20 Vile Quotes Against Women By Religious Leaders From St. Augustine to Pat Robertson

[Triana]

With diatribes about entertainers who invite rape and moms who are destroying America by supporting their families...with ignorant arguments about fetuses that masturbate, and females who might as well if they use contraception, and fetal personhood that trumps the personhood of females...it’s tempting to think that Christian conservatives have reached some new pinnacle of hating women and sexuality. But the sad reality is that even the media’s most unabashed misogynists like Michele Bachmann, Michael Burgess, Lou Dobbs and Juan Williams are actually tame compared to their ideological ancestors, including some of the biggest names in Christian history.

In past centuries, men who were hailed as church fathers, patriarchs, doctors, and even saints boldly expressed their view that females are inferior and loathsome, and they explained at length why God shared their perspective. Lest we fall into the conservative trap of thinking that the past was somehow better than the nasty messes we face today, it’s worth pondering some of the lovely tidbits the Church has thought fit to preserve and promote in the centuries since Christianity was founded. Here are some of the most savory. They come from three waves of religious leaders: “Fathers” of the Catholic Church, Protestant reformers, and American patriarchs who inherited the mantle of both.

Church Doctors and Fathers

· Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman. –Saint Clement of Alexandria, Christian theologian (c150-215)

· In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die... Woman, you are the gate to hell. –Tertullian, “the father of Latin Christianity” (c160-225)

· Woman is a temple built over a sewer. –Tertullian, “the father of Latin Christianity” (c160-225)

THE REST (if you can stomach it):

http://www.alternet.org/belief/20-vile-quotes-against-women-religious-leaders-st-augustine-pat-robertson

[meow2u3]

1. St. Augie' sexism was a combination of ignorance and struggles w/his own lust

Between widespread 4th century beliefs that women were nothing but defective men and the defense mechanism we now call reaction formation (going to the opposite extreme to deal with unacceptable impulses), it's understandable.

Nowadays, there's no excuse to belittle women in the name of God because we know better, or at least should know better than to believe women are not as human as men.

[Arugula Latte]

4. And, really, there's no excuse to do anything in the name of God

because whatever "God" does is all made up in some mortal human's head.

[DreamGypsy]

2. And Tommy Aquinas definitely got the biology wrong...

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence.

Sorry, Dude, your gender is the cheaper model. Takes two full volumes of instructions to build a Woman; one volume and a carelessly written addendum to build a Man.

From Wikipedia, the X chromosome:

The X chromosome in humans spans more than 153 million base pairs (the building material of DNA). It represents about 2000 out of 20,000 - 25,000 genes. Each person normally has one pair of sex chromosomes in each cell. <snip>

Identifying genes on each chromosome is an active area of genetic research. Due to the fact that researchers use different approaches to predict the number of genes on each chromosome, the estimated number of genes varies. The X chromosome contains about 2000 genes compared to the Y chromosome containing 78 genes, out of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 total genes in the human genome.

The special instructions needed to build a Man have been disappearing like the hairs on an aging guy's head over the 166 million years since we split from our monotreme cousins by adopting the XY game. For a while, it was thought that all the Y chromosome genes would disappear.

Again from Wikipedia, the Y chromosome:

The X and Y chromosomes are thought to have evolved from a pair of identical chromosomes, termed autosomes, when an ancestral mammal developed an allelic variation, a so-called 'sex locus' – simply possessing this allele caused the organism to be male. The chromosome with this allele became the Y chromosome, while the other member of the pair became the X chromosome. Over time, genes which were beneficial for males and harmful to (or had no effect on) females either developed on the Y chromosome, or were acquired through the process of translocation.

<snip>

By one estimate, the human Y chromosome has lost 1,393 of its 1,438 original genes over the course of its existence, and linear extrapolation of this 1,393 gene loss over 300 million years gives a rate of genetic loss of 4.6 genes per million years. Continued loss of genes at the 4.6 genes per million year rate would result in a Y chromosome with no functional genes --- that is the Y chromosome would lose complete function --- within the next 10 million years. Comparative genomic analysis, however, reveals that many mammalian species are experiencing a similar loss of function in their heterozygous sex chromosome. Degeneration may simply be the fate of all nonrecombining sex chromosomes due to three common evolutionary forces: high mutation rate, inefficient selection and genetic drift. Furthermore, comparisons of the human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes (first published in 2005) show that the human Y chromosome has not lost any genes since the divergence of humans and chimpanzees between 6–7 million years ago, and a scientific report in 2012 stated that only one gene had been lost since humans diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 million years ago. These facts provide direct evidence that the linear extrapolation model is flawed and suggest that the current human Y chromosome is either no longer shrinking or is shrinking at a much slower rate than 4.6 genes per million years estimated by the linear extrapolation model.

<snip>

The human Y chromosome is particularly exposed to high mutation rates due to the environment in which it is housed. The Y chromosome is passed exclusively through sperm, which undergo multiple cell divisions during gametogenesis. Each cellular division provides further opportunity to accumulate base pair mutations. Additionally, sperm are stored in the highly oxidative environment of the testis, which encourages further mutation. These two conditions combined put the Y chromosome at a risk of mutation 4.8 times greater than the rest of the genome.

Without the ability to recombine during meiosis, the Y chromosome is unable to expose individual alleles to natural selection. Deleterious alleles are allowed to "hitchhike" with beneficial neighbors, thus propagating maladapted alleles in to the next generation. Conversely, advantageous alleles may be selected against if they are surrounded by harmful alleles (background selection). Due to this inability to sort through its gene content, the Y chromosome is particularly prone to the accumulation of "junk" DNA. Massive accumulations of retrotransposable elements are scattered throughout the Y. The random insertion of DNA segments often disrupts encoded gene sequences and renders them nonfunctional. However, the Y chromosome has no way of weeding out these "jumping genes". Without the ability to isolate alleles, selection cannot effectively act upon them.

A clear, quantitative indication of this inefficiency is the entropy rate of the Y chromosome. Whereas all other chromosomes in the human genome have entropy rates of 1.5–1.9 bits per nucleotide (compared to the theoretical maximum of exactly 2 for no redundancy), the Y chromosome's entropy rate is only 0.84. This means the Y chromosome has a much lower information content relative to its overall length; it is more redundant.

Got it, Tommy?? Stick that in your Summa Theologica and smoke it!

Thanks for the post, Triana.

[Arugula Latte]

3. Religion can go eff itself.

The three major patriarchal desert monotheisms have brought little but misery to humans, particularly women.

Here's a "salute" to you, religion:

[Triana]

6. My sentiments exactly! n/t

[Initech]

7. [phone]

[Arugula Latte]

5. K&R

[Enthusiast]

8. These wise men were right. Women should remain humbly and unobtrusively respectful toward men.

I keed.

[Enthusiast]

9. Kicked and Recommended!

This is where organized religion will take us. Backwards.

Women's rights in a society are an accurate gauge of that society's level of progress and enlightenment.

[Sherman A1]

10. K&R

Thanks for posting.

[Nye Bevan]

11. Here's another: "sorry ladies, you're not allowed to drive here"

- Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia