Losing my Religion

Mr S has got a post up about Love, christianity and women at ATW. I imagine this as a more thoughtful approach to the challenges posited off the back of a string of grossly titled, uselessly heated debates on abortion.

The romantic notions of women and faith are ideals. Romance wasnt all about chivalry, the idea of some woman being whisked off into the sunset by a knight back then reflect the lucky ones i expect! Marriage was very much a trade with women as commodities. The realities are always a bit different.

The thing about being 'westernised' is that I can challenge my faiths absurdities. I havent had a view of an obstinate unmovable God since I realised that much like Islamic texts are stuck in the socio political context of the time but remain unchallenged, christian texts were also. I cant imagine Jesus building his church via St Peter, the first Pope, and being disingenius to think faith would not evolve with time. Thats just stupid. The rules of Islam apply and can be distorted by murdering nutjobs precisely because noone en masse thinks they can change much and the ones in charge dont want to. Critical masse has had effect in the West for christianity but at the top its still a bit murky. I'd wager from the number of christian couples with standard size families at mass when i get a chance to go along, they dont follow the rules. They dip in and out of what suits their lives in 2007.

I admire the devout but i dont feel bound in by them until they start ranting. However lets not kid ourselves about the timeline in all this. The general secularizing trend gradually dissolved many of the barriers and made it easier for the faithful but it is still pretty vague. Catholics are divorced, use contraception, and have abortions at about the same rate as non-Catholics. (Recruitment of priests and nuns has ebbed to a very low level, while the average age of priests and nuns is very high). As recently as in 1968 Pope Paul VI, against the counsel of his own advisers, issued his infamous encyclical, Humanae Vitae, condemning contraception. The encyclical triggered a massive revolt among Catholics--lay and clerical--and was viewed widely as an attempt to turn back the clock, to restore medieval authoritarianism. Ive chucked abortion into that. Pretty obvious to me if someone wants to tell me my life is worth less than an unformed group of cells then I should. It is a constant challenge and in comparison to Islam and women, largely a question of degree and context. Insisting on no contraception (supported better because it affects guys too) or a pregnancy is a huge deal for anyone. The faithful in Islam truly believe they are doing women and the world a favour protecting them under that veil and keeping them inside. They truly believe it is in their best interests.

As i was growing up in the fall out of feminism i quickly recognised the crap applied to women in the form of fundamentalism - to which i added and still include the decrees on contraception and abortion. I argued about them when i was 16 and at a catholic school. Not a lot has changed. Looking further afield at Islam when i was in my early 20s before the jets hit the twin towers, fundamentalists of all religious sorts seemed pretty similar in what they were saying. Some of it made me very angry. Not Without My Daughter a film i watched in the early 90s about an American woman stuck with her nutjob husband in Iran - gentle and loving in America it didnt take long for the Ayatollah via his own family to work the loony magic and turn him into a fundi. He saw what he was doing as righteous - insisting she wore the veil for her own good and that his daughter stay in Iran. Saudi Princess the book followed, stories about the 'dirty women' who bleed and the rituals of Judaism...and then the following bit of advice from the pope - all made me question just how tenable a position you can have as a female in any of the great faiths without looking utterly foolish. The twenty-year papacy of John Paul II has confirmed this perception, while his selection of conservative bishops and cardinals may surely continue this trend well into the future in spite of Ratzinger. These events highlighted to me the disconnect between the Vatican's power structure on the one hand and most ordinary Catholic and non-Catholic opinion on the other, myself included.

Pope John Paul the II. A man I greatly admired for his devout ways in a fierce consumerist environment made some dreadful and probably predictable errors. The following didnt take place two centuries ago. It took place a few decades ago in Kosovo. The Pope forbade raped women in Kosovo to use the "morning after pill". He condemned them to bear the children -of another faith- and caused many of them, born into a country where religious and social tolerance were non existent to be shunned by their communities for the sin of being raped. Without meaning to undermine Mr Smiths post of good intentions re reverence to women - so 'revered' were catholic women that inspite of the hideousness of their situations they were to make the ultimate sacrifice. Apparently though in contrast the Vatican's distribution of contraceptives to nuns in the Congo in the 1960s, was what senior Vatican official Monsignor Ello Sgreccia called "a legitimate defense" against the possibility of rape. Catholics for a Free Choice even launched an effort to get Useless Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to review the special Non-Member State Permanent Observer status that the Holy See (the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church) enjoys at the U.N. I understand, though i need to look into this properly, that The Holy See is the only religious body so privileged and has used that status to exert pressure on the U.N. to down-play efforts to deal with the problem of overpopulation and the reproductive health and rights of women. Somehow though it really doesnt surprise me. On the one hand i support women kicking out of the socio political chains of Islam. Id be an enormous hypocrite if i didnt recognise the issues the Holy See's direction compounded not so very long ago and continues to compound today in the third world.

