Happy Mothers Day!
.
"Every Woman Should Be Filled With Shame By The Thought That She Is A Woman"...

..the previous declaration was brought to you by St. Clement of Alexandria from the early 2nd Century of our "beloved" Christianity.

His and other's thoughts and ideas brought justification to and were the beginning of the open denigration of women throughout early Christianity that ultimately led to the Witch Trials and Witch Hunts that ultimately led to the deaths of untold thousands of innocent women, men and children on both hemishperes.

This 300 year period of witch-hunting from the 15th Century to the 18th Century is what R.H. Robbins called "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of Western Civilization."

The Witch Hunts were an eruption of Orthodox Christianity's villification of women, "the weaker vessel," in St. Peter's words.

Add to that the thoughts from the Inquisitors who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (the handbook for determining who is a witch, gaining their convictions and clarifying the barbaric ways of punishing them) who claimed that women were more likely to become witches than men, "because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than men; because being formed from a man's rib they are only imperfect animals and crooked whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose midst Christ emerged."

It also didn't help that 13th Century preachers found fault with women on all sorts of counts..."they denounced women on the one hand for the lascivious and carnal provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give thought to divine things."

According to a Dominican of essentially the same time-frame as above, "woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest and a hindrance to devotion."

A man in 1621 lamented, "of women's unnatural, unsatiable lust...what country, what village doth not complain?"

The Church Father Tertullian also chimed in on why women deserve their status as despised and inferior human beings..."and do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of THAT tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was not valiant enough to attack. YOU destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert, that is, death; even the Son Of God HAD to die."

Still others expressed the above view more bluntly. The 6th Century Christian philosopher, Boethius, wrote in "The Consolation of Philosophy" that "woman is a temple built upon a sewer." Bishops at the 6th Century Council of Macon voted as to "whether women even had souls".

In the 10th Century Odo of Cluny declared that, "to embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure".

The 13th Century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake in creating woman: "nothing deficient or defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought not to have been produced then."

The Lutherans at Wittenborg debated whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women responsible for all sin. As the Bible's Apocrypha states, "Of woman came the beginning of sin and thanks to her, we all must die." It was also understood that women were impediments to spirituality in a context where God reigns strictly from heaven and demands a renunciation of physical pleasure.

And of course, the final clincher, from 1st Corinthians 7:1 which states, "It is a good thing for a man to have nothing to do with a woman."

Hey girls, didn't mean to ruin your day but...why and how have living, breathing, thinking women put up with this misogynistic crap for so long throughout history even essentially to this modern day of so-called Christianity???

Perhaps it's summed up best, (and to which I concur) in the following by historian Arnold Toynbee...

"Religion and its practices have consistently been one of women's fiercest enemies...the fact that many women do not realize this shows how thorough the brainwashing and intimidation have been."

So much for our "beloved" Christianity huh?

"I think no more of taking another wife than I do of buying a cow." - Apostle Heber C. Kimball, The Twenty Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace, p. 101

Also quoted in Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19, Chapter 17, "Taking a Wife and Buying a Cow".