Of course, one leaves their DNA that lives on in one's offspring, but one can also leave some of one's mind by writing a book. Then, whenever, someone picks up the book and can know you.
Of course, one leaves their DNA that lives on in one's offspring, but one can also leave some of one's mind by writing a book. Then, whenever, someone picks up the book and can know you.
Do you think any one realy learns much from what we leave? It takes such a long time ... know what I mean? ... hmm heres a ponder for the conection of it all my friend G
I learned a lot about the human condition from Shakespeare and from Omar Khayyam.
Thanks for the cows looking north-south. I always play tennis north-south, for then the sun is not as much of a factor, which is why all courts are built that way, but, sometimes, when close to the net on a far side, I hit east-west to the other side over the net but still close to it as a 'trick'.
I think when you're dead, you're just dead (it seems likely);
but I'm not sure.
I'm really not sure!
However there is one thing I am sure of, and that's if there would exist a god, I don't like him.
I apologize for my language, but god can kiss my butt.
I'm sorry, it's not against this forum or any of you, it's just I don't like god.
I don't need him.
To hell with god.
Hello, David Maes.
A constructive response to the question would have sufficed. It seems, however, that you are expressing a genuine fear of "god," rather than denying the existence of "god." Perhaps you should be contributing to the "Science vs God" thread?
In addition, it is not just sufficient to state your view, but somehow necessary to take pains to offend those who may hold a different view.
It is doubtful that reducing yourself and your opinions to graffiti then scrawling an apology across it, in any way deminishes the insult.
How does divisiveness and adherence to fear and petty prejudice in any way further the "Quest?"
__________________ "What a fragile balance between the indispensable and the sublime." Hans Blumenberg
"Perfection is not when there is more to add, but when there is no more to take away." Antoine De Saint-Eupery
Disclaimer: *The above statements are my opinion only and shouldn't be taken as factual. Read at your own risk*
It was not the concept of "God" that I hated, but rather what 'religions' have done with the concept.
Pardon the lenghtly post, but I think you may appreciate it, after all is said and done.
SEXISM
by
Barbara G.Walker
More than any previous group, the followers of the Judeo-Christian God worked assiduously to trivialize, diabolize, or humanize their deity's predecessors and rivals. Bible writers therefore described all the baals (gods) of neighboring peoples as various kinds of abominations, or demons, and the Great Mother Goddess of the middle east as a particularly evil one.
This Goddess was the Queen of Heaven referred to in Jeremiah 7:18, sinfully adored by Jeremiah's opponents; and Diana of the Ephesians, "whom Asia and all the world worshippeth" according to Acts 19:27. Among her numerous other names were Asherah, Ishtar, Astarte, Esther, and Eostre, whose springtime festival was anglicized as Easter. One of the earlier interpretations of this "thousand-named Goddess" in Sumero-Babylonia was Lilith, whose symbol was the lotus -- an ancient sacred icon representing female genitals, birthgiving, and universal creativity.
Apocryphal writings converted Lilith into Adam's first wife, who was unsatisfactory because she defied God's order to lie beneath her husband. She mocked Adam's sexual ineptitude and dumped him, then cursed God and laughed at the angels God sent to punish her. The story claims that she went off to live by the Red Sea (or, the primal Sea of Blood), mated with "demons" (i.e., other gods), and gave birth to a hundred children a day. This detail establishes Lilith as one of many incarnations of the Great Mother Goddess. Four thousand years ago she was known in Sumeria as Lillake or Belit-ili.
After Lilith's defection, the biblical God created a more complaisant mate for Adam by the curiously female-imitative device of male motherhood, arranging for Adam to give birth to Eve from one of his ribs. This device was a blatant piece of plagiarism from Sumerian and Babylonian traditions, which called the Goddess "Lady of the Rib" because it was believed that mothers created their babies' bones out of their own ribs, as they created their babies' flesh out of their own blood.
