Our Chattering Classes Explain it All For You

“Every major religion’s texts were written at a time when women were regarded as little better than talking cattle.”

As I have said before, one of the things contempt does it blind us to the thing we hold in contempt. No effort is made to understand what is we hold in contempt because we imagine that, being contemptible, it is not worth understanding. That may work if something is genuinely contemptible. But if it’s not (as for instance, “religion” is not) we wind up making fools of ourselves and doubly so when the religion happens to be the actual revelation of God Almighty. So, for instance, the fool who writes the above passage knows absolutely nothing about, say, Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman and smashing four social barriers–religious, ethnic, political and gender–all at once. He knows nothing at all about Jesus treating Mary of Bethany as a disciple of equal dignity with all his other disciples (which is what “sitting at his feet” signifies). He knows nothing of Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles. He knows nothing of Paul, who said that in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female and who worked side by side with many women in the spread of the gospel. Nor does he seem to have grasped the significance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was emphatically not viewed by the early Church as little better than a talking cow.

Does this mean there was no sexism in the Church. Of course not. But it does mean that the New Testament really did bring something new into a world in which, due to the Fall, women were universally oppressed. It was the Christian tradition that gave birth to the idea that the love of woman was ennobling. It was the Christian tradition that universalized the idea that man and woman are of equal dignity. Indeed, the whole concept of equality is *nothing but* a mystical idea that comes to us from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Empirical science knows nothing of human equality. The notion that we can get rid of the Christian tradition and retain a faith in human equality is one of the great lies the devil is busy telling the world today.