Creationism in Crisis - Women Hunted Too - Before Man-Made Religion Assigned Them a 'God-Given' Role

UD anthropology professor Sarah Lacy has proposed a new theory that challenges the familiar story that labor roles during ancient times were divided by sex and that men evolved to be hunters and women to be gatherers.

Woman the hunter | UDaily

Sarah Lacey, an anthropologist with Delaware University, USA, believes she has found evidence that, in hunter-gatherer societies, in contradiction to the traditional view which has men as the hunters and women as the gatherers, in fact, women played their part as hunters too.

This was before their assumed gender roles became formalised by religions which provided men with the excuses they needed to control women by declaring that 'God' had assigned them roles as man's 'help meet' and so subservient to men. Women were instructed that they should be obedient to a man's demands and fill the role of sex-slave, housekeeper and cook, because God said so:

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2: 21-24

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GENE 3.15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. GENE 3.16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3: 15-16

As I related in my book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, in pre-Christian Gaelic society, under the 'Brehon Law' women had equal rights to men and could adopt leadership roles, own property and divorce abusive or unfaithful husbands - rights that were systematically stripped from them under the influence of Patricus (St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh), when he called an all-male meeting of Gaelic tribal petty kings and declared those rights to be contrary to God's Law in the Bible, and women should henceforth be subservient and obedient to men and never be in a position of leadership over them.

St. Patrick is reputedly responsible for abolishing the Brehon law or rather with integrating it with Christian Law by going through it line by line with a convention of tribal chiefs called for the purpose and striking out anything which did not accord with the Bible. Brehon law, from the Irish ‘breithim’ meaning ‘a judge’ was the system of law in use in Gaelic Ireland since ancient times – a Celtic Common Law, necessary to settle disputes between residents of different petty kingdoms or different tribal traditions. One effect of this was to reduce the status of women; depriving them of many of the rights they held under Brehon law, such as the right to divorce their husband, to own property and to occupy positions of leadership. St. Patrick’s brand of Christianity was to be strictly hierarchical, patriarchal and misogynistic, in line with the Bible and the teachings of St. Paul, although there were deviations from strict cannon law. Divorce, for example, though no longer available on demand, could still be granted for a wide variety of reasons (4).

Rosa Rubicondior, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, pp. 8-9

Sarah Lacy, with her colleague, anthropologist Cara Ocobock, from the University of Notre Dame, have published their research in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist and an article in Scientific American. A news release from Delaware University explains their work:

Icons of Feminism - Mary Woolstencraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine

Icons of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797

Source: Wikipedia

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787

Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism

Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.

Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.

One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.

If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"

"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"

"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"

“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?

… Etc, etc, etc.

Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.

And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.

Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

Religion Provides Excuses for People Who Need Excuses - Iranian Women's Protest

Iranian parliament

Photo: AP

Iran: protesters call for move to a non-religious state. What changes would that bring?

The closest things we have to the fundamentalist Christian dream of a fundamentalist theocracy, can be found in the Islamic world in states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where Sharia Law is little different to the Levitican Laws a Christian theocracy would impose on the rest of us. In fact, they have the same cultural roots in the tribal cultures of the Middle East, where religious superstition and the support of the priesthood was used to control and subjugate the population and, for the ruling men, the women.

Misogyny and a desire to control the females of the tribe probably originated in pre-human ancestors where biologically, there was an advantage in the males ensuring the children they supported were their own and not those of other males. Males would have been insecure in their ability to ensure fidelity, reinforced by their own tendency to 'spread their seed' as widely as possible, which required the women in the tribe to be unfaithful to their partners. The biological dynamics resulted in males being physically stronger than females and able to impose their control by force, if necessary.

Androcentric religions, such as the Abrahamic religions, evolved partly to codify this gender relationship and give it divine authority, to provide males with the excuses they needed to control and coerce females.

The Evolution of God

The insecure little men who control the Islamic Republic of Iran are continuing to use religion as their excuse for denying the women of Iran the right to choose what clothes to wear in public!

Imagine if this was reversed and women were telling men what to wear! The regime wouldn't last 5 minutes, and nor would any religion that supported it.

And yet, because their holy book, like the Bible before it, was written in a time when inadequate, insecure little men held the political and economic power, women were regarded as goods to be bought and sold, little different to slaves, the same holy book can be used as an excuse to treat women the same way today.

Just like the Catholic and most fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches, Islam is obsessed with sex. It assumes that if women are not rigidly controlled, they will go and seek out other men to have sex with, and if a women reveals more than just her eyes to any man other than her husband, it will provoke sinful sexual urges in the man which will condemn his 'soul' to an eternity of pain because the religion's god hates nothing more than a man lusting after a women to whom he isn't married.

But of course, that will be the woman's fault for tempting the man. The man can't be expected to see a woman's face, hair or legs and not want to have sex with her, and since it's her doing the tempting, anything that follows will be her fault too, consensual or not.

A couple of recent articles in The Conversation explain the importance of the women's demonstration against the compulsory wearing of the hijab in public and how fundamentalist Islam is merely the excuse for repression. They are reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.