There were Gnostic beliefs extant in the early Christian era -- when Gnosticism was more respected than the fundamentalist/literal type of Christianity -- to the effect that the Queen of Heaven (or, Mother of All Living) actually created Yahweh, and later punished him for arrogantly pretending to be the sole creator. (1) Third-century and fourth-century Christian zealots wanted the female principle diabolized so her power over Yahweh would be forever denied. They made woman (Eve) responsible for all the evil in the world, and man (Adam) her relatively innocent victim. "Adam was not deceived," says 81. Paul, "but the woman being deceived was the transgressor" (1 Timothy 2:14).
81. Augustine propounded the church's canonical doctrine of original sin, holding that all persons born of woman are sinful because they are born of woman; sexual conception, and passage through the female body, transmit that awful sin of apple-eating to all generations. People eventually forgot the Gnostic idea that Eve and the serpent were the real saviors of the human race, providing the gift of knowledge that God didn't want people to have. People eventually forgot the Gnostic conception of the evil demiurge (God) who blamed all generations for the offense of a remote ancestor. People also forgot to revere the creative wonder of birthgiving, which so awed their predecessors, and listened to the followers of Augustine saying that the female body transmits the virus of damnation to every newborn baby, who is therefore defined as demonic by the church. To this day, a Catholic baptism ceremony involves a verbal exorcism of the demon within the child. (2) No woman had a hand in developing these doctrines. What mother could look into the face of her newborn infant and see there the reflection of a demon?
80 it was that childbirth -- generally recognized as a mother's transcendent joy even though it hurts -- was finally converted by Christian tradition into the manifestation of God's curse on the female sex. According to Genesis 16, God told Eve that she, and by extension all women, must be a husband's slave; and that he, God, would "greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." This was interpreted to mean that God intended women to have as many children as possible, and that it should pain them as much
as possible, in order to work out God's will in the matter. Theologically at least, it seemed that man could finally achieve what men had always enviously craved: a degree of control over the function of motherhood.
Martin Luther remarked that if women died of excessive childbearing, it was perfectly all right because God wanted it that way. (3) When Dr. James Simpson began relieving women's labor pains with the newly discovered anesthetics during the nineteenth century, English clergymen raised a great outcry against this "sinful" opposition to God's will, depriving God of the pleasure he took in listening to women's screams. (4) Yet, when Queen Victoria allowed her doctor to give her chloroform during the birth of her eighth child, the clergymen were silenced. Apparently a queen was permitted to overrule God.
Today many people assume that methods of birth control have been invented only within the last century, to relieve women of the unhappy results of too many pregnancies, too close together. Actually, birth control has been a part of human culture since at least Neolithic times. In the ancient classical civilizations, women used sponges in the same way that modern women use diaphragms, and abortifacient drugs were not unknown.
Some of this lore continued to be passed down secretly among Europe's "wise-women," and the Inquisition often accused witches of telling their clients how to avoid conception. Of course this was an offense meriting execution. But even in the most primitive cultures, anthropologists have found women seeking ways to limit their reproduction, if only by avoiding sexual relations as long as they are lactating, which can go on for three or four years. It was said that having children too close together prevents a mother from giving each one the care and attention it deserves. That is why, the women said, they tried hard not to wear themselves out with childbearing.
Patriarchal traditions are notable for strenuous efforts to prevent women from denying sexual favors to men, even to the point of allowing (or at least tolerating) rape both within and without marriage. Old
Testament warriors were directed by their God to rape all the young girls in a conquered town and make them into"concubines" (sex slaves) or supernumerary wives, so they could beget more and more children. The underlying reason for patriarchal obsession with reproduction was not only that more children made more workers in the fields and households, but also that more children guaranteed a greater immortality for the paternal ancestor. People used to believe that men whose memory was worshiped by many descendants could actually become gods in the afterworld. That was the post-mortem favor promised to Abraham by the biblical God: "I will make of thee a great nation" (Genesis 12:2). It was yet another way of plagiarizing from the traditions of the primal mothers, who had become Goddesses through actual physical creation of whole races of people.
The Christian idea that male "seed" must not be wasted, but must find some fruitful female "soil," is still alive and well in Catholic teaching. When Pope John Paul II visited some impoverished and overpopulated areas in South America, where infanticide was a common if tragic expression of desperate family planning, he took no notice of the peasants' real needs, but lectured them against contraceptives, saying that "any woman who uses a birth control device commits a sin worse than murder." (5) Women were mentioned specifically. Apparently the church has not really dealt with the question of men's use of condoms to prevent venereal infections.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor," ruled that a wife may be freely used and abused because she is lower than a slave, being "in subjection" to her husband according to God's law. (6) A fifteenth-century ecclesiastical Rules of Marriage recommended scolding and bullying of a wife by her husband, who could actually earn credit in heaven by beating his wife "out of concern for her soul." (7) Martin Luther thought himself an unusually kind husband because he didn't beat his wife with a whip or a stick, but only punched her in the head from time to time, to keep her from "getting saucy." Luther noted that girls mature faster than boys for the reason that "weeds grow sooner than good crops." Some fathers of the church maintained that women are born as imperfect, birth-defective
males, showing that their fathers were ill or in a state of sin when begetting them. John Scotus Erigena said that when the heavens finally open in glory, Woman will be no more, because God has embodied the sinless part of humanity in Man, and the sinful part in Woman. (
Clement of Alexandria wrote that Christ's mission on earth was to destroy the works of the female, and every woman should be permanently ashamed of her gender. (9) St. Odo of Cluny called woman "a sack of dung," and John Aylmer described her as "the dregs of the devil's dung hill." (10) Other church fathers opined that woman is "the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin." (11)
The Inquisition's official handbook, Malleus Maleficarum (A Hammer for Witches), stated that women could be tortured with impunity and that "all wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman." (12) Even into the twentieth century, the Catholic Encyclopedia continued to assert that the female sex is inferior to the male sex in both body and soul. (13)
During the nineteenth century, clergymen exerted themselves to oppose the suffragists' campaigns for women's rights. The Reverend Peter Easton described the "emancipated woman" as "an incarnate demon, a creature of unbounded lust and merciless cruelty." An Anglican churchman said women don't deserve equality under the law because they are "intrinsically inferior in excellence, imbecile by sex and nature, weak in body, inconstant in mind, and imperfect and infirm in
character." (14) Orestes Augustus Brownson wrote in the late 1800s that every woman must be subject to masculine control, otherwise "she is out of her element, and a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, except through a woman's influence." (15) The president of a leading theological seminary declared in 1890 that the Bible "commands the subjection of women forever." (16)
Examples may be multiplied endlessly, to show that denunciations of the female sex by European and American clergy have spared no exaggeration, and recognized no limit, in their eagerness to load every
conceivable insult onto woman, and blame her for every conceivable crime. Judeo-Christian prejudice against women is probably the world's longest-lived form of prejudice. We tend to describe uncivilized cultures as "savage," and to imagine our primitive ancestors as sadistic brutes devoid of decency or kindness. But the archeological and historical records don1t support this view. Instead, it seems that early cultures with a matrifocal or "matrist" orientation were considerably more egalitarian, peaceful, and nurturing than our own culture. (17) In some ways they were more "civilized" than the civilization of which we are so proud.
How would we rate the cultures that produced Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, and Mao Tse'Tung, with their military conquests, death-camps, gulags, institutionalized tortures, and widespread suppression and murdering of both foreigners and citizens? .. Even our own American culture, so widely admired and emulated around the world today, has produced serial rapists, child-
killers, and other mass murderers. Historically, European immigrants to America committed genocide against the aboriginal population, engaged heavily in the African slave
trade, and in more recent decades used high-tech weapons against distant peasant-agrarian nations (Le., Vietnam),
killing millions. (1
Modern American movies designed for teenage audiences often feature rape, murder, torture and mutilation. Television stars gun down their enemies as casually as little boys playing Cops and Robbers (Pow! You're dead!), so it1s hardly surprising that with so much cultural input, violence is perpetuated; and the violence is often directed against women.
Rape is a violent act, often condoned in secret by Christian authorities, as another means of suppressing women. "The Inquisition kept harems of young women, who were incarcerated purely because of their good looks; they were subject to repeated prison-rape by inquisitors and other strangers with connections to the Holy See, who threatened them with grotesque tortures if they failed to submit... The Christian Church also engaged in temple prostitution, and kept brothels of young
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