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From: morphy@truebalt.cco.caltech.EDU (Jones Maxime Murphy)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Newspaper Article
Message-ID: <1990Oct12.214229.23575@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 13 Oct 90 01:52:45 GMT
References: <4836@sarah>
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu
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Being from a catholic background myself, I believe catholicism and
feminism are fundamentally incompatible. In fact, the entire
Judaeo-Christian-Islamic family of genetically related religions have
several fatal flaws that render them useless for the development of
spirituality in a manner unvitiated by gender bias.

First of all, god is consistently referred to as male, unlike the
supreme deities of many other religions. When he does choose to sire a
child, he does so with no advance warning to the person involved. We
now call that rape.

[Actually, I believe the angel Gabriel was sent down to ask her.
Isn't that what the "Anunciation" celebrates?  --CLT]

Most damning, however, is that god consistently prefers to talk to
men. All prophets are male, as is Christ. Women are purely auxiliary,
as far as god is concerned.

The results of this are obvious. While women are welcome to perform,
say, fundraising duties or other auxiliary functions, they are almost
universally excluded from the power structure of organized
Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions.

[How do you account for the presence of female priests in non Roman
Catholic churches?  The Methodists, Episcopalians, and others have
ordained female priests.  I'm not disputing your original point, but
it appears that there are winds of change -- do you think that
religions are capable of change?  --CLT]

JMM in Pasadena.