The War on Women: An Ecological, Historical, Socio-Political, and Religious Synthesis

By P.D. Lingenfelter Highby

Highby expertly cuts apart the 5000-year history of the war on women so that she can decode and explain the ancient - deliberately difficult and elitist historical jargon for the sake of the intelligent general reader. Highby surprises us by showing how the war on women always played out as parallel to a war against Nature, as well as a class war. Therefore, the war devalues Nature, slaves, and lower-class men as well as women. This war influenced the Renaissance Spirit/Matter split with its witch burnings. It applies to current Darwinian versus Creationism arguments, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479793778

P.D. Lingenfelter Highby

A retired professor of religious studies and philosophy (Urbana University, Urbana, Ohio, where she taught on campus and at two off-campus sites at a men's prison and a woman's prison), author P.O. Highby was no "Ivory Tower" professor. She emphasizes that she obtained her Ph.D. in theology and philosophy not because she prefers these fields, but because she had learned from experience that these categories caused the most harm to women and children. Highby accidentally learned of the religious cover-up and outright erasure of data on the war on women and Nature while using science, not seminary, libraries.

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Copyright © 2013 by P.D. Lingenfelter Highby.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013902600

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4797-9376-1

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Rev. date: 02/25/2013

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Contents

I      Introduction

II      Prologue

III      Time Lines of Logos Development

IV      Overview: How Christianity Subdues Both Nature And Women

V      Systematic Theology—The Biggest Weapon In The War

VI      God/Trinity

VII      Creation-Out-Of-Nothing

VIII      Human Nature

IX      Redemption or Salvation

X      Church

XI      End Times or Ultimate Things

XII      The Science/Religion Split

XIII      Summary

I

Introduction

Because of its total connection to the historical devaluation of Nature, The War On Women is the most important and momentous war in existence.

Not just human existence, but the future of our troubled planet depends upon our understanding of the above bald and bold statement.

In our Western World, such a broad claim can grow even more all encompassing: the War on Women in the West is also tied to issues regarding slavery, mistreatment of indigenous populations, and child abuse, as well as to the momentous Spirit-Matter or Science-Religion Split that occurred in the Renaissance. Ancient Aristotelian either… . /or… logic, with its accompanying hierarchical structure in philosophy and theology, allowed this grouping together of all of the above subjects.

And so, in order to understand the War on Women, we do need to see not only the historical configurations, but also the accompanying ecological, socio-economic, political, and religious/philosophical patterns within that war.

Women have always been beaten, raped, tortured, and killed in the war on women, but today, with a more educated populace, the bullies are waging a more passive-aggressive war that includes severe verbal and psychological abuse as well as physical abuse. Cultures are no longer simplistic cave-man cultures of physicality. The war on women has become primarily a War of Words. How can mere words be such powerful weapons?

Historically, words have had power to harm

1.   whenever rich, intelligent, and educated—therefore powerful persons have been bullies who desire power and control via rhetoric, which is the art or science of using words effectively in speaking or writing so as to influence and persuade, or

2.   whenever women have not been allowed to be educated and, therefore, remain poor, ignorant, and uneducated regarding rhetoric the skillful manipulation of written or spoken words.

Socio-politically, words have had power to harm

•   whenever women are the mere property of their fathers, then husbands, and finally, their sons when their husbands are dead,

•   whenever women cannot own any property or money of their own,

•   whenever women have no claim to their children,

•   whenever women could not vote (as late as 1920 in the U.S.), and

•   whenever married women in many states had no control over the bank account (even in the 1970s in the U.S.).

Religiously, words have had power to harm whenever the church institution declared that:

•   Women are not fully human,

•   Women have no souls or only an irrational or animal soul,

•   Women’s work is mere animal drudgery or slave-like work,

•   Women are not equal to men (The Catholic Encyclopedia 1916),

•   Female witches must be burned at the stake (even in the U.S. of the early 1700s), and

•   Women must be forever obedient and subservient to their husbands (a pious lie about woman’s place).

Ecologically, words have had, and still have, power to harm because both ancient Greek philosophy and ancient Christian theology insisted upon a crucial Change of Words (a metonymy) from a natural, physical, ecological sense to a supernatural, metaphysical, and anti-ecological sense:

•   The original natural sense of the term Logos, had been earlier applied to Mother Nature’s creative Word.

•   The later supernatural, anti-Nature sense, applied the term Logos to Jesus, the Son of God, as the supernatural creator and Word of God.

Details of this war on Nature that is closely tied to the war on women will be made clear in the Time-Line chapter.

