Cherie Blair thinks god is nice to women
So Cherie Blair is giving a lecture in Rome on Friday titled ‘Religion as a force in protecting women’s human rights’. So…..what’s she going to say then? What can she say? It would be interesting to know.
One wonders if she’s going to just…make stuff up. People do that you know. I’ve noticed it. They like women’s rights, and they like religion, so they want to say the one helps or supports or fosters or protects the other – but there is very little evidence of that, and quite a lot of evidence of its opposite. So what are they to do? Well…just say things, that’s what. Religion allows that, and most other institutions and bystanders allow it too. It’s even expected. Religion is a good thing (the idea seems to be); other good things are good things; religion should be associated with these other good things; therefore when saying things about religion it’s commendable to use a certain kind of verb (helps, supports, etc) between the word ‘religion’ and the good things. No need to look for evidence or consider the plausibility of the use of such verbs; just do the necessary. So Karen Armstrong informs us that ‘at the core of every single one of the world religions is the virtue of compassion’ – which just isn’t true. The seven deadly sins don’t even mention cruelty, which is just as well given how vindictive the OT god is, and Jesus is not much better. It’s the modern piety that religion is all about compassion – that compassion is ‘at the core of’ all religions, whatever ‘at the core’ of means – but compassion has not always been the important virtue that it is now; Armstrong is just blatantly reading her own modern morality back into the old religions. It seems unlikely that Cherie Blair will be attempting anything else.
To a certain kind of person, all good things have to ultimately be linked and all bad things do too. Nothing can just be good, or bad, it has to be good because it’s religious, or bad because it’s un-American, or whatever.
I’m sounding a lot like G. E. Moore, but it’s true.
I can never figure out what to make of Cherie Blair. She seems to swing wildly between intelligent and well-considered opinions, and complete idiocy like this.
I wonder how Cherie’s going to square that talk with her God-besotted husband’s new Catholic fetish. Oh, what OB said. She’ll just make stuff up. Jesus H. Christ Tomatoes in a Sidecar (as my mother said when fully exasperated), can’t these people do or say *anything* about the state of the world without reference to imaginary, contradictory, anti-human, retrograde bullshit?
So, why IS it that churches are so full of females?
JoshS,
Apparently it was Cherie who talked him into converting, so it sounds like she is even more keen on Catholicism than he is.
A good question ChrisPer. Almost as good as the one about why churches are almost exclusively run by males.
Of course, the answer to my question is pretty well understood these days. I genuinely wish we had answer to yours. I suspect it would constitute a significant advance in the culture.
I perhaps should add that “by an answer” I mean a good one. We’ve always had plenty of crap ones.
ChrisPer, was your question meant to imply that the answer is that religion is in fact ‘a force in protecting women’s rights’? Or that women think it is? If so, do you think the first is true? The second? If so, why?
Maybe one partial reason is that churches do often provide a social support network which women can access and value. In some situations it may be the only support network available to women. This is probably most true in mobile societies where a family may move to an area and have no family or established friendships. The church can provide these ready made, up and running. Or in places where traditional gender roles are seen as very much the norm.
Men may place less value on such networks while having access to a variety of alternative social situations such as the workplace, sports associations and the pub.
OB, I have no doubt that your observations are correct, as far as they go. My question was meant to suggest that there may be a bigger picture than the framing you have used. Either the capacity of women for rational behaviour is called into question, or there are seriously important compensations for the absence of a non-discriminatory social environment.
Don, yes, and… I find my spouse is far more socially connected than I am, even if you completely eliminate church-related networks.
Funny how stereotyping puts men at the pub, most of the men I know are working like hell and their recreation is with the wife and family . The pubs I go past seem to be spilling both men and women into the the street.
Why women are so churchy: social support network and comfort, plus a socially acceptable outlet for activity and energy for those women who were pressured/guilted/otherwise prevented from having careers.
The same reason why oppressed minorities (African-Americans, for instance) are religious. Oppressed people often are. Religion does have its uses as social network and comfort, I’ve never seen an atheist who denied that.
Jenavir
Well hello, I think you have nailed it fairly and squarely on the head. The lower down the scale of power, often, (but by no means always), the more influential a religion can be on a benign, socially organising level.
The villages where my modestly-incomed, at one point disastrously and lengthily bereaved methodist ancestors grew up were focussed around the church not just for its *religion*.
The fluid social organisation of that time (late fifities, early sixties) was often a communitarian, selfless, and often none-too judgemental arrrangement; the church just happened to be the *building* where it was easiest to meet, if not the only place to meet. They were all “devout believers”, of course…
I blame my overweening use of texting during the last three months for the abysmal syntax in my previous post. So sorry. Bad thumbs.
‘Religion as a force in protecting women’s human rights’? Hahahahahaha!!!!! She must be joking. She’d better be…!
Before Karen Armstrong went so weird about Islam (and her explanation of it in her memoirs is bizarre – that she identified the so-called “sense of violation” some Muslims claimed to feel over The Sataniv Verses with her own feelings about the failure of authorities to recognise her epilepsy), she did a good book called The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity and the Creation of the Sex War in the West. Perhaps Cherie should read it. It includes the stories of a number of women whose lives and health (physical and mental) were wrecked by organised religion.
So, why IS it that churches are so full of females?
And why IS it that churches are so full of SUBSERVIENT COW-TOWING females?
To answer your question, Marie-Therese:
Because a lot of women have internalised the bullshit that gets thrown at them by the God-botherers. If someone already has low self-esteem, s/he (in this case, she) will accept it when other people tell her that she is, indeed, worthless. What is particularly nauseating with Christianity is its ascribing of virtue to ‘humility’ and turning yourself into a doormat (especially if female). It reinforces their lack of self-worth, and tells them that they shall be ‘blessed’ for it.