Women Priests

[Karatema]

I've just been having a Twitter argument with a man who believes women should not be Priests!

He's added me to his list of "bores", which is fine by me, because I think people like him belong in the past. AIBU?

I'm sure MNers will tell me if I am.

I'm not religious but that's so insensitive, @Birdsandbeez

@berrygirlie

I'm not religious but that's so insensitive, *@Birdsandbeez*

It's tongue in cheek but the message has an element of truth.

People say how the religious do good work, charity etc - you don't need to be religious to be good.

I bet you can't think of any good deed done by the religious that can't equally done by an atheist. However I bet you can think of many evil deeds that are carried out in the name of religion but can't be done in the name of atheism.

That's true, but religious and non-religious people (including those somewhat in between e.g. spiritual people) are a widely spread group and so morality doesn't come into play imo. If people find religion helps them be better people then I'll support that. I agree that most good tasks can be completed irrespective of religion though, but there are also terrorist actions and crimes committed by athiests.

It's about the people themselves, not the religion in general from my perspective.

@berrygirlie

That's true, but religious and non-religious people (including those somewhat in between e.g. spiritual people) are a widely spread group and so morality doesn't come into play imo. If people find religion helps them be better people then I'll support that. I agree that most good tasks can be completed irrespective of religion though, but there are also terrorist actions and crimes committed by athiests.

It's about the people themselves, not the religion in general from my perspective.

Yes there are terrorist attacks committed by atheists but not in the name of atheism - there is a big difference.

People often say Hitler and Stalin were atheists and committed some of the worst mass murder in history - that is true but they didn't murder because they were atheist.

Both Hitler and Stalin had moustaches they didn't murder because of that either.

A correlation and a cause aren't the same.

Hitler was a Catholic.

@AryaStarkWolf

I think women should just stop going to a church that views them as second class citizens tbh

Can you put this on billboards please.

You don’t have to be religious to do good in the community but the stats seem to suggest that something compels more people with a faith to do something:

Studies show that 54 percent of people who regularly attend religious services do volunteer work, compared to 32 percent of people who do not regularly attend services [source: National Service Resources].
money.howstuffworks.com › faith-b...

Populations attending churches are aged compared to the general populace at large. They literally have more time on their hands, thanks to retirement, pensions etc.

This hijacking and monopolisation of morality and do-gooding by religions and the religious is one of the single most off-putting things about them. Well actually, no, it's one of a multitude of enormously off-putting things about them.

@Moonmelodies

Hitler was a Catholic.

The Nazis also persecuted the Catholic Church, so I think that's a bit of a thin argument.

The Vicar and curate (trainee Vicar) at my church are both women.

The Nazis also persecuted the Catholic Church, so I think that's a bit of a thin argument

Yes, until they came to a nice cozy arrangement that the Catholic Church would turn a blind eye to Nazi atrocities, or indeed, facilitate them to a degree, and in return the Nazis stopped persecuting the church. Guess how all those prominent Nazis ended up in South America in the late 40's and early 50's? It wasn't courtesy of assistance by Thomas Cook.

@Moonmelodies

Hitler was a Catholic.

He was also white and German but do you think all white people or Germans in 2020 are like Hitler?

@Hollyhocksarenotmessy

It's a theological issue and lots of churches hold this position.

I'm an atheist, I dont care what they do, but i think its outside of normal equality issues. Religion by it's very nature, isn't logical.

Yeah, I'm always a little surprised that people think this is an equality issue as if it is a job description. In any of the sacramental churches it's not, it's a very specific question of the role of the priest during the eucharist, and the relation of the material body to that.

It's not dissimilar to the idea in certain types of neopaganism that have a fertility element there is a male and female principle, and these need to be represented by an actual man and actual woman in ritual function, because, you know, the body is real and that principle isn't just notional, separate from it's material instantiation.

Women can, theoretically, and in many cases do and have fulfilled all kind of leadership roles in Catholicism or the Orthodox churches, mitred abbesses functioned as bishops except for the sacramental element in the middle ages, for example, theoretically there is no reason you couldn't have women as cardinals and I would not be surprised to see that at some point, etc.

But it's difficult to see what you could compare sacramental theology to in other elements of employment equality.

I bet you can't think of any good deed done by the religious that can't equally done by an atheist. However I bet you can think of many evil deeds that are carried out in the name of religion but can't be done in the name of atheism.

May I point you to China and the 'reeducation' concentration camps to maintain state atheism or any of the other examples where state atheism turned horrifically vile and violent?

