Religion: bad news for women and gays?

[Alaric]

Does anyone know of a highly religious society where it is good to be gay or female, I'm a bit stumped to think of one.

my personal view is that religion is bad news for everyone. Most religions are just an excuse to judge

The Episcopal Church of the USA (part of the Anglican Church worldwide) has a female Presiding Bishop (i.e. the top Bishop in their Church hierarchy) and has a pretty enlightened attitude towards homosexuality too (partially stymied, if I've understood correctly, by the central authorities of the Church of England).

"partially stymied, if I've understood correctly, by the central authorities of the Church of England"

In other words, they don't represent the mainstream?

Pagan's don't give a monkies if you're gay and being a women is a bonus

Well, the USA is a big country...

But, no, I don't know what proportion of US Christians identify as Episcopalian (I'm sure Wikipedia would tell me, but I'm really tired so apologies if I don't check). We all know that moderate, tolerant, open-minded American Christians don't get as much press as the Fundamentalist Right... and that may well reflect the actual proportions. I don't know... (I'm not American, just spent a bit of time there recently).

Nor, I'm afraid do I know enough about the governance structures of worldwide Anglicanism to know to what extent the Episcopal Church is independent from the CofE and to what extent is has to answer to the CofE's central authority.

But, just on the 'women' issue... I do know that they have had women bishops for ages and that no-one seems to bat an eye at having a woman Presiding Bishop. So that's one step in the right direction... Not so much in the church I personally attended, but in others I've visited (still within the Episcopal tradition) I have seen statements overtly welcoming/encouraging LGBT Christians.

(Oh, and a very quick google - and now I must go to bed - tells me that it's up to individual Episcopal bishops whether they allow same-sex partnerships to be blessed in church, but that suggests that some, at least, do...)

faerie, you beat me to it!

I think it helps if you separate out the difference between faith (which does not discriminate), and organised religion which tends to be a social construct and which can and has certainly been used as means to arrange society in ways which contradict some if not all the original teachings.

My knowledge is limited, so I stand ready to be corrected, but strongly Buddhist societies do not seem to do either, nor do Hindus, and (as far as women are concerned at least) neither does kibbutz style Judaism.

Quakers?

Buddhists don't much care about whether you are gay or a woman either (some SE cultures might not be so keen, but there is nothing in the suttas / methods that is gender/sexuality dependent).

Quakers (I was an attender some time ago) are also pretty cool :)

I am not gay but I am female.

I think the church is a pretty good place for women. The church is run by women.

The Christian faith is about transforming to the will of God.

"The Christian faith is about transforming to the will of God."

WTF does that even mean? Sounds preachy to me.

The ancient world was a pretty terrible place to be a woman. Women weren't considered to be persons in the legal sense, they didn't really even own their own bodies. Christianity, with its central emphasis on the preciousness of each human being to God, our all being equally extraordinary in his eyes, meant that it was extremely attractive to women (and to slaves). Large numbers of converts in the early church were women and slaves people who were non-persons in Roman society because in the Christian church they were really valued.

Seriously? Are you in possession of the same bible as me?

Yes, Rational, and I have actually read it too. Plus I do know something about the early church.

If you are thinking about things that Paul says you need to set these in the historical context in which they were written.

I'm sorry but I have no patience for picking out the nice bits which are apparently relevant today but dismissing the nasty bits which have to be read in their historical context. Cherrypicking it's called.

Unitarians are very open to women and gay people (very flexible theology). The metropolitan community church is more orthodox in its theology and generally caterers for the lbgt community. The reformed jews keep getting mentioned when there are newspaper articles about civil partnerships in places of worship so I assume they are ok too.

Rational, I think that the majority of religions moved women's rights on in their time but sadly the scriptures then become set in stone and instead of taking the spirit of progession the words are taken as the literal truth by some.

Op it sounds like you are looking for a whole country where the majority of people belong to a religion where is it good to be a woman or gay - not so sure about that one.

And what of the mass exodus from the CofE to Catholicism after the female bishops fiasco? Took them a couple of thousand years to even talk about it and there's still a sizeable opposition. Not to mention the churches who'll still not sanction gay marriage. Not moved on that much really have they?

There isn't any sort of mass exodus, Rational, that's hyperbole.

It's not cherrypicking to understand that the Bible, and particularly the pastoral letters, as written in a particular time and place. I wouldn't dismiss the 'nasty bits', as you call them. I'd merely seek to understand them and what they might mean for us today. That's quite different.

In any case, I think you might start by asking people of faith who are women and or gay about whether their experience is that it is good to be a woman or gay in that faith.

I suspect that most of them would say that has good and bad aspects. So, speaking for myself, it's a bummer that there aren't women bishops yet in the CofE, and depressing that there are sections of the CofE that oppose the ordination of women. But that doesn't stop me being a Christian, because being a Christian is about being a follower of Christ. It's bigger than my sex (or sexuality). And it doesn't stop me being a member of the CofE because its traditions and theology are more than that one issue.

And, for what it's worth, in my view the CofE is an ok place to be a woman. I'm not gay, so I can't speak for that experience. But there are a lot of LGBT around in it.

Rational: those who have departed come from the High Church part of CofE which is hot on the apostolic tradition. IME, they are all gay (trained at Staggers, mainly). The anti-gay part of the Anglican community tends to be found in the evangelical parts, all of whom are very welcoming of women priests and support their becoming bishops. The two issues really don't sit together well.

LBGT people, I meant.

Rational - when you say the bible has "nasty bits" do you perhaps mean the Old Testament? Because the major point of Christianity is that Jesus moved us on from the Old Testament attitudes and behaviours. So the whole Christian religion does rather encourage us to "dismiss the nasty bits", if you mean the nasty bits of the Old Testament. If it didn't, then we would still be living by a set of rules that the Jewish people no longer follow either.

The difficulty over issues like women priests and bishops is that large organisations have a lot of inertia - it takes a lot to get them moving. Smaller churches, even within the Anglican Communion, have managed to sort themselves out, have a debate, and change their rules, without a huge amount of fuss or publicity. eg Scottish Episcopal Church have had female priests for a while, none of the legislation to allow individual churches to "opt out" of the new reality, and recently voted to have women bishops (though we don't actually have one yet). So change is possible, but it takes time and a lot of prodding to make anything large and slow-moving shift in its course.

Agree AMumInScotland, but it's also the case that the CofE is bound, by its traditions and history, to keep a consensus among people who have lots of different kinds of disagreements -- some of which are arguably much more basic to faith and worship that women priests/bishops. A small church in which everyone more or less agrees about everything will find a change such as women priests easier to achieve.

Frankly, I don't care if you think I am preachy, rational. FWIW, I don't think you are very rational but I would find it tedious to call you on every post.

Yes, when you become a Christian, you do transform to the will of God. You do not change God to match the ways of the flesh (there I go preaching again, la la la).

It is a very silly exercise to cherry pick individual bible verses to meet some weird aim. It is much more, erm rational, to read whole portions in context.

The OT, to lots of non-believers, is not palatable because they zoom into parts when God is in a judgment mode. Satan loves when they do this. In truth, the OT is a love story between God and his people. They stray, he pulls them back, they stray, he pulls them back...

If God has put it on your heart to read and try to understand the bible, do it prayerfully, and meditatively. It is usually best to read the bible with other people so that you can discuss the particular verses.