Does The Bible Promote Domestic Violence Against Women?

[sidneyworld]

... and children?

In the thousands of years of the history of religious culture, there are accounts of various levels of oppression of women. Either within a domestic situation, or as a singularity during war or personal opposition within tryanny. This is a critical subject for me because there are endless ways to interpret what is actually oppression/suppression and ultimate submission by women in whatever role they might have assumed or be designated, willfully or otherwise in their life within their community, or within the confines of their personal family/relationship or general within their society, as being acceptable or a disproportioned in the value of women.

My interest here first qualifies a substantial familiarity with domestic violence on a professional level. I traveled throughout this country for several years doing research on domestic violence and had to be inside, and presumably a victim to truly understand the dynamics and common denominator that constituted domestic violence. And some things became remarkably evident to me, among so many other things.

Culture plays a critical part in domestic violence. It's not all about drug and alcohol abuse. As a matter of fact, it had less to do with a drug induced disposition, than the way many men are raised or exposed to prolonged abuse of women.

70% of legitimately abused women in this country who have had to be sheltered are hispanic. And most came into these shelters broken, with two to four children who were initially unapproachable stonefaced and terrified. None of these women, to the best of my knowledge had any drug addiction or alcohol abuse or even smoked cigarettes. The black and caucasion women had an entirely different story and most of these women, few as there were by comparison, were also addicts of some sort. I was in seven shelters ranging from the North East, MidWest and Southern Midwest. The concentration of allegedly abused women in the North East who had to be sheltered were black but their stories outside the earshot of counsellors told a different story. They simply needed shelter until they could find someone else to take care of them and their habits. The Domestic Violence Association of America and other similar programs in this country do not personally investigate the offender as a policy because of the security risk to the victim. If the victim requests it, a police report is filed in that county. But just about anyone can call a Domestic Violence shelter and be allowed in, at least for a few days. In any case, the bottom line here is that genuine and the most violent of domestic violence cases comes in two basic forms, for not much more than two reasons. Culture, and drug abuse. Sometimes its both but not as any viabily consistent formula to consider.

Hispanics are extremely cultural and religious people. The women are taught to respect the male household, including their own chiildren above and beyond their own needs and are completely subordinated to this mentality. They are indoctrinated into this lifestyle at a very young age and the degree by which this exists in this country relies greatly on how long, and far reaching their contact with the rest of society becomes as they become of age and perhaps begin their own family. Education plays a vital part in their liberation from this scenario, but many hispanics live in tight net communities and this is the only thing they know and trust and have as an only sense of familiarity. Those who are abused are living the worst hell imaginable because they are led to believe that the man is the master of their universe, and even those who have considered leaving, will not allow their children to be subjected in being raised without the income and protection that their father, their husbands, their masters have provided. And they do. Hispanic men are wonderful providers. But they do it as a sense of honor with a sword in their hand. Nearly every case I've seen has the same scenario. And, these women still love their men. They had these men's children. They are still in love with their men. It's the only thing they have to hold on to next to their children, because to face the reality of their abuse means they have essentially failed and will have nothing left in their lives. This is real stuff.

Now of course, women of other cultures, even quite wealthy women have faced physical and mental abuse and of course death, while it's less understandable by virture of what might be apparently a viable cache of resources to "escape" the things that bind women to men is far more complicated and far more spiritual and emotional. Or they would indeed leave the hell behind. But it's not in such cases a lack of education or binding culture or religion. It's usually need and fear and what is perceived to be otherwise impractical, venturing out alone into the world after having the security of a home and a household, certainly years in the making. But this is not the core point. Where do men get this notion of such disproportion superiority over the role of women? Roles are different but they are complimentary. But not in domestic violence. Especially with women whose men are pastors, preachers and presumably stand behind a profuse misinterpretation of scripture which is universally accepted beyond secular culture. What a mess!

*******

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
By Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches. Posted February 2, 2009.

