3636 Institutionalized Misogyny

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact."

-- Bertrand Russell --

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I found this from The Word Detective (http://www.word-detective.com/2012/10/grizzlygrisly/): 

"I actually thought, back in the 1990s, that the increasing popularity of the internet would be a boon for reading and language skills because, back then, reading was the only thing you could do online. Practice makes perfect, yadda yadda. Text is still the bulk of content online, but the catch is that much of it appears to have been written by drunken chipmunks, or perhaps just by people with a very shaky grasp of standard spelling. Oh well, things do fall apart. I used to joke about the inevitable arrival of a “point and grunt” interface for computers, but then the iPhone and iPad arrived, proving that true genius often consists of patenting the stupidest thing you can possibly imagine."

A man after my own heart.

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I found this at Roba's blog (http://www.andfaraway.net/blog/2012/10/08/an-awareness-of-the-universe/):

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many – perhaps most – of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven – or hell. [Emphasis mine - Silk]

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation.

The intro to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

(I have been unable to verify the source, since I don't happen to have a copy of the book here, and different publication dates tend to have different introductions anyway.  But I know Roba to be intelligent and well-read, so I'll take her word for it.)

Roba was remarking on how mind-blowing the size of the universe is.

Me, my first thought was, "Sheesh!  I didn't know Clarke was a Mormon!"

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Ok, now I get into religion.  It's just my opinion, and I'm allowed to have one, even if you disagree.  If I go straight to hell for it, so be it.  If you got here on a search and are tempted to blast me or strive to educate me in the comments, don't bother.  It isn't worth your time to compose or my time to delete, and I won't respond.

Basically, I don't respect The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes, they can be very nice people. That's not what I mean.  They shouldn't feel hurt; there are many sects and religions I don't respect.  Join the club.  I just respect you guys less.  A lot less.

What I don't respect are the beliefs.  I'm not talking about gold tablets or (early) polygamy or racist policies, although I have a hard time "getting" any of that.  What gets me is the frank misogynism.

Many religious systems, if not most, are misogynistic to a greater or lesser degree.  Women are considered lesser in the eyes of God, dirty, the bearer and source of sin, tempters.  I'm looking at you, Christians (Catholics in particular), Muslims, conservative Jews, in general any religion invented by (ok, divinely revealed to, if you insist) men of the male persuasion.  But at least in those religions, women are still children of God, even if they are allowed no voice or role.

Of all, Mormons are the worst offenders against women.

If you were born into a Mormon family I can understand why you stay.  We cling to what we know.  I'll give you a pass.  But I absolutely cannot respect someone's choice to convert to that religion.  I can understand why a man might.  The temporal (this life) advantages are enormous.  And the promised afterlife for a man is amazing. (I have a belief that whatever you truly believe will happen to you after death, does.  Any man who also believes that will absolutely love what the Latter Day Saints promise.)

However, I cannot understand why any intelligent, sane, self-respecting woman would convert to, consciously join, a church that tells women that they have no value to God or anyone else except as given to them by a human-type man.  Any woman who does must be missing one of those three attributes.

Here's how it works.  When a Mormon man dies, he becomes a god, literally, and gets a whole planet for himself to be the god of.  He can then populate the planet with women, as many as he wants apparently, who will be absolutely compliant to his wishes and are happy to act as sexually available handmaidens.

Women aren't so lucky.  When they die they don't go to "heaven" (a male god's planet) unless they are called to heaven by a man.  If no man calls them, they stay in torment for eternity.

Thud.

What does that tell women? They'd better find a man in this life and keep him happy until one or the other of them dies.  Shut up.  Be compliant.  In this religion, God doesn't consign you to Hell, a man does.  He can even do it by default. 

Of all the world's religions, this seems the most obviously designed by males, for males, period, the least spiritual religion of all (at least of all I know of).

I don't understand why ANY woman would believe that crap.  I can understand why men would want to, but they certainly get no respect from me for not saying, "Hey, this isn't right.  Something's wrong here."
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