I have been asked why I put so much time and thought into my critique of WomanChrist. As one friend put it, at least the book suggests a more feminist christianity, so why do I not like it more? As I noted to the friend (in a very enjoyable and thoughtful discussion over lunch), I have deep ideological issues with two concepts here, and they’re both interfering with my enjoyment of, and any agreement with, the book.<\/p>\n
First, I intensely dislike rigged contests, and androcentric religion is the biggest rigger of all in the contest of life. It’s tough enough to do well in a system set up to cut you down. Why then would anyone want to fight and scrabble for the crumbs dropped from the table of the privileged? That’s what the book ended up feeling like to me: a way for women to try to claim they deserved bigger crumbs. It’s a religiously loaded euphemism, but I’m one of those who would rather reign in hell than grovel in heaven.<\/p>\n
Second, any religion which supposedly purports to be for everyone — but which then carefully teaches<\/i> that over half of the human race is somehow inferior to the other part, and only the supposed “superior” part is trustworthy enough to lead the religion — is just whacked. If I had a job in a corporation run along those lines, I would so<\/i> sue them for sexual harassment.<\/p>\n
This is not to say, faced with such a situation, that my reaction to the book is the only logical or feasible one. If I’ve learned anything over my life, it’s that we’re all living our own stories, and creating our own internal truths. I know there are women and men who deeply and passionately believe in, say, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. In such a situation I find I must applaud any attempt to change all the major religions back to more divinely egalitarian forms. At the same time, the very need<\/i> for such effort within patrifocally based religions make me both angry and sad — angry that women have to struggle so for any recognition as human beings on a par with the male of the species, and sad that this struggle is still<\/i> on-going.<\/p>\nTolerating the alien<\/h3>\n
After writing the WomanChrist<\/i> review, I got asked a related and fascinating over-arching question by Paka, one of my readers: “What conceivable ‘good’ does christianity offer a woman?” It’s a question I’ve been struggling with for a while now, especially since it can be expanded logically to “Why do women in particular, and people in general, sometimes passionately support ideologies which actually harm<\/i> them?”<\/p>\n
Over the years I’ve slowly come to believe this is not a straightforwardly answerable question. We cannot accurately say, for example, “they” are all foolish sheep, or brainwashed, or whatever. I feel, in fact, that such dismissive answers run the risk of becoming reductio ad absurdum<\/i> arguments — which, I think, also shows the issue has not been given enough thought.<\/p>\n
So, in no particular order, here are some of the possible reasons I’ve come up with or been told of, which might explain why people support ideologies which are harmful to them. If you can think of any I’ve missed, I’d be interested to hear them. For lack of a better term, I’m using “they” to signify those who hold these ideologies.<\/p>\n
This is interesting for a number of reasons since, like any other belief system, there are both good and bad parts to it. True, secularists are usually free of damaging religious superstition and dogma… but it seems to me we’ve lost something in reducing the world to so much mechanically integrated systems. We have no reverence for the little things any more; we have intellectually castrated our instinctive empathy with the natural world. Why pause in the accumulation of money and power to consider the sexual organs of specific perennial biota? Maybe simply because roses smell good, and make us happy?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
I have seen no good results of this style of argumentation, although I’ve seen these techniques backfire dramatically. They seem to make people feel smugly self-righteous if they’re the belittling mockers, as if they’ve ‘won’ something — although I’ve no idea what they feel they’ve won, since I’ve never seen them successfully change anyone’s mind. If the participants are on the receiving end of this pointless cruelty, they seem to end up angry and feeling emotionally besieged. In such a situation, I’ve noticed they either cling ever more tenaciously and rigidly to their beliefs — which is a big loss to rationality, in my admittedly prejudiced viewpoint — or, tragically, they fall back on apathy and cynicism, losing all interest in any<\/i> part of the issue in question.<\/p>\n