Escaping an abusive marriage is no easy task for many evangelical women, many of whom have pastors that say physical abuse is no reason for divorce.

What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment -- as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible -- and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband -- an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church -- for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband -- a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”
That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

While Saddleback’s teachings certainly don’t make such an explicit argument for submitting to violence, and Holladay tells abused women they must seek safety before they attempt to reconcile, there is a similar profession of helplessness before biblical mandates. In the audio clips, Holladay protests he could tell women that there was a third biblical justification for divorce, “a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’” But ultimately, he says, there’s not, and the question of separation versus divorce comes down to a matter of dealing with the pain of fixing a marriage now or later, almost a matter of discipline..." more

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet

**************
So, does the Bible promote domestic violence? Or is this the result of the vast human misinterpretation of scripture? I believe it is, and that many are living in a man's world established many generations ago, on the side of ignorance and superiority, presumably within God's law.

What do you think?

Anne Marie

 

[Mr Ripley]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

 

[sidneyworld]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

I think that organized religion covered up divine convenants which cherished women far more than men as being the equalizer, spiritual regulator, motivationalist, and ultimate peacemaker for the sake of their family, community and perhaps humanity. Clan of the Cavebear demonstrates how women initially were communed with respect and love for each other because they were not overwhelmed with a physical sense of superiority. That it was men who divided and conquored their inherent affection for each other to gain a better stronghold to their masculinity, undermining the purpose of women by compromising their value as human beings by decaying their self-esteem.

In nature, it's actually the female in most cases who makes the critical decisions in their respective families, along with taking care of every social aspect of their families' growth. I find it very suspect that in the Bible, In the Old Testament, God's words are an intepretation by profits, but the words of Jesus Christ were spoken literally in person, and many times in front of many people, as testified in scripture and that Jesus' philosophy is virtually infallible, especially on matters concerning the equality of women to men, and that the most powerful are the most humble. This was not the sentiments of the divine dialog of God within the Old Testament.

Jesus spoke of the individual, not the collective. Power was a separation of sorts and had its place in a physical world, but always shelved below divine faith. I truly believe that there has been a somewhat conspiracy theory involving the rankings of women in scripture that eventually became perpetuated throughout history and the greater man's church became, the less valuable a womans worth became.

The Old Testament is extremely ambiguous on this issue and thus easily manipulated to serve the purpose of men of that era and for generations thereafter, and in many cases, in many societies, to this day is still an indoctrination to their worth.

I'm not a woman's libber, so to speak. I have endless issues with NOW and other woman's organization who have in fact done well in their attempt to emasculate men in this society, not unlike many black folks have done well in their attempt to hold every white person responsible for slavery. There is clearly a disporportion in the distribution of equality during the course of mankind and most times it begins with a notion. Hitler had such a notion and brought it into fruition. Etc.

But this is all man's doing, man's application of misinterpreted scripture, whether deliberate or subversive.

Anne Marie

 

[Diuretic]

Given that hermeneutics is a complex topic and too easily pushed aside in favour of a fundamentalist, literalist interpretation, it's entirely possible that some will use this simplistic interpretation to support their view of the world. For non-believers it doesn't matter, but for believers it can be very important. And for the wielders of power, what a back-up....God says this is how it should be. Get out of that one and I'll call you Houdini.

Here's an example:

Ham was born in Queensland, Australia but moved to the United States of America in 1987. He has a bachelor's degree in applied science (with an emphasis on environmental biology) from the Queensland Institute of Technology and also holds a Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland.[4] He is married to Marilyn ("Mally"), whom he describes as a "very, very submissive, supportive wife" who has "always supported me five million percent".[5] The couple have five children—two are married and two live with them in Cincinnati—and have four grandchildren.

Emphasis added.

Ken Ham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

She has never in any way questioned my being away or what I'm doing or anything like that;

The ARK Foundation Web Masters

To each their own, but I have two doormats, I don't need a third doormat that also masquerades as my wife.

So, I'll come down on the "deliberately misinterpreted" side.