If you want to handwave those away because atheism didn't make them do it, well, religion doesn't make people violent either. It's a reason people use to excuse violence and why they should use force, just like China uses maintain social cohesion through atheism as an excuse (and pretty much every government ever has used at some point), but it doesn't make them do anything. They don't do it because of doctrine, they do it because systemic power without rigiorous checks enables them to do so, both on a small and nationwide scale.

When something becomes an institution that people can claim power through, there will be corruption. Where you have an ideology that puts an 'objective' view of good, you will have those who do evil to maintain that ideal. While among the best known ideological groups, religious groups aren't unique in this. Anyone with the ability and a desire for power and control can become violent when the systems around them support it - and they all do at some point.

I'm philosophically monist, no skin in this game, but the whole religion makes things bad and atheism would make everything better shows a lack of understanding of how systemic corruption works and the history of atheist institutions. Believing in any deities doesn't make anyone a saint, but not believing in any deities doesn't make people or institutions any better.

I mean, science can also nuke whole islands off the map. I've been working on a project about islands and places that no longer exist because of nuclear and bio-warfare testing and...yeah, just like people can use religion as an excuse, people can use science as an excuse too.

I bet you can't think of any good deed done by the religious that can't equally done by an atheist. However I bet you can think of many evil deeds that are carried out in the name of religion but can't be done in the name of atheism

North Korea is technically an atheist state, unless you count communism or Kim-worship as a religion. They have violated every human right on the planet and committed any evil deed you can imagine, and some you probably can't.

Yeah, I'm an atheist myself, quite strident bordering on anti-theist, but I don't think there's any mileage in claiming atheistic states >>> religious states.

Secularism in an otherwise peaceable, open, democratic and tolerant society, yes, infinitely preferable to religious autocracy etc, but when the best example of a strictly atheistic state is the former DDR....

Telling that what is now the former East Germany is still the least religious part of the planet, and the former DDR wasn't formed purely out of a desire for an atheistic state, but I don't think it's desirable to live in any state where they attempt to forbid freedom of worship. Keep it out of public life by all means, but individuals should absolutely be free to believe and worship however they like, no matter how outlandish or ridiculous it might appear to others.

@AnotherNameForChristmas

I bet you can't think of any good deed done by the religious that can't equally done by an atheist. However I bet you can think of many evil deeds that are carried out in the name of religion but can't be done in the name of atheism

North Korea is technically an atheist state, unless you count communism or Kim-worship as a religion. They have violated every human right on the planet and committed any evil deed you can imagine, and some you probably can't.

North Korea is largely atheist but it isn't violating human rights because of atheism.

A lot of nations are predominately atheist but they don't have totalitarian governments, the cause of the oppression in North Korea is independent of it's lack of religiousity.

Like I say, a correlation and a cause aren't the same.

The point made about religious people doing good works wasn't about their moral superiority, the poster was saying that she has not observed the religious to be particularly fearful of death - a reason for religiosity suggested by a previous poster.

There doesn't seem to be any particular evidence that the religious are more afraid of death, however, in fact it seems to be quite clear at this moment in time that the public at large generally is deeply fearful of death, has little capacity to talk about it, and generally has a very difficult time dealing with it's inevibility.

Telling that what is now the former East Germany is still the least religious part of the planet, and the former DDR wasn't formed purely out of a desire for an atheistic state

I'm not actually sure what this means because it makes no sense. But the DDR wasn't an atheist state as such. Indeed religion was tolerated and there were a lot of churches, the meetings at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig are a good example of the church being tolerated. (although they did grow into something way beyond the church, of course)

Angela Merkel certainly wasn't hindered in any way in her career - her father was a pastor.

Good points about the re-education camps in places like China, North Korea. China, and the USSR in its day, go in for that kind of thing because of the belief that a person can't serve two masters and so the state must come first and the other must be indoctrinated out (they have also tried that to a greater or lesser degree with the family, too). Where the religious organisations and the state have the same goal - the state allows the religions to carry on more or less underground depending on which state you're talking about. The point about those types of thing, i think, are less anti-religion and more pro-totalitarian state.

There doesn't seem to be any particular evidence that the religious are more afraid of death, however, in fact it seems to be quite clear at this moment in time that the public at large generally is deeply fearful of death, has little capacity to talk about it, and generally has a very difficult time dealing with it's inevibility

This is interesting from the point of view that one of the things I find most reassuring about my atheism is a total lack of concern about death. Sure, I don't want to suffer a painful or drawn-out demise more than anyone else does, but with regard to what happens afterwards? Couldn't give two hoots. There's nothing to be afraid of at all in non-existence. The universe functioned perfectly well before I ever existed, and it'll continue to function long after I'm gone. There's no point at all in worrying about people left behind etc, because my non-existence means it's entirely impossible for me to impact that in any way whatsoever.

