(October 10, 2014 at 2:18 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: As a secularist, my view is that Christianity indeed deserves credit for giving women a more respected position in the Church than what was typically accepted in their culture....[but]....the New Testament, while it contains some of this progression, is not the end-all-be-all of moral instruction that we would expect it to be if it was the infallible word of God.
There's also the widespread pro-feminist historical view about how pre-Abrahamic, paleolithic cultures likely adored women, had women as leaders of their faith, and even represented their creator god(s) as feminine -- and that Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths largely developed their patriarchical stucture, including their retrograde positions on women and sex, largely as a method to distinguish their 'newer' religion from the better estalished 'dirty-sex-crazed-heathen wymen cults'
that came before them.
I don't know if there is enough real evidence to establish quite all that, but if that idea generally reflects reality during paleolithic times, one might even reconsider any 'deserved progression' re: women found in the New Testament and Christianity, as little more than a small mound at the bottom of a very deep valley, when considering the longer view of human cultural development.
