Are Women's Rights Against The Bible?

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The way I look at the Bible, God took them through a civilizing and enlightening process, but what he started with was basically a bunch of barbarians.

You may find this lecture by Steven Pinker on the Myth of Violence to be of interest:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steve ... lence.html

Are we to assume that anything that Satan does is automatically wrong?

I think this is a reference to the verse in 1 Corinthians that said that "a woman is not allowed to speak in the church, and must be in submission". However, it also goes on to say that a man must submit to the church.

As for women's rights as we know them today, the Bible does not speak against it. In fact, in mainline Protestant denominations, women are often ordained as pastors.

The only instances where men and women would be unequal is when applying for job positions that require a great deal of physical agility (i.e. police officer, firefighter, etc.), but this is because men and women are built differently.

No, this thread is not about whether or not a Woman can speak in Church, but whether Women's rights (such as property rights, the right to have a job, voting rights, and the right to be part of government) are against the Bible in any way.

Tell the people of Israel that whenever a man dies without leaving a son, his daughter is to inherit his property. If he has no daughter, his brothers are to inherit it. If he has no brothers, his father's brothers are to inherit it. If he has no brothers or uncles, then his nearest relative is to inherit it and hold it as his own property. The people of Israel are to observe this as a legal requirement, just as I, the Lord, have commanded you.

If a man has sexual relations with another man, they have done a disgusting thing, and both shall be put to death.

Don't spend all your energy on sex and all your money on women; they have destroyed kings.

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

And, of course, her husband gets to sit at the gate and chew the fat with the town elders, while she gets up before everyone else (whilst it is still night) and cooks steaks for breakfast.

Tom: I gather you're not terribly fond of the Bible.

Joseph: Not at all! It's the most over-advertised book in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

Tom: There's a lot of interesting material in the Old Testament, isn't there? For instance, it says that God created everything except the water.

Joseph: You've put your finger on it. The water I is the goddess. You see, what happens in the Old Testament is that the masculine principle remains personified and the female principle is reduced to an element. The first verse says when God created, the breath of God brooded over the waters. And the water is the goddess.

Tom: I assume you don't believe in an actual, literal seven days of creation.

Joseph: Of course not. That has nothing to do with the actual evolutionary story as we now get it.

Tom: How do you reconcile these two accounts?

Joseph: Why should one bother to, any more than you would try to reconcile the Navajo story?

Tom: I remember hearing a wonderful lecture by the late Louis Leakey in which he insisted that there was no conflict between the Genesis account of creation and what he had discovered.

Joseph: Well, it is in conflict because he didn't read it carefully enough. There are two Biblical accounts, one in the first chapter and one in the second, and they're quite contrary to each other.

It's about time we stopped feeling that we have to believe in the Bible. I'd just as soon try to work out the Navajo thing, where they come up through four worlds. One is red, one yellow . . .

Tom: But if you throw out the Bible as history, don't you also throw it out as a moral imperative?

Joseph: Yes. I don't think the Bible is anybody's moral imperative, unless you want to be a traditional Jew. That's what the Bible tells you.

Tom: Doesn't it tell you how to be a good person?

Joseph: No.

Tom: Lots of people think so.

Joseph: Just read the thing. Maybe it gives you a few hints, but the Bible also tells you to kill everyone in Canaan, right down to the mice.

Tom: What was the passage you quoted to justify their exclusivity ideas?

Joseph: "There is no God in all the world but in Israel." That leaves everybody out except the Jews. This is one of the most chauvinistic views of morality.

One of the great texts is in Exodus, when the Jews are told to kill the lambs and put the blood on their doorsteps so the angel of death won't kill any of their children, but will kill the first children of the Egyptians. And the night before they leave, they're to invite their Egyptian friends to lend them their jewels and so on. Then the next night, they run off with the jewels, and the text says, so they fleeced the Egyptians. No, so they despoiled the Egyptians. You call this good ethics?

Tom: What's the background of something like Cain and Abel?

Joseph: There's a very amusing Sumerian dialogue that appeared about 1500 years earlier than the Cain and Abel story. It's about a herder and an agriculturalist competing for the favor of the goddess. The goddess chooses to prefer the agriculturalist and his offering. Well, the Jews come into this area, and they're not agriculturalists, they're herders. And they don't have a goddess, they have a god. So they turn the whole thing upside down, and make God favor the herder against the agriculturalist.