 

[Cecilie1200]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

Especially surprising to ME is how you can decry misogyny in one sentence, and then exhibit it yourself in the next by presuming that YOU know what's better for women than they themselves do. If you can't understand why Christian women don't see their situation the way you do, maybe you should turn it around and wonder why YOU don't see it the way THEY do.

 

[AllieBaba]

I'm stunned that we're using the Clan of the Cave Bear to analyze the bible.

WTF?

 

[Mr Ripley]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

Especially surprising to ME is how you can decry misogyny in one sentence, and then exhibit it yourself in the next by presuming that YOU know what's better for women than they themselves do. If you can't understand why Christian women don't see their situation the way you do, maybe you should turn it around and wonder why YOU don't see it the way THEY do.

Reasoning isn't your strong point is it? I know that it's better to be free and respected than it is to be beaten down by your religion, that's pretty simple really. You obviously like to be beaten down by your religion into a subservient female. Why do women do it? Because the simple minded need to believe and belong.

Sidney, if you want a response please keep your answers shorter, life is too short to read your mini novels that go around in circles.

 

[sidneyworld]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

Especially surprising to ME is how you can decry misogyny in one sentence, and then exhibit it yourself in the next by presuming that YOU know what's better for women than they themselves do. If you can't understand why Christian women don't see their situation the way you do, maybe you should turn it around and wonder why YOU don't see it the way THEY do.

Reasoning isn't your strong point is it? I know that it's better to be free and respected than it is to be beaten down by your religion, that's pretty simple really. You obviously like to be beaten down by your religion into a subservient female. Why do women do it? Because the simple minded need to believe and belong.

Sidney, if you want a response please keep your answers shorter, life is too short to read your mini novels that go around in circles.

Ripley, I agree. My apologies. I tend to think for the reader at times and take both positions in a subject which is a result of years of being a paralegal drafting countless complaints, affidavits and briefs. Sheeeesh!

Thanks, Ripley.

Anne Marie

 

[dilloduck]

... and children?

In the thousands of years of the history of religious culture, there are accounts of various levels of oppression of women. Either within a domestic situation, or as a singularity during war or personal opposition within tryanny. This is a critical subject for me because there are endless ways to interpret what is actually oppression/suppression and ultimate submission by women in whatever role they might have assumed or be designated, willfully or otherwise in their life within their community, or within the confines of their personal family/relationship or general within their society, as being acceptable or a disproportioned in the value of women.

My interest here first qualifies a substantial familiarity with domestic violence on a professional level. I traveled throughout this country for several years doing research on domestic violence and had to be inside, and presumably a victim to truly understand the dynamics and common denominator that constituted domestic violence. And some things became remarkably evident to me, among so many other things.

Culture plays a critical part in domestic violence. It's not all about drug and alcohol abuse. As a matter of fact, it had less to do with a drug induced disposition, than the way many men are raised or exposed to prolonged abuse of women.

70% of legitimately abused women in this country who have had to be sheltered are hispanic. And most came into these shelters broken, with two to four children who were initially unapproachable stonefaced and terrified. None of these women, to the best of my knowledge had any drug addiction or alcohol abuse or even smoked cigarettes. The black and caucasion women had an entirely different story and most of these women, few as there were by comparison, were also addicts of some sort. I was in seven shelters ranging from the North East, MidWest and Southern Midwest. The concentration of allegedly abused women in the North East who had to be sheltered were black but their stories outside the earshot of counsellors told a different story. They simply needed shelter until they could find someone else to take care of them and their habits. The Domestic Violence Association of America and other similar programs in this country do not personally investigate the offender as a policy because of the security risk to the victim. If the victim requests it, a police report is filed in that county. But just about anyone can call a Domestic Violence shelter and be allowed in, at least for a few days. In any case, the bottom line here is that genuine and the most violent of domestic violence cases comes in two basic forms, for not much more than two reasons. Culture, and drug abuse. Sometimes its both but not as any viabily consistent formula to consider.

Hispanics are extremely cultural and religious people. The women are taught to respect the male household, including their own chiildren above and beyond their own needs and are completely subordinated to this mentality. They are indoctrinated into this lifestyle at a very young age and the degree by which this exists in this country relies greatly on how long, and far reaching their contact with the rest of society becomes as they become of age and perhaps begin their own family. Education plays a vital part in their liberation from this scenario, but many hispanics live in tight net communities and this is the only thing they know and trust and have as an only sense of familiarity. Those who are abused are living the worst hell imaginable because they are led to believe that the man is the master of their universe, and even those who have considered leaving, will not allow their children to be subjected in being raised without the income and protection that their father, their husbands, their masters have provided. And they do. Hispanic men are wonderful providers. But they do it as a sense of honor with a sword in their hand. Nearly every case I've seen has the same scenario. And, these women still love their men. They had these men's children. They are still in love with their men. It's the only thing they have to hold on to next to their children, because to face the reality of their abuse means they have essentially failed and will have nothing left in their lives. This is real stuff.

Now of course, women of other cultures, even quite wealthy women have faced physical and mental abuse and of course death, while it's less understandable by virture of what might be apparently a viable cache of resources to "escape" the things that bind women to men is far more complicated and far more spiritual and emotional. Or they would indeed leave the hell behind. But it's not in such cases a lack of education or binding culture or religion. It's usually need and fear and what is perceived to be otherwise impractical, venturing out alone into the world after having the security of a home and a household, certainly years in the making. But this is not the core point. Where do men get this notion of such disproportion superiority over the role of women? Roles are different but they are complimentary. But not in domestic violence. Especially with women whose men are pastors, preachers and presumably stand behind a profuse misinterpretation of scripture which is universally accepted beyond secular culture. What a mess!

*******

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
By Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches. Posted February 2, 2009.

Escaping an abusive marriage is no easy task for many evangelical women, many of whom have pastors that say physical abuse is no reason for divorce.

What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment -- as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible -- and never for abuse.

As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”

“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.

Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband -- an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church -- for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”

Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband -- a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”
That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”

There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”

While Saddleback’s teachings certainly don’t make such an explicit argument for submitting to violence, and Holladay tells abused women they must seek safety before they attempt to reconcile, there is a similar profession of helplessness before biblical mandates. In the audio clips, Holladay protests he could tell women that there was a third biblical justification for divorce, “a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’” But ultimately, he says, there’s not, and the question of separation versus divorce comes down to a matter of dealing with the pain of fixing a marriage now or later, almost a matter of discipline..." more

Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet

**************
So, does the Bible promote domestic violence? Or is this the result of the vast human misinterpretation of scripture? I believe it is, and that many are living in a man's world established many generations ago, on the side of ignorance and superiority, presumably within God's law.

What do you think?

Anne Marie

The Bible is an inanimate object. Any actions that result for someone reading it can ONLY be interpreted as things done by the reader who came to his/her own conclusions.

 

[sidneyworld]

I'm stunned that we're using the Clan of the Cave Bear to analyze the bible.

WTF?

Lol. I wasn't explaining the Bible here as much as the relationship of women as it was portrayed in this book. It left an impression, albeit rather abstract in my post.

Anne Marie

 

[Cecilie1200]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women. Especially surprising is that women either don't care or don't mind that their religion beats them down at every turn. I guess you can fool most of the people all of the time. What do you think?

Especially surprising to ME is how you can decry misogyny in one sentence, and then exhibit it yourself in the next by presuming that YOU know what's better for women than they themselves do. If you can't understand why Christian women don't see their situation the way you do, maybe you should turn it around and wonder why YOU don't see it the way THEY do.

Reasoning isn't your strong point is it? I know that it's better to be free and respected than it is to be beaten down by your religion, that's pretty simple really. You obviously like to be beaten down by your religion into a subservient female. Why do women do it? Because the simple minded need to believe and belong.

