TALIBAN AND THE RISING TIDE OF WOMEN
Two women have captured my heart in the last few days,
Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. I’m
sure that most of you have heard about Malaya.
She is only fourteen years old.
She lies in a medical induced coma trying to survive gunshot wounds to
the head and neck. She was shot point
blank by the Taliban because she attended school and spoke out for the rights
of other girls to attend school. If she
lives, the Taliban has promised to try to murder her again. The bright spot in this,
if there is one, is that Malala’s family is supporting her and her actions against
the murderous threats of the Taliban. Another
bright spot occurred in the Australian parliament recently. Prime Minister Julia Gillard gave the most passionate
speech condemning misogyny in government I have ever heard. Check out Gillard’s speech attacking Tony
Abbott (opposition) for his sexist
actions and remarks in government on Youtube if you haven’t already. Julia Gillard is spell binding. The video has
gone viral.
BC MP Elizabeth May
and Premier Pauline Marois of Quebec are two Canadian women leaders trying to
move governments to embrace a more egalitarian value system. Their efforts to increase respect for women,
kids and the environment are of course severely hampered by our prime minister
who belongs to a Christian evangelical fundamentalist church. The pastor and congregation of this church are
heavily steeped in Biblical prophecy which they take literally. In my
view this in turn fosters the belief that it doesn’t matter much about the
environment anyway, or the needs of the poor, who are primarily women and children
because it’s all going to end soon as we are in the End Times . According to scripture the End Times precedes
the Second Coming of Christ.
Mary Daly, international Catholic theologian. Philosopher and
feminist (she died two years ago) suggested in her book “Beyond God the Father”
that the Second Coming so anticipated by Christian fundamentalists might be
hugely surprised when it gets here. Daly
suggests the Second Coming is really the “Be-Coming” of women in leadership
roles demanding equality for all humans along with care for the environment. In other words, Daly thinks women will bring
the end of patrarichary. In the meantime we have male Conservative politicians
who are trying to bring back the debate on when life begins, which is of
course, the angle they hope might eventually outlaw abortion. The question of when life begins for a single
human egg is still fuzzy, but one thing is becoming clearer all the time, and
that is how, when and where the first truly human person (Homo sapiens sapiens)
was born.
Homo means man, of course, and Homo sapiens sapiens means
thinking man (to differentiate modern humans from Neanderthal types). When these words are strung together they
mean the human man, hence the term mankind. Women are
supposed to be included in this description.
The thought and image of women as subordinate to the male simply became
part of religious thinking which eventually turned into civil law in Europe. Remember Adam and Eve? This myth is deeply
embedded in at least half of the world’s brains, both male and female. But the
entire world is going to have to rethink this Biblical myth, and other creation
stories, because according to the geneticists
at University of California, Berkeley, when Eve was born there was no
Adam. The very first Homo sapiens sapiens
wasn’t a guy at all…she was a baby girl.
And she was a mutant, so to speak.
That is, she mutated in her mother’s womb to become the first truly
human being, one that differentiated her from all the other man-apes (and
women-apes). According to these geneticists
this happened approximately two hundred thousand years ago in Africa and all of
the humans on earth today are descended from this first human female
child. But after the rise of patriarchy
female children were treated brutally as property of the men; this is still
happening in many countries. Let us
center our minds and hearts on the life and death struggle our little sister and
daughter Malala Yousafzai is waging. More later about how and when the geneticists
made this discovery of the first human. Oh, and this video was just sent to me from
Silver Donald Cameron. Check it out, too, if you have time.
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