The interesting thing is that throughout the Old Testament, it's the younger brother who overturns the older brother in God's favor. It happens time and time again. This is simply a function of the fact that the Jews come in as younger brothers. They come in as barbaric Bedouins from the desert, into highly sophisticated agricultural areas, and they're declaring that although the others are the elders - as Cain was, the founder of cities and all that - they are God's favorite. It's just another form of sanctified chauvinism. You understand the view of exclusive religion, don't you - "You worship God in your way, I'll worship God in his."

Tom: I gather there were a number of East-West conflicts in the early church. I find Pellagius a fascinating figure, for example.

Joseph: Pellagius in the fourth century was either a Welshman or an Irishman, I think. He upheld the individualistic Western tradition against what I would call the tribalism of the East, and was considered a heretic. He stated the main points against the doctrines of which St. Augustine, his contemporary, was the champion. One was the doctrine of original sin. Pellagius said, you cannot inherit another's sin. Therefore, Adam's sin is not inherited by anybody.

Tom: The sins of the father are not visited upon the son?

Joseph: That is all Eastern philosophy, not European. Another thing Pellagius said is that you cannot be saved by another's act. That takes care of Jesus on the cross and knocks the whole thing out. Of course that was rejected. Pellagius was defending a doctrine of individual responsibility. I don't know where it comes from, but certainly it was typical, I would say, of European as opposed to Eastern points of view. You were an individual, not merely the member of a group.

Tom: That sounds like the line in the King Arthur legend . . .

Joseph: "Each knight entered the forest at a point he had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path." That's from The Quest of the Sangral, 1215 or so in France.

Tom: How do they expect to find their way then?

Joseph: By questing.

Tom: And that's what we all do in life?

Joseph: Yes. Otherwise, you'd follow someone else's path, follow the well-tried ways. No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It's a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done.

Tom: You once said that no human society has been found where mythological motifs are not to be found and celebrated - "magnified in song and ecstatically experienced in light and power and vision." What about ours?

Joseph: What has happened in ours is that on the official level the accent is on economics and practical politics, and there has been a systematic elimination of the spiritual dimension. But it exists in our poets and our arts. It does. You can find it here. It's in a recessive condition, but otherwise people wouldn't have any spiritual life at all.

Tom: Isn't it alive in some phases of the ecology movement as well?

Joseph: Yes. And this interest now in the American Indian lore, isn't this interesting? The brutalized, rejected people - they've got the message that this country is waiting for.

There's an awful saying of Spengler that I ran into in a book of his, Jahre der Entscheidung, Year of Decision, which is the years we live in now. He said, "As for America, it's a congeries of dollar trappers, no past, no future." When I read that back in the 30s I took it badly. I thought it was an insult. But what is anybody interested in? And then Lenin says, "When we get ready to hang the capitalists, they'll compete to sell us the rope." And that's what we're doing. Nobody's thinking of what their culture represents. They're wondering whether the farmer in the Midwest will vote for you because you sold their wheat to the Russians, or what not. It's a terrible lack of anything but economic concerns that we're facing. That is old age and death; that is the end. That's as I see it. I have nothing but negative judgments in respect to that.

And look at what people are reading in the papers. You get into the subways and people are all reading the same thing - this murder, that murder. This rape, this divorce. What topics to be mentating on! This journalistic accent in our lives is murder. Murder.

Tom: You don't see the struggle ending? There's no kind of world order that could bring that about?

Joseph: It would have to be a world order, but then there would be struggle within it, just as there is struggle within our United States order. No revolution has ever taken me in. I've known too many revolutionaries.

Tom: If the only myths that exist then are the ones that everyone believes in - Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism - can't people create a new one that would meet today's needs?

Joseph: No, because myths don't come into being like that. You have to wait for them to appear. But I don't believe anything of that kind will happen because there are too many points of view floating around the world. All myths so far have been within bounded horizons, and people have to be in accord with their life dynamics, their life experiences.

Tom: The ancient Greeks were surrounded by the presence of gods and statues and reminders of gods.

Joseph: But that doesn't work any more. Christianity isn't moving people's lives today. What's moving people's lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It's a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn't even an ideal that anybody's fighting for.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery" is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it:

Children at birth.

Children in the cradle.

School children.

Youths and maidens.

Fresh adults.

Older ones.

Men and women of 40.

Of 50.

Of 60.

Of 70.

Of 80.

Of 90.

Of 100.

The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot.

It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

It is hard -- harder -- still harder upon the next three sets -- cruelly hard.

It is blessedly softened to the next three sets.

