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Entry: The Wrongs of "Rights" Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_wrongs_of_rights#7070 Post contents: @ Philipa, Although the Bible never criticises "inequality" - certainly not in the way "equality" is defined in the West today - your conclusion that ancient Christianity, because of its Roman foundations, encouraged "inequality" between the sexes, is ahistorical. Early Christianity was especially popular among women, and among slaves, because of its message of ultimate transcendence of temporal politics and social classes. (Will some better Biblical scholar than I help me out here? How many of the recipients of St Paul's epistles - and how many personal friends and supporters of his whom he mentioned by name - were women? Quite a lot, as I recall.) One of the most persuasive logical, historical reasons to believe in the "credibility of the witnesses" of Christ's resurrection, is that his resurrection was first witnessed and reported by women, at a time when the testimony of women was considered worthless among Jews (and not very credible among Romans either.) If the story of the Resurrection was a hoax, the hoax's "publishers" would not have said that the first witnesses were women. The first Christians were, literally, women, the women who discovered the empty tomb, whose testimony was considered worthless among their fellow Jews at the time. Jesus Christ was the first REAL feminist. "Son, behold thy mother", he said to my patron Saint, John the Evangelist. (Gloss, I broke with Catholic convention and chose St John for my confirmation name, because he was, and remains, my favourite saint. I guess that disregard of strict convention was my bit of English Protestantism coming out :-) Jesus defended an accused prostitute (or adulteress, it's not clear) from stoning. Many of his first supporters - including financial ones - were women. And thank God the "cult of Mary" was revived around 900 years ago, so much so that many American Protestant fanatics accuse Catholics of being "Mary-worshipers." On that note, here is a photo of the "Miraculous Medal" of BVM Mary, which I wore around my neck every day from age nine to 16 - for which I was occasionally teased/taunted in the showers at my (mostly Protestant) school's Phys-Ed classes, although, to be fair, most of my Protestant classmates expressed a mixture of envy and admiration for my wearing it. (Admiration for my refusing to take it off even when taunted for it, and envy because the Protestants suffer a kind of spiritual poverty by being deprived of the veneration of Mary.) Hm. Now that some of my friends here have dissuaded me from my recent temptation to convert to Protestantism, maybe it's time for me to begin wearing this medal again. Here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Miraculous_medal.jpg/800px-Miraculous_medal.jpg "Inequality between the sexes", my ass. (Apologies to Boyd Cathey who asked me to refrain from foul language, but hey, as our BVM Mary might say, "boys will be boys", yeah? ;-) :-) I'll bet Mother Mary might have even had a word with her Son after He cursed the den of thieves at the Temple with more eloquently "foul" language than I could ever come up with.... :-) Oh, and if any Cultural-Marxist-Feminist might come around to comment here that "Mary was (or is believed to be) a Virgin, but women were not REALLY liberated until the 20th century", well, all I can ask is, "How much of a 'liberation' has it been for women to have the 'liberty' to have sex on the internet like Paris Hilton?" Like our host Taki, I'm an admirer of beautiful women and won't be a hypocrite about it. But let's keep it real and don't pretend that Western women of today are more "free" for having the liberty to be sluts than the BVM Mary was for being, simply, a beautiful soul who, according to the Catholic Church, is closer to Christ than any daughter OR SON of Adam, ever. Sent at: 2008 07 24