B. U. G. S.

I read somewhere that Islam says that hell is full of women. Islam hasn’t much use for women, but of course muslim men have to have SOME use for them, or no more muslim men. By the way, I saw a while back the new queen of Jordan on TV. She was stunning.Beautiful. She wore no headcovering but her manners put the western newsbabes to shame. She was straight forward but very courteous. She acted as if she was representing more than just her very important self.

Comment by Shari

What I laughingly and for lack of a better term call my memory does not recall the King of Jordan stooping to marry an Arab. Did the last couple marry a European woman?

Long before the Da Vinci stuff came up, it was well known that the fatal mistake Mithraism made was excluding women completely. From what I can understand through all the rewritten history, today’s Mass was formerly the Agape, the Love Feast. It was held in private homes and the WOMEN tended to preside.

In the Eastern Rite Church which I was baptized into they still don’t let you have any breakfast at all until you have taken the Host in bread and wine. Catholics used to do that, but not any more.

By the time the Eucharist is over, you are very hungry. At that point the Orthodox priest hands out the Agape, bread. Lots of bread. It is, to coin a phrase, like manna from heaven.

Speaking as a politician rather than a theologian, which I ain’t, this is very significant to me.

You don’t need the DaVince Code to know that women MADE Christianity.

But there came a time when Christianity stopped being the faith of slaves and women, as they would put it, and became the faith of the Empire. By then, the Roman Empire’s capital was in Constantinople, and it was a Middle Eastern Empire. Middle Easterners consider women as several steps below rabbits, and the very idea of women presiding over an Agape was Doubleplusuntough.

Another historical thread enters in here:

There was absolutely nothing new about Islam. The Middle East was never purged of Arianism. Between Constantine and the rise of Island there was one long war in which the Grreks tried to impose the Trinitarian idea on churches inthe Middle East.

Arianism said exactly what Islam said, that there was one God, and He is God, and Christ was his Prophet.

Islam still says that CHRIST, not Mohammed, will come to judge the quick and the dead. But he is NOT the son of God.

I am no theologian. My field is politics. In other words, my expertise is how you win out.

There came a point at which the Middle Eastern Roman Empire had to stop depending on women and put them “in their place.” The Da Vinci Code is right about that, though it gets the dates wrong. And one reason I repsect Orthodoxy is because, despite the fact that it is something everybody is supposed to forget, Orthoxy simply cannot omit the Agape.

In the end this absolute fanaticism about males is straight politics. The Church needed women — and slaves — back when it was just getting off the ground.

But when Christianity began to be a major competitor in the real world of power politics, it was a simple fact that men had the strength and the power, and men wanted a political phil — sorry, I mean a religion – that belonged to THEM. So all the influence they had granted to women was taken back.

This is not exactly a shock to an expert on political power. Screwing the people you based your power on before is standard Bush Administration policy. Does anybody really think it’s NEW?

Somehow everybody tries to make a mystery of history.

So does any of this discredit Christianity? It does only if you need everything to be a Just-So story.

We keep hearing that Christianity grew in the Just-So Way, the good guys versus the bad guys. If you accept The Faith, it will make you Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.

That enraged C S Lewis. He kept saying that he wished people would stop arguing for his faith because it caused good things to happen or it was a comfort or it went with the tide of history. CS Lewis kept saying taht the only question is whether it is TRUE or not.

Not whether Jesus was the true result of Moses. Not whether Christians were the historical good guys.

Is it TRUE or not?

So I dissect the history of every faith as a political strategist.

And I keep being told, “You are violating the myth I need to believe.”

You think I am evil. I think you should lay off myths.