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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
The role of religion in the ruthless discrimination against women
In “On Faith: A Conversation on Religion and Politics with Sally Quinn,” a forum that currently runs in The Washington Post, a highly provocative opinion piece came out last April 13 about the role of religion in gender discrimination. The article, “Religion lies about women,” was contributed by Paula Kirby, a Scotland-based former Christian who is a now a freethinker serving as a consultant to secular organizations.
Kirby contends that the ruthless discrimination against women in many of the world’s societies is largely due to the age-old dogma of Christianity, Islam, and other major religions that women are inferior in the eyes of God. She says that organized religion’s attitude to the respective positions of man and woman is captured in a nutshell by this invocation in Ephesians 5, which is attributed to St Paul: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” Because of this strongly lopsided invocation, Kirby argues, “All is not well with the world, and only the deluded or the disingenuous could claim to see equality where there is only subservience.”
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She observes that that the Abrahamic religions in particular fear female sexuality so much that they go to extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control, constrain, and repress women in every way, like slicing off the clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure, cloaking women from head to toe to severely curtail their experience of the outside world, and forbidding abortion even when pregnancy puts the mother’s life at risk or even if the woman has been raped and is carrying the child of the rapist. These, she says, are stark manifestations of “the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized by the reactionary forces of religion.”
Read Paula Kirby’s “Religion lies about women” in The Washington Post now!