No one knows how many Kosovan Albanian women were raped. There were unconfirmed Nato reports of 'rape camps' operated by Serb soldiers. Groups working with refugee women shipped forbidden morning after pills to camps in Kukes, Vlora, Lezja and Tirana in Albania. The Popes removed dispassionate advice amounted to turning their rape into an act of love by accepting the enemy within and carrying their pregnancies to term. How thoughtful. This blatant misinformation was in some understandable views 'intended to further a political agenda to prevent access to contraceptives in general and specifically to emergency contraceptives, which enables the prevention of unwanted or enforced pregnancy, clearly an urgent need of some women in a war situation such as Kosovo.'

UNFPA executive director Nafis Sadik said: 'It shows an insensitivity to the suffering of the women of Kosovo. The women of Kukes need our support and care, not condemnation.' Why would anyone argue with that?

A spokeswoman for Marie Stopes International said women in the camps were suicidal at the prospect of bearing their Serb rapists' babies and would opt for this rather than giving birth. I bet they bloody well were!

Outside of hideous scenarios such as these. The church still says that marriage is ordained for the procreation of children. Therefore it is a woman's duty to have children with her husband. Thwarting God's intention must be just as heinous as abortion. The first bit it is obvious - but we arent bound by duty to this. We are bound by hormones. Imposing a duty makes it banal.

Thanks to living in the UK, where a more liberal western set of values came about through mounting enormous challenge and criticism of the Church, I can actually ignore all of it. Im very lucky to live here. But their chipping away at issues is a reminder that where sometimes I feel they are hard done by and the government needs to work on some basis of give and take... they ARE there- and given half a chance would insist every bit as much as the next religion. Problem is the way government gets all muddled and tackles it. In Islams case, frightened of it. This flopping around on Islam, after keeping christianity at arms length quite fiercely, makes the whole approach so antagonising.

There is a clear difference in degree between religions and attitudes towards women. The clear difference in socio political dogma where the religion is meshed into the fabric of society. There is something rather creepy sounding, though, in the similarities between parotting the reverence for women in christianity which sets specific female gender based roles and the worship of Perfection ...and the men in Islam who do the same (and the women who go along with it in both). There are plenty of references within Islam that gave women a much better social status than women ever found in christianity. And the burqa is not advocated in the Koran but seen as protcetion. Of course how it all then becomes interpreted is at the crux of the issue really. And just how much it gets applied in the West is down to the society that keeps it at arms length and mounts a critical challenge rather than imposing. Third world backward ratholes having, of course, a much much harder time. But really - did anyone give a shit about womens rights under Islam before 9/11?

The catholic view on contraception and abortion is a clear parallel to all this given it operates in the third world but little reminders come about when in the west people parrot the Old Testament to justify no abortion rulings with religious zeal. That is religion dictating to me how to make a decision and then condemning me for it without compassion and without the first clue what leads to such a decision. Zygotes trump a fully formed human. Bollocks.

What it boils down to is something you cannot shirk. Religious dogma, controlling sexuality and ultimately controlling men and women. Its just the latter are easier to control for some.

It is pretty accurate to recognize that toward one side are gathered conservative, even reactionary, Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews, while toward the opposite side are diverse groupings of moderate and progressive Catholics, Protestants, Jews, humanists, and others. I prefer the gentle aspects and voices of my faith wherever I can find them and opt for the latter - but i do not discount the former. A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist, a literalist by degree. It hasnt altered for me personally because 9/11 changed the goalposts. Islam has adopted a far fiercer dogmatic vicious and violent method overall and therefore becomes the number one priority. Wound more tightly into communities untouched by reason and progress, the attempt is to keep a much tighter grip on the faithful using the progress in the West as an example of how not to proceed. Of course here in the UK governments compound what might have been better progress by making a religion an ethnicity. Im not ethnically catholic.

I respect and hugely admire the women who are fighting off the bigotted mysoginist assholes in Islam whilst maintaining their own degree of faith as only they can - given the limitations and laws applied to women. You cannot as a christian 'use' Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a brave example when she wants women to reject their faith altogether and at the same time then raise an eyebrow at gobby women who challenge christian rules. If you want to be a really verbose 'God botherer' then take up the flack.

Interestingly Ratzinger has a new approach to the role of women. Whilst facsinating and seemingly progressive it falls back upon the virtues eschewed around Mary the mother of God. Who remains the paragon of womanhood as the Perfect Virgin, that ideal not so very different from the other faiths. Beautiful but flawed, odd and extra unatainable concept into the bargain. Tough eh. Bear in mind the year this Pope came to extol his progressive ideas and reexamine these texts though: 2004.

Faiths have huge values. What weve gained and lost as a society makes a tremendous impact socially and extracting all of it has left a massive vacuum filled by worship of rubbish.

Long post. Yeah, Im thinking it all through and constantly having to work it all out as I go along in the current climate. But Ill take the contraception, the option to divorce, abortion, commit all these sins if i face them and seek my peace with God, thanks. Whatever judgement falls upon me is through God and not the lectures judgments and views of others.

Some briefer thoughts on the Harley Street abortion decision later.