Religion & violence against women..

‘Guff’ is how two people whose opinion I value described my assertion that religion is merely a cloak to justify violence against women, when in reality it is sadistic assault for sexual indulgence.
 

So let’s get started.
 

We can dismiss so-called ‘honour’ killings (has there ever been such a prostitution of language?).
 

These foul murders, often in the most brutal circumstances, have been ascribed to Islam. The skewed logic is that all such murders are committed by Muslims, QED they stem from Islam.
 

Actually, they almost all stem from Pakistan, which happens to be Islamic. And they are not committed by the authority of Sharia but by semi-detached members of the human race, barbarians whom we have allowed to bring their vile and primitive customs from some tribal backwater in Pakistan to pollute society in the UK, whereas they should be confined to their own designated areas of origin, very much like animals in a game reserve.

So my starting point is that the Abrahamic religions have been conceived by men; if you believe that  they came down from the stratosphere in tablets of stone, you are definitely a suitable case for treatment. All assume the inferiority of women. In the same way that slavery is founded on a belief in the inferiority of the slave (whom the Bible places on the same footing as women).

“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

All three Abrahamic religions subscribe to the concept of female inferiority. They share the ‘Adam and Eve’ belief that it was a woman who let loose evil upon the world..

They share the belief that menstruating women are unclean and to be avoided. Some Orthodox Jews will never shake hands with a woman in case she is menstruating, and I guess this is the reason why it bad protocol to shake hands with a Muslim woman.

I
n Christian societies, until recent times women were regarded as property and had no rights. It was only in Victorian times that emancipating laws were passed, such as the Married Women’s Property Act, prior to which all the wife’s property passed to the husband, leaving the wife in danger of future penury if the marriage went bad.

It was perfectly lawful to beat your wife with a stick, provided it was no more than a finger’s thickness. You can see where my thesis is now going.

I
t is only in very recent years that women’s rights have gained the protection of the law.

But we are not there yet.

What are the main issues of concern to the Anglican Church. Poverty? Sin? Inequality? Not that I can see.

The C of E is sex-obsessed over women bishops and gay priests.

The Catholic Church does not even believe that women are responsible for their own bodies. Their Christian duty is to be a brood-mare. Abortion is not permitted even if the woman’s life is in danger, as in the recent Irish case where the woman was neither Catholic nor Christian nor Irish – a clear case of manslaughter if ever I heard of one.

In a case of rape, a woman is obliged to carry the child of her rapist.

In other words, a woman has no intrinsic value other than to breed. Only a short step from there to violence against her.

And so to Judaism.

I
n Orthodox synagogues men pray separately from women and in many women are relegated to an upstairs gallery. Gender hierarchies  are entrenched in Jewish thought; orthodox Jewish men are required to say everyday thanks to a God "who has not made me a woman".

There are the ‘chained’ women; their husbands can refuse them a religious divorce so they can’t remarry.

To quote a couple of contemporary cases that at least made headlines  outside Israel, we have the 8-year old girl spat on as she went to school for being ‘inappropriately dressed’, and the four girls made to sit at the back of the bus, even though such blatant discrimination is against the law.

Where Islam stands out is that it is mired in the 9^th Century. The Torah still sanctions the stoning of women caught in adultery, but this has not been exercised for a while. Not so in Islam.

So what is more likely? That women are beaten out of religious duty? Or out of sexual gratification dressed up as such?