Women & Religion

I had to laugh at Dylan G’s comment, “I don’t doubt that the world worshipped the Goddess, but I doubt that reason for worshipping the Goddess is because human beings didn’t know that sex made babies. I have to believe that women were smart enough to realize why their bellies would swell up and why they would end up pushing out a child nine months later.� That’s actually a good point…I was so enraptured by the simplistic notion that early humans thought that it happened by magic and therefore women were magical, that I forgot to think about it in evolutionary terms. Ape, penguin and zebra fathers have a clear understanding of which children are theirs (scent markers I guess?) so I don’t doubt evolution would have developed some sort of parentage marker for early humans. I read someplace that human babies are born resembling the father so the father will take responsibility for the baby once it’s born. If that’s true, then how did early humans not make the connection? So perhaps the writers weren’t giving full depth to the reasoning behind matriarchal societies or worship of the Goddess. But I probably need to take an Anthropology class before I could process this little idea further and make any sense.

In response to Stephanie R: I too was surprised by Stone and Pagel’s articles. I was not aware that there were so many accounts of Goddess worshiping in history. However, it did confuse me a bit to learn about the goddesses that Stone discussed. I suppose I should open my mind to the idea of there being more than one kind of God because from my understanding and teachings, there is only one God. I like how you mentioned how maybe if we had kept with the idea of earth being important that we would not be facing the current situations we are with pollution and climate changes. That is a very good point. Also, I agree with you about how we are simply incorporating what we already know about religion into “even larger meanings� (pg.72). I heard about the movie The Da Vinci Code, but have never seen it, so the idea that women played such an important part in the history of the Bible was very shocking to me. I never knew about all of the important women that Pagel mentions in her article. As interesting as it was to read about these women such as Mary Magdelene, it was very surprising to me that growing up in the church, I had not heard of so many of the other people. That helped to prove the claims of the feminist leaders that Christianity, as well as other religions, is such a male dominated thing. I find it very disturbing that so much of the gospel has been hidden and rejected by men and probably many women and I would like to learn more about what has been left out.

Pasted this in the week 2 cafe the first time:

WEEK 3 Comments

I liked what Krystle M. had to say. The way that things were written in history can be taken either way. We have to look at general writing of the times and even how the people of the time spoke. There are many things today that people say and write that would be taken completely out of context from someone not in that particular group of people. The same can be said of what we read in history. We are not from the same culture, sex or time and we may have different impressions of what they are trying to say.

I enjoyed reading everyone's comments on this weeks reading and there's one question still stuck in my head. Why don't women just go back and re-translate the Bible? What is stopping us from being able to do that entirely? There are obvious discrepencies in the version of the Bible today from both the writers and the translators. The only way that I see us getting a somewhat more accurate representation is to find a woman that would be able to translate it correctly. Or even better, a team of men and women that could work on it together in order to have an unbiased viewpoint of what is being said.

I was also surprised by Stone and Pagel’s articles since I as well didn’t know there were so many times Goddesses were worshiping in history. I had no clue about this and didn’t really even think about it. Pagel mentioned a lot of important women in the time, which I had no clue about as well. I have never even heard of all the names that was mentioned in Pagel’s reading. I thought it was great to read about people I have never heard of before and know what they have done and how it has helped us today, since I can put it in my own point of view. I don’t understand how so much of the Gospel and reading of god can be left out. I think when we do find out how much and what was left out it will be amazing to read and understand what it was.