Sidney, if you want a response please keep your answers shorter, life is too short to read your mini novels that go around in circles.

No, according to your own post, what you "know" is that you are a better judge of what's good for me and whether or not I'm being "beaten down" by my religion than I am. That's misogynistic and patronizing beyond anything I am ACTUALLY experiencing in my religion, thank you, so if it's all the same to you, I will continue making my own decisions based on my actual experiences rather than your condescending and uninformed prejudices. I have no time for bigots OR chauvinists. When you stop fearing women long enough to actually credit them with the ability to think, you call me.

 

[Mr Ripley]

Especially surprising to ME is how you can decry misogyny in one sentence, and then exhibit it yourself in the next by presuming that YOU know what's better for women than they themselves do. If you can't understand why Christian women don't see their situation the way you do, maybe you should turn it around and wonder why YOU don't see it the way THEY do.

Reasoning isn't your strong point is it? I know that it's better to be free and respected than it is to be beaten down by your religion, that's pretty simple really. You obviously like to be beaten down by your religion into a subservient female. Why do women do it? Because the simple minded need to believe and belong.

Sidney, if you want a response please keep your answers shorter, life is too short to read your mini novels that go around in circles.

No, according to your own post, what you "know" is that you are a better judge of what's good for me and whether or not I'm being "beaten down" by my religion than I am. That's misogynistic and patronizing beyond anything I am ACTUALLY experiencing in my religion, thank you, so if it's all the same to you, I will continue making my own decisions based on my actual experiences rather than your condescending and uninformed prejudices. I have no time for bigots OR chauvinists. When you stop fearing women long enough to actually credit them with the ability to think, you call me.

it's simple really, all religions treat women as second class citizens. You seem to understand this, but what you think you're experiencing in your religion isn't necessarily what that religion really talks about. If you want to be blind to that fact, knock yourself out, I really couldn't give a shit. So if you have no time for bigots and chauvinists but have time for me, does that mean that I'm neither?
PS Is it that time of the month or are you always this cranky?

 

[Cecilie1200]

Reasoning isn't your strong point is it? I know that it's better to be free and respected than it is to be beaten down by your religion, that's pretty simple really. You obviously like to be beaten down by your religion into a subservient female. Why do women do it? Because the simple minded need to believe and belong.

Sidney, if you want a response please keep your answers shorter, life is too short to read your mini novels that go around in circles.

No, according to your own post, what you "know" is that you are a better judge of what's good for me and whether or not I'm being "beaten down" by my religion than I am. That's misogynistic and patronizing beyond anything I am ACTUALLY experiencing in my religion, thank you, so if it's all the same to you, I will continue making my own decisions based on my actual experiences rather than your condescending and uninformed prejudices. I have no time for bigots OR chauvinists. When you stop fearing women long enough to actually credit them with the ability to think, you call me.

it's simple really, all religions treat women as second class citizens. You seem to understand this, but what you think you're experiencing in your religion isn't necessarily what that religion really talks about. If you want to be blind to that fact, knock yourself out, I really couldn't give a shit. So if you have no time for bigots and chauvinists but have time for me, does that mean that I'm neither?
PS Is it that time of the month or are you always this cranky?

I will thank you not to project your ignorant biases onto me as something I "seem to understand". It makes me feel like I need a shower, aside from making you sound like an ass. I cannot imagine what I ever said that even BEGAN to make you "think" (for want of a better word) that I share your imbecilic viewpoint. However, to spell it out for the thinking-impaired, my religion adds depth, spiritual growth and nourishment, and comfort to my life. The only thing currently treating me as a second-class citizen is YOU, in your blind desire to hate all religion.

And by the way, I just LOVE that open-minded, feminist shot of "Are you on the rag?" Newsflash, ass hat. You're as distasteful to women ANY time of the month. But I am sorry to hear you have a tiny penis.

FLUSH!

 

[Fatality]

The bible certainly does promote intolerance, bigotry, and violence against women.

says the theologian, not!