It has now done all the damage it can, and might as well be put out of commission. Yet with comical imbecility it is continued, and the four remaining estates are put under its crushing ban. Poor old wrecks, they couldn't disobey if they tried. And think -- because they holily refrain from adulterating each other, they get praise for it! Which is nonsense; for even the Bible knows enough to know that if the oldest veteran there could get his lost heyday back again for an hour he would cast that commandment to the winds and ruin the first woman he came across, even though she were an entire stranger.

It is as I have said: every statute in the Bible and in the law-books is an attempt to defeat a law of God -- in other words an unalterable and indestructible law of nature. These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statutes. He breaks every one of the himself, adultery and all.

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life.

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in man's construction is this: During your entire life you shall be under inflexible limits and restrictions, sexually.

During twenty-three days in every month (in absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also she wants that candle -- yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

But man is only briefly competent; and only then in the moderate measure applicable to the word in his sex's case. He is competent from the age of sixteen or seventeen thence-forward for thirty-five years. After fifty his performance is of poor quality, the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great value to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new. There is nothing the matter with her plant. Her candlestick is as firm as ever, whereas his candle is increasingly softened and weakened by the weather of age, as the years go by, until at last it can no longer stand, and is mournfully laid to rest in the hope of a blessed resurrection which is never to come.

By the woman's make, her plant has to be out of service three days in the month, and during a part of her pregnancy. These are times of discomfort, often of suffering. For fair and just compensation she has the high privilege of unlimited adultery all the other days of her life.

That is the law of God, as revealed in her make. What becomes of this high privilege? Does she live in free enjoyment of it? No. Nowhere in the whole world. She is robbed of it everywhere. Who does this? Man. Man's statutes -- if the Bible is the Word of God.

Now there you have a sample of man's "reasoning powers," as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can't overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her.[**] He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man.

So he concretes that singular conclusion into law, for good and all.

And he does it without consulting the woman, although she has a thousand times more at stake in the matter than he has. His procreative competency is limited to an average of a hundred exercises per year for fifty years, hers is good for three thousand a year for that whole time -- and as many years longer as she may live. Thus his life interest in the matter is five thousand refreshments, while hers is a hundred and fifty thousand; yet instead of fairly and honorably leaving the making of the law to the person who has an overwhelming interest at stake in it, this immeasurable hog, who has nothing at stake in it worth considering, makes it himself!

You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.

Now if you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairness and justices between man and woman, you would give the man one-fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem. Now wouldn't you? Necessarily. I give you my word, this creature with the decrepit candle has arranged it exactly the other way. Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it. He even wantonly added a sharp pang to that pathetic misery; for he kept within those women's sight, always, stalwart watchmen whose splendid masculine forms made the poor lassies' mouths water but who hadn't anything to solace a candlestick with, these gentry being eunuchs. A eunuch is a person whose candle has been put out. By art.[

Leviticus 20:29 "Do not degrade your daughter by making her a prostitute, or the land will turn to prostitution and be filled with wickedness."

Deuteronomy 23:17-18 "No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow, because the Lord your God detests them both."

Do not disgrace your daughters by making them temple prostitutes; if you do, you will turn to other gods and the land will be full of immorality.

No Israelite, man or woman, is to become a temple prostitute. Also, no money earned in this way may be brought into the temple of the Lord your God in fulfillment of a vow. The Lord hates temple prostitutes.

The topic is not whether or not there is a god.

The original question is whether women's rights are against the Bible.

I'm pointing out that women's rights are clearly defined within the Bible, and that women are to be subordinate and submissive to their husbands.

Whether or not there is a god should be a separate topic.

Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

A good wife is her husband's pride and joy; but a wife who brings shame on her husband is like a cancer in his bones

Better to live in a desert than with a complaining, nagging wife.

"Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against the king but also against all the nobles and the peoples of all the provinces of King Xerxes. For the queen's conduct will become known to all the women, and so they will despise their husbands and say, 'King Xerxes commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, but she would not come.' This very day the Persian and Median women of the nobility who have heard about the queen's conduct will respond to all the king's nobles in the same way. There will be no end of disrespect and discord.

"Therefore, if it pleases the king, let him issue a royal decree and let it be written in the laws of Persia and Media, which cannot be repealed, that Vashti is never again to enter the presence of King Xerxes. Also let the king give her royal position to someone else who is better than she. Then when the king's edict is proclaimed throughout all his vast realm, all the women will respect their husbands, from the least to the greatest."

The king and his nobles were pleased with this advice, so the king did as Memucan proposed. He sent dispatches to all parts of the kingdom, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, proclaiming in each people's tongue that every man should be ruler over his own household.