The religious right claims that the bulk of South Africans are God-fearing, devout believers, with 85% belonging to some kind of organised religion. If this is true, what are we to make of our world-beating statistics for child abuse, domestic violence, rape and murder?If indeed the pious moral majority of whatever stripe takes themselves off to church/synagogue/mosque/temple on a regular basis, then who is committing all these heinous acts?The data tells us it’s not the women -- who make up less than 3% of the prison population -- and it would be stretching the bounds of credulity to believe that the unbelievers are wholly responsible.
Feminist
scholars argue that thepatriarchal nature of the world’s major
monotheistic religions, in fact, creates a breeding ground for
intolerance, human rights abuses, and violence against women and
children.
Men of religion only
relatively recently got around to recognising women as fully human,
with souls.
The battle over ordination of women has been a long and
bitter one. For a long time the Christian Church’s justification was
that this was because Jesus’s apostles were all men. The argument, of
course, has its roots in the notion of God as the Father, a vengeful,
rule-bound patriarch who demands total obedience and dispenses harsh
punishments.
St Augustine spelled it out
for his brothers: “For woman is not the image of God, whereas the man
alone is the image of God.” The natural corollary of this belief is
that men are God-like and women are not.“If God was male and woman was
not male then whatever God was, woman was not,” writes historian
Rosalind Miles. Add to this the legend of the fall from the Garden of
Eden, and Eve and all her daughters were set up for millennia of
scapegoatism, becoming “the greatest race of underdogs the world has
ever known”.
This phallocentric view was
necessary for the monotheistic religions to take root and survive,
particularly as they had only recently overthrown the pantheistic
Goddess/Great Mother religions, and needed to masculinise God entirely
in an attempt to erase the last vestiges of female power. The Qur’an
makes its contempt for these Goddess worshippers quite clear: “The
pagans pray to females: they pray to a rebellious Satan.”
(It is particularly
fascinating that, while all these religions acknowledge Godas
u......
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A new survey has revealed that atheists know more on average about religion than religious followers.The survey conducted in the US found that atheists and agnostics seemed to be more knowledgable about facts and histories relating to religions than people who followed thosefaiths. A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn"t identify Martin Lutheras the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public...Count Saint Germain
Anthony North: No occult figure is more puzzling than the Count Saint Germain. Always dressed in black, but decorated by diamond jewellery, Saint Germain first appears in Vienna about 1740 when he moves in high circles after curing a French Marshal of illness.Where the Count came from, no one knows - there are many versions of his birth from being the son of a Hungarian prince, to the son of a Portuguese Jew, to the b****** child of a Bohemian nobleman. In a full life he was known as a great mus...Richard Dawkins and the new age fakers
Two years after challenging a selection of religious fundamentalists to justify their beliefs in Channel 4’s The Root of All Evil,Richard Dawkins – “Darwin’s rottweiler” – is growling again. This time, in The Enemies of Reason, he takes on the wider penumbra of the paranormal, New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo, and the often expensive spiritual services that bring succour to the sucker. His targets include astrologers, psychics, dowsers, homoeopaths and a woman called Elisis Livingstone who claims th...Baby with abnormal features deified in Jharkhand
Submitted by Peace Crusader: A girl born with three eyes and two noses has been attracting hordes of people who believe her to be an incarnation of Hindu god Shiva. The birth of the "wonder girl" in Angara block of Ranchi created quite a stir last week with villagers queuing up for a glimpse of the baby. "People from far-flung areas are coming for a glimpse ofmy daughter. Why has god played such a cruel joke with me by giving me a daughter with abnormal features," rued Sukhlal Mahto, the girl"s ...The power of prayer
For thousands of years people have believed that prayer can help heal the sick and since at least the 19th century scientists have conducted research and experiments to try and determine if this is really the case. Just what is the real powerofprayer ?"Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. . Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them ?&q...Techno-animism
Anthony North: Few of us have not heard of, or seen, The Matrix. A film that mixes the ultimate ideals of cyberspace with religious and mythological imagery, it is seen as pure fiction. But fiction has a habit of coming true. Many would scoff at such an idea. Religious hog-wash has no place in the modern technical world. But I would argue our innate spirituality will recur in every society and culture -even the most atheist, materialist and technological. The first religion was arguably the anim...Can we really transplant a human soul ?
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Martin Redfern: For some a battle between science and religion is being fought for the soul of America. The Creationists argue God created the world in six days and want their beliefs given equal status to evolutionary science. Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day's drive of two-thirds of the US population. For the rest, it is just 10 minutes from CincinnatiInternational Airport. That is why it was picked as the site for a new museum, due to ...The forever gods
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Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body. University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston. The Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the...
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Do atheists know more about religion ?
Count Saint Germain
Richard Dawkins and the new age fakers
Baby with abnormal features deified in Jharkhand
Techno-animism
Can we really transplant a human soul ?
Creationist museum challenges evolution
The forever gods
Iron age slab shows belief in soul seperation
