Let Eve Take Her Place at the Table

In the Berenstain Bears children’s book “The Bike Lesson,” the father does everything wrong, after which he repeatedly says, “and that’s what not to do, small bear.” The misogynist religious fanatics who brutalized the women of Afghanistan have done their best to teach us such a lesson.

By showing the horrors to which religion utterly corrupted by masculine insecurity can lead, they’ve shown us what not to do. If we learn from their lesson, the ill wind emanating from caves in Afghanistan may yet blow us some good.

As the newly liberated women in Afghanistan throw off their burkas, it’s a most appropriate time to declare, finally and in no uncertain terms, that our religions are liberating themselves from the masculine insecurity that has distorted them for thousands of years.

I consider myself to be a religious person. But I believe that religion itself is in need of salvation from its own history, which has been almost entirely male-dominated. This has frequently undermined the teachings of the founders of the great religions, most of whom preached what can be classified as more feminine behaviors.

Here is a fanciful scenario that could help move the world toward religion shorn of misogynist baggage: God might visit a major religious leader. Because I am a Catholic, I’ll say the pope. God would say, “I am neither male nor female but both.” Then the pope could issue an encyclical declaring that women are created in God’s image as much as men are, so women should neither be barred from the priesthood nor subordinated to men; that women are not unclean, inferior beings, so there is no reason why men who are married to them cannot be priests; that homosexuals are God’s children as much as heterosexuals are; and that a God of compassion could not favor overpopulation leading to famine and pestilence, so birth control is common-sense morality in an overpopulated world.

If John Paul II issued such a statement, it surely would not impress fanatics like Osama bin Laden or even many conservatives of all religious persuasions, but the pope would bring his achievements in the areas of women’s rights, sexuality and religion up to the level of his accomplishments as a champion of the oppressed. He would go down in history as the greatest pope ever.

These changes would, moreover, bring Christianity much closer to the largely feminine values preached by Jesus than it has been since it fell under the influence of such men as Tertullian, the early Christian theologian whose writings are indistinguishable from the attitudes of the Taliban. (“And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too,” Tertullian ranted. “You are the devil’s gateway; ... you destroyed so easily God’s image, man.”) Then, to complete this scenario, all the major leaders of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religions could get together and say to those who see the world as the Taliban does: “Yes, it’s just what you fear. We’re your worst nightmare--we really do believe women and men are equal. And henceforth, we’re going make our religious practices live up to that belief.”

If the leaders of the world’s major religions were to get together and use a “sex remover” on their conceptions of God, we could achieve a new-time religion based on sexual equality, one that sees God as both male and female. Religious leaders shouldn’t wait for a visit from God to do this.

Could this conservative pope and the leaders of other religions make such a dramatic reversal? Part of our faith is to believe in miracles.