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How has religion influenced your ideas and beliefs about men and women and how they are valued?
Written 2 December 2002 for Women’s Studies
How has religion influenced your ideas and beliefs about men and women and how they are valued?
I was not raised in a religious household, per se, but my mom was raised Catholic, so some of her spiritual influence was passed on to me as a child, and we occasionally attended Catholic services. I remember being baptized and attending catechism for a short time, as a young girl, but I do not remember much about the details as to what was said or what I was taught. I can recall reciting numerous prayers and coloring-in pictures of biblical scenes, but that is about it.
I do remember visualizing God as a very tall, slender, old white male with long wavy white hair and a long white beard that reached the ground (sort of like Dumbledore). There was never a point in my childhood where I visualized or thought of God as a female, or as a combination of male and female. I always accepted that God must be male, because I saw only males as religious leaders in the church; and males held most of the power in the world (and of course, still do).
It was not until much later in my life, at the age of seventeen, when I turned to Christianity; however, I neglected to acknowledge the Old Testament as much more than a collection of male-interpreted fallacies. I started out attending services regularly, but I found the sermons about women to be rather demeaning, and I could not apply or relate to anything that was said about women to my own life. As I read through the Bible and found all the scripture directly referring to women, I only found that women were either subservient homemakers, or evil whores, which seemed—to me—to be too limited to be accurate. At that point, I decided to expunge the Old Testament from my studies, and to only focus on the New Testament.
I have found that Jesus had a lot more nice things to say about women, and that they did indeed have a much greater role in human society at that time than has been documented by the Old Testament. The interesting thing I have found with regard to both the Old and New Testament is that Jesus was an androgynous portrayal of God, and that completely contrasted to “God the Father” of the Old Testament. In my opinion the two books are completely separate doctrines, and being a Christian and not a Jew, I have decided to follow the one that makes more sense and can be applied to my life as a female. It does bother me that women are always referred to as “the weaker sex” with regards to the Bible and religion, but it seems as though most of what has been written has been biased information, committed to paper by men. I believe that, as a woman, I can identify with Jesus much more than with “God the Father,” and I am glad that the New Testament was adopted as the correction and renewal of the Old Testament for Christian believers. I no longer attend services because of the sexism involved; however, I do pray and study on my own, which is just as good in my opinion.
This is an excerpt from a paper I wrote for Women’s Studies, Sociology 115, 2 December 2002; It has not been revised at all, except for minor grammatical corrections.
Upon reading this, I was actually shocked at my own self for recognizing the Jewish issue so long ago. I honestly had no idea that I have had this nagging awareness for quite some time, at least since 2002, as evidenced by this paper.
Anyway, I am now twenty-seven, and I have come to be amused at my complete naivety and state of confusion with regards to the Bible. I think that it is important to document my own evolution in this regard, because most people have a really difficult time reconciling the Old and New Testaments, as well as, identifying with anything in the Bible—especially women. I hope that upon reading about my own development, you will come to see that I used to be just as confused and turned off as any other typical American. I can understand why people fall away from the faith; it is ludicrous if you do not understand the Jewish issue, which pervades both doctrines. I have many friends and acquaintances that have forsaken Christianity because of this.
I learned all of this while studying Luther and Hitler. Hitler really had an astute mind and was able to make sense out of all of this biblical hodge-podge. He has had, by and far, the most influence on my own personal faith, and it was not until I started studying what Hitler had to say about Christ and Christianity that I really embraced it. I, too, had started to fall away, because I became utterly disillusioned by the flabbiness and unnaturalness of Christianity. I also had a very hard time making any sense of anything I had read.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only parts I understood were isolated sections of the four Gospels. As soon as I read Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, Table-Talk, and Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, well, everything just fell into its logical place. I finally was able to understand the Bible, for the first time; Hitler had a way of bringing it back to life and making it pertinent to the modern age. He was really quite amazing in this respect; that is an undeniable fact. He was ardent about denying his possibly being a prophet—of sorts—; I don’t know about that. Prophets are never recognized or appreciated in their own lands or eras. Hitler may have his place yet.
Jewish references erased in newly found Nazi Bible An institute in Germany has unearthed a Nazi bible ordered by Adolf Hitler to replace the old and new testaments expunged of all references to Jews. Hitler's race theorists even rewrote the 10 commandments and added two more for good measure in the book called ‘German with God’ which was—alongside Hitler’ s autobiography—meant to be required reading in every home in his Third Reich. Thou shall not kill, coveting one’s neighbor’s wife, thou shall not steal and all other others were scrapped by a regime that stole, murdered and plundered its way across the world. Hitler admired the ceremony and majesty of the church—he admitted as much in Mein Kampf—but hated its teachings which had no place in his vision of Germanic supermen ruling lesser races devoid of ‘outdated’ concepts such as mercy and love. But he knew the power of the church in Germany and even he could not banish it overnight. He was even forced to abandon the systematic murder of the handicapped and insane before the war when outspoken bishops began to speak against it. Instead his plan was to gradually ‘Nazify’ the church beginning with a theological centre he set up in 1939 to rewrite the Holy Bible. He appointed lackey professors to work on a thoroughly Nazi version that would remove all references to Jews and all compassion. Their brief: ‘The cleanse church texts of all non-Ayran influences.’ The first to go were the 10 Commandments. The Nazi 12 run: “Honor God and believe in him wholeheartedly. Seek out the peace of God. Avoid all hypocrisy. Holy is your health and life! Holy is your wellbeing and honor! Holy is your truth and fidelity! Honor your father and mother—your children are your aid and your example. Keep the blood pure and your honor holy! Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers. Always be ready to help and to forgive. Honor your Fuehrer and master! Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice. That is what God wants from us!” More important for Hitler, however, was the eradication of Jewish words, including Hallelulja, Jehova and even Jerusalem—it was instead termed the ‘the eternal city of God.’ “The book will have to serve the fight against the immortal Jewish enemy!” said Hitler in a memorandum to the institute in Eisenach. Hansjoerg Buss of the Nordelbischen Church Office discovered the Bible in an archive search. It was printed in 1941 by a company in Weimar and was shipped out to thousands of churches across Nazi-occupied Europe. It is understood most have been destroyed. The name of the office Hitler created to shape the Bible in his image was the ‘Institute for the research and removal of the Jewish influence on German church life.’ One of the major tasks was to ignore Jesus’ Jewish roots and turn him into an Aryan. Other words specifically banned by Hitler’s “race-haters” were Zion, Hosanna, Galilee and Moses. One order found in the archives for a special exhibition in Eisenach of the institute’s bizarre work came from Walter Grundmann, the anti-Semitic director appointed by Hitler. He wrote in 1941: “The Bible must become Jew-free and the German people must see that the Jews are the mortal enemy who threaten their very existence.” Hymn books were also trawled and ‘Ayranized’ with no references to make the party elite balk during the few times they were ever likely to find themselves in a Christian church. At its height, a team of 50 worked on re-writing hymn books and the Bible. But it was all a charade as far as Hitler and his S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler were concerned. Both dreamed of being overlords of an essentially pagan society where the only virtues to be praised were iron hardness and a capability to obey any order, no matter what. “Human kindness and the moral compass as set by the Bible were laughable to them,” said Ulrich Messner, a Nazi expert. The King James Bible is a little under 800 pages in paperback form. The Nazi ‘Bible’ was 750 pages, after the references to Jews had been banished and Nazi improvements added.
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