I think a lot of the people you are talking about have a lot of those fears because of a lingering, residual sense of religiosity, even if they are not outright religiously minded themselves. They fear something that they can't quite put their finger on, when the fact is accepting that there is literally nothing, and no reason to fear anything as a result, is enormously liberating and anxiety-reducing.

If you think about this, a religion that you aren't quite fully bought into, telling you that you have to do this or that in order to ascend into the afterlife, but you don't fully believe it or fully disbelieve it either, that's got to play on your mind and act as a source of anxiety. If you never put any credence in those notions to begin with, you simply don't have that doubt, and you don't have the resultant anxiety.

I accept many people with faith will feel exactly the same way about death as I do, i.e. totally fearless, but they're not the issue really, it's the people who are kinda stuck in the middle.

I'm not actually sure what this means because it makes no sense. But the DDR wasn't an atheist state as such

No, but religious adherence certainly wasn't encouraged, with the result that over the lifespan of the state religiosity atrophied to the point where the DDR became the single state with the least preponderance of religiosity on the planet. The area of modern unified Germany that was formerly the DDR still has the lowest preponderance of religiosity of any comparable area on earth, proving that once religion goes out of a society, not only does society not fall apart, but it seems that religion isn't particularly missed and it doesn't make a comeback either.

This is why I think it's inevitable that sooner or later the world will move toward a generally more atheistic and secular outlook. Perhaps not in places that are still Theocracies, but certainly in the Western world it's in terminal decline, and there's nothing to suggest that it will reappear once it is gone.

Ok - it's a bit rich to be claiming that the Soviets, or the maorists, etc, never persecuted people or engaged in evil acts directly out of their atheism. It's in the barest way historically untrue, evidentially so. Many have explicitly acted in that way - there were anti-religious campaigns in many of these nations that included execution of believers priests, and leaders, and even today in China religion and freedom of thought generally are vigorously suppressed.

Anyone who claims otherwise is letting ideology get in the way of facts and maybe should think about that in terms of claiming not to be ideologically motivated.

Also, as another poster said, power adheres in institutions and that isn't divided particularly along religious lines, or non-religious ones. It's a feature of institutions, and it'd naive not to understand that.

I'd also point out though, that the idea that you have a block called "atheism" and a block called "religious", or that atheism when encountered isn't in fact enmeshed in a wider philosophical system that determines how people think, is philosophically naive. Marxism, or social Darwinism, or existentialism, are whole worldviews, and their atheism is part of what structures their thinking, and their ethics, just like platonism, or stoicism, or Hinduism.

But really, the clue there is something wrong in that kind of statement should be as simple as reading a little history.

Not sure how the Maoists became maorists in my post, sorry!

I don't think it is the case that the religious are afraid of death but they fall for a promise of an afterlife as a reward for being good in this life, yet there is no evidence of an afterlife.

Why would anyone base their acts on this life on what they think may happen after their death - there isn't anything to suggest you will survive your own death.

Telling people they will fester in hell for eternity if they don't follow religious doctrine is little more than blackmail and seeks to control people.

Birdsandbeez, thoughts of the afterlife is not the only reason why people might embrace a religion (Judaism for instance takes relatively little interest in the afterlife).

Nor (other pp) do they have to be motivated by a belief that only religious people are capable of good actions. Most Christians I know do not believe that.

You can also be converted to a religion without having been exposed either to a religious upbringing or to any proselytising activity.

I became a Christian as a child. Grew up in perhaps the most secular country in the world, with a family whose religious activities were confined to singing a few Christmas carols and attending the occasional church wedding. There were no religious schools in my country and if there had been I certainly wouldn't have attended them.
The closest I can come to explaining what happened to me was a religious experience, a sense of a presence. Started reading the Bible on my own, started attending church (together with a handful of octogenarians I had never met before).

I don't try to follow the will of God for fear of any punishment He might dish out. It's more like my relationship with my parents: I don't want to let them down because I love them, not because I am afraid of anything they might do to me or because they've ever tried to bribe me to behave.

@Moonmelodies - Hitler was not a Catholic. He was a Teutonic Pagan. The Nazis loathed Christianity and aimed to replace it with the Nazi religion which was pagan. Look at the work of Alfred Rosenberg.