gender discrimination should receive.
Nevertheless – suppose the Bishop of Fulham followed “the dictates of his conscience” by excluding black people from the clergy – I bet you wouldn’t find it hard to criticize him for that. (That’s just a guess, but there is a pattern to this stuff.)
@Amy Clare
There’s a good critique of Galdwell by Steve Pinker, quoted at Accelerating Future:
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/11/pinker-on-gladwell/
Ohhhhhh – Irish Charles, you have been here before, under another name. I’d rather you used your old name, so that people who would remember you have the chance to do so.
A couple of minor points:
“BTW from an evolutionary perspective, patriarchal religions are clearly a success story.” So were smallpox and tuberculosis and influenza, by and large, in 1900. So is AIDS more recently. The evolutionary success of something is dependent upon environment; having a good long run of success obviously doesn’t mean something is invincible. I see the cultural evolution of religious vs. secular worldviews as a sort of red queen arms race; it’s still possible for one side to gain a fairly decisive advantage.
“Indignation is not my strong suit — anyhow I find it hard to criticise the Bishop of Fulham for following what I presume are the dictates of his conscience.” I think that’s silly. Andrea Yates may have been crazy, but her actions were actually quite consistent and principled given her beliefs. She believed that her children were going to hell if she didn’t kill them, so she killed them to “save” them. The fact remains that she’s a nutbag who killed her children; adhering to bad principles or a rancid conscience, developed due to ignorance, is not a defense (although at least Andrea Yates had the added defense of being psychotic and delusional; the Bishop of Fulham seems to be completely in possession of his faculties).
Also, Carolus seems to have completely failed to address my original point, which is that I don’t see any reason to believe that particularly high IQ individuals were the dominant factor (or even one of the more important factors) in driving the development of early cultural mores related to sex. I mean, I could speculate that because men have an earlier onset of schizophrenia, they were more likely to have grandiose delusions and hallucinations, which might propel them to the head of certain religious organizations. Or I could claim that before birth control, women were pregnant for so much of their adult lives that they had no chance to attain leadership positions in tribes where physical health was strongly related to social status. But of course that’s speculation; with no way of establishing causation I’m essentially just pulling explanations out of my ass. I could excrete several dozen more superficially plausible ideas with no effort at all, but that’s mere pseudoscience.
Why are we bothering with this. Religion is basically irrational, and if people are going to follow mythology then you can expect them to do a lot more stupid things than simple discrimination.
I don’t know why a woman would WANT to be a bishop in such an organization. Better to go where that kind of nonsense is not the norm.
We’re bothering with this partly to point out that yes, god does hate women.
@Ophelia
You write:
“What’s your point? That churchy horror of opening the jobs to women is based on the belief that there are fewer female geniuses? If it is, so what? That’s a crappy basis for systematic a priori discrimination.”
I was referring to your comment that some men find women ‘inferior’ and no, I reckon the objection to women clergy has little to do with the male-female genius ratio.
Whether gender discrimination is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a moral sense depends on the circumstances. From a libertarian perspective, for example, it is a matter of freedom of association. In an open society, libertarians argue, one may choose one’s company for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. At any rate, private discrimination is certainly not a ‘moral fact’ in the same way as, say slavery or genocide. Libertarians find it no more objectionable that most churches discriminate against women in high places than that gay clubs are reserved for homosexuals or that people of colour have their own associations which exclude Japanese or whites. Often it’s a matter of preference rather than prejudice, like preferring blondes to brunettes or vice-versa.
There are of course some good arguments against these libertarian views — like most moral issues, intelligent people will argue about them until the cows come home. That’s what distinguishes morality from empirical knowledge. Round and round we go ever since Aristotle.
At any rate I reserve my indignation for truly nasty behaviour, such as theft, robbery, criminalising artificial contraception, synagogue-torching, murder etc.. It’s not my strong suit in that I don’t get hot and bothered about relatively minor issues. But of course one person’s molehill is another person’s mountain.
Besides, there’s nothing to stop women from establishing their own religion. It would certainly be an interesting experiment.
@Jay,
I feel tempted to write ‘spot on’. But the scientifically interesting is question is WHY something as irrational as religion has been such a success, and WHY the irreligion most of us subscribe to has been such a failure.
Cathal,
No you weren’t, because that’s not what I said.
I know what libertarians think. I know what you think, too – I remember. I also remember it gets tiresome rather quickly. You enjoy provoking. Hence, obviously, you enjoy telling a woman that gender equality is minor. I foresee boredom…
@Ophelia,
I plough a narrow furrow, like most of us. What I actually enjoy is arguing that gender equality is not an open and shut case and putting the other side, i.e. basically the Darwinian case for gender complementarity rather than gender egalitarianism. And what really fascinates me is why — after two hundred years of feminism, and as countless feminists correctly point out — alpha males are still running the show and why, for example, a greater proportion of women were heads of state and government in the 16th century than is the case today. The problem with feminism is that it’s a kind of evolutionary cul-de-sac — but you’re right, I’m actually boring myself, if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, I’ve only 23 broken records in my repertoire and I’ve played them all.
Still, a boring argument is not necessarily a mistaken one.
No indeed, in fact a boring argument is quite likely to be an unmistaken one.
But…the obvious provocation makes this particular one boring, in this particular place and context. It reads more like a performance than a genuine inquiry.
Since the Bishop will be appointed to a special new position within the Catholic church, he’s giong to need new headgear.
A suggestion:
http://calvinandhobbes.me/grosshat.php
“I was referring to your comment that some men find women ‘inferior’ and no, I reckon the objection to women clergy has little to do with the male-female genius ratio.”
So why did you bring it up?
Carolus Hibernicus.
As an ex Anglo-Catholic I can tell you exactly why the idea of female Bishops is so resisted, AC priests as a generality ( I can see you like generalities ) fear and often loathe women. There is no need to invoke peculiar theories of genius or admire the supposed consistent theological position of dissenting priests ( AC theology is totally confused anyway ) it’s a simple matter of prejudice.