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How to Change the World

Religions don't create values.  Religions endorse values.

There are some very common human values, although none of them is universally accepted.  Tell the truth most of the time.  Don't kill unnecessarily.  Don't steal if it can be avoided.  Don't mess with someone else's spouse.  Such things.  Most religions have variants of those kinds of things.  There is no absolute agreement on those things; just general agreement.  The devil is in the details.

There are, also, purely formal "commandments".  Be good.  Do what is right.  Be a good person.  Behave toward other people the way you would like for them to treat you.  That is just a way of saying:  be moral.  Just what we should do varies from place to place and time to time.

There is incredible disagreement, too.  Some religions endorse polygamy.  Some permit serial monogamy.  Some  religions acquiesce to slavery.  Some oppose it.  Some religions call for punishing anyone who does not agree with the religious doctrine.  Some live and let live.

Always, religions select from whatever is generally accepted in a culture (although sometimes it is a distant culture) and endorse some set of behaviors.  If they believe very strongly about their ethical standards, their community standards, they say God told them it was right.  Of course, they may change their minds, later, and then say slavery, for instance, is wrong.  God told them so.

I know all of that, and I would like to suggest just one ethical standard that no religion could exempt itself from, that everybody had to honor:  women have to be understood and treated as equals.

No more automatic male heads of households.  No more giving daughters away to some other man.  No more genital mutilation.  No more assuming that males should decide whether to have children, or how, or when.  No more all male priesthoods.  No more burkas, except for fun, or style, or costume.  Admire St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or Mohammed, or Buddha.  Just no more treating females like property.

That would change the world.

Personally, I would not care in the least if a religion believed in one god, or seven hundred.  For all I care, a religion could work one day and eat cold soup the other six.  Don't shave, or shave your heads.  Wear baggy pants.  Refuse to eat goat meat, or eat only corn flakes.  Dance, or don't dance.  Just know that women and men are equals:  behave like that.

No choice!  Put it in your religion or don't.  It won't matter.  You have to do it.

What would happen, of course, is that pretty soon it would be the First Commandment.  Religions almost always come around, eventually.  But whether they do or don't, women and men have to be equals.  After a while, even the Pope would agree.  She is certain to.

[And truth be told, I just remembered that today is International Women's Day.  The hundredth anniversary.]

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