Skip to main content

Leftover Ribs


She lives in Afghanistan.


She was raped by a relative, so she has humiliated her family, and deserves to die.  


iShe has agreed to marry the guy who raped her, so they are going to let her live.


It's a man's world where men, created in the image of God, own their women.  


It isn't about Afghanistan, and Sharia law.  It is about Michele Bachmann, too, and the head of her Biblical household--Marcus--who told her to go to law school.  She hated the idea, but Michele believes, too, that men are the heads of their households.  Michele isn't a Muslim.  She blames Jesus.

She is wrong about that.  It isn't about Muhammed or Jesus.  It is about men and women.  Do you think women invented a god who made them servants?  Which of the female authors of the holy books wrote that women should keep their heads covered, and shut up, in church?

Quick!  Who was our first female president?   In what year did women first hold a majority of seats in Congress?  How many Popes, or Cardinals, or Bishops, or Priests have been women?

Why do women pay any attention, at all, to what holy men tell them to do, or what worth they have?

God is male.  Jesus was a bachelor.  Mary was an eternal virgin, with babies.  We can deduce that the Spirit of God, which came upon her, must have been male.  All of the Apostles were men.  Popes?  Bishops?  Priests?

That young girl in Afghanistan--there are thousands of them, just as there are millions of Michele Bachmanns--is not first a victim of religion.  She is first a victim of men.  The men invented the religion.  The men created god in their own image.  Then god created women to be handmaidens, from leftover ribs.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...