Christian doctrine, using philosophical and theological magical thinking, performed an arrogant feat, seldom understood by the average person. The War on Women uncovers the little known and often deliberately hidden Change of Words and its drastic ecological, historical, religious, and socio-political consequences. This book thereby illuminates and explains why and how the War on Women equates to a similar War on Nature, and leads eventually, to a huge split—or almost a war—between science and religion, as well.

II

Prologue

One primary aim of all three of the world’s major monotheisms was to destroy the common ancient belief that the female Mother Nature, mythologized as Goddess in all of her sensate aspects, had created the earth and its creatures. All three monotheisms substituted an invisible and metaphysical God as the true Creator instead of the visible and physical Mother Nature. This deity was imagined as male human-like, having a superior rational intellect and speech. This God did not declare Nature dead or powerless. Rather He declared that she was simply passive and that, behind the scenes, He would direct all of her goods and services found in earth, air, fire, and water as He—the All-powerful One—saw fit.

Christianity (the belief system and the people who hold such beliefs) and Christendom (countries where Christianity is dominant and/or countries that have an established Christian state church) usually deny that its Christian belief system is fast bringing the earth close to destruction. For two main reasons, many of the present-day true believer type of Christians have a hard time admitting that human abuse of Nature (despoiling, polluting, and overcrowding) has culminated in climate and other ecological changes. Either they believe that since God is in charge, He wouldn’t let that happen; or they believe that it doesn’t matter if the earth is destroyed, because God, in the apocalypse that the Bible predicts, will destroy the earth by fire in order to punish the wicked unbelievers and create a new heaven and a new earth for the faithful believers.

Thus, few understand that issues regarding Nature or women have anything in common or anything to do with the Christian religion. Seldom or never does the institutional church overtly and publically proclaim that it has declared a war on both Nature and women. Nevertheless, this book, The War On Women: An Ecological, Historical, Socio-Political, and Religious Synthesis, makes precisely this claim: that the systematic theology which the ancient Christian Church and its Church Fathers developed, is one of the main causes of our world’s environmental chaos and of the perennial state of war against women. That is, in its doctrine, the institutional Church always closely tied, and still ties, women and their roles to Nature and its role.

[Only Christian systematic theology is emphasized in this book, rather than the Bible and/or the liturgy, because theology is where theocratic politics are explicitly found and spelled out, albeit often couched in ancient coded religious and philosophic jargon. Biblical scriptures and liturgy contain merely scattered and implicit clues to Christian theocratic politics].

Using the words from the biblical Genesis, chapter 1, verse 28, that its God directed man to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living things, these Christian Church leaders deliberately tried to destroy the pagan Nature religions that existed before the Judaeo-Christian belief system. These leaders despised pagan religions because pagans worshipped a plurality of Nature gods and goddesses and valued Mother Nature as the intelligent designer or creator Logos.

To counteract and destroy these pagan claims, the ancient Christian Church Fathers declared three major points to be absolutely true:

1)   That Jesus, instead of Mother Nature, was the true Logos creator,

2)   That Jesus, as the Logos, was part of a triune, yet still monotheistic, God, and

3)   That Mother Nature was merely a passive puppet in his spiritual hands.

To convince people to abandon their old pagan beliefs and turn to the new Christian religion, church leaders had to brainwash the populace by establishing two new cultural thought systems in a relatively short period of time. [The three hundred years from about 150 Common Era (A.D.) to 450 Common Era (A.D.) is a short time when we consider that very few people at the time could read or write, the majority of people were slaves, and there were no modem means of journalism or transportation]:

•   First: these Church Fathers, themselves, had to understand when and how the Logos concept came to be, and to make the choice to change both its denotation and its connotation; and

•   Second: these church leaders had to develop six interrelated tales that included the Hebrew/Jewish creation story as the foundation of their Christian beliefs. Systematic theology is the overall title of these six stories that will be told here after the Logos concept and its time-line are briefly set forth and described.

These two new cultural thought systems produced dire consequences for both Nature and women because the history of misogyny with its war on women mirrors the history of the war on Nature. This book describes both the thought systems and their consequences.

III

Time Lines of Logos Development

Time Line: circa 3000 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era)-600 B.C.E.:

The original feminine plural logos, refers to physis in Greek or to Mother Nature in English. Her gender is feminine plural since the mother gives birth to children of both male and female genders. Because Mother Nature is considered to be divine, she is both spirit and matter—without a split between the two concepts. The original term Logos incorporated a very broad perspective: not merely word or logic