 |
| Wombniverse/The Red Sea. Watercolor, India Ink, and Gouache. © Liz Darling 2017. |
This (link right here) is an awesome podcast by Women's Liberation Radio News. You can listen to it on Soundcloud. The episode is on Women's Spirituality, but my favorite part is the segment by Sekhmet She Owl, which starts at minute 48:50. An excerpt:
"Religion is inextricable from patriarchy, and if we want to
set women everywhere free from male domination and give them feminist consciousness,
we have to understand what religion does to them and refute the lies that
religious men tell. Religion is used to colonize women’s minds, to make them
cooperative with male power. The indoctrination starts early in life for most
of us. As girls, we’re forced to go to church or temple or mosque, we’re taught
to pray to all-powerful, all-knowing male god, to beg him for what we need, and
to feel guilty when we disobey him. We’re taught to kneel before him; submit to
him, be grateful to him as the source of all goodness in our lives, and life
itself. There is no equivalent reverence of a female figure anywhere. There is
no female in the individual or collective imagination with such power,
knowledge, or creativity. Men designed it this way, millennia ago, erasing the
goddess that civilizations everywhere once worshiped.
Patriarchal religion places a male authority figure in the
female psyche, leading women and girls to accept male power over them as unquestionable.
Mary Daly said 'when the God is male, the male is God.' Consider how much more
submissive religious women are to the men in their lives compared to secular
women. Consider how much farther away women on the religious right are from
feminism than liberal and leftist women and corresponding religiosity versus
secularism in these two groups. While patriarchal religion is not the source of
misogyny in men or women, it does an excellent job of enhancing the misogyny
already there, and excusing political, cultural, and social expressions of
misogyny. Belief in an omnipotent, male deity and his rules for proper living
render women compliant with male authority, both in the home and in the
community. This is why most religious women on the right go along with the
brazen misogyny of their men. God told them to be obedient wives and daughters.
Patriarchal religion is men’s fantasy of their own absolute power, control,
domination, and immortality. Rather than some metaphysical truth about the
universe or human beings, we should trust male religion to reveal the truth
about the male psyche, male ego, and men’s deepest desires."
-Sekhmet She Owl
-Sekhmet She Owl
 |
| Dualities. India Ink. © Liz Darling 2017. |
