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Where did it all begin: the degradation of women? Some contend that there was a time, a long, long time ago when Mother Earth and women were revered; however, a pro-male mindset came in when we substituted the powers of the sky out there over the earth below us. But if we begin with the cornerstone of Western philosophy, Socrates, some 2,500 years ago, we see how we’ve managed to have the mindsets that we now have.

Socrates gets credit for saying, “Do you know anything at all practiced among mankind in which the male sex is not far better than the female.” Plato credits Socrates with that statement in his work, The Republic.

Let us not think that only the West had such prejudices. Christianity really takes a back seat to many other religions. Here’s a brief sample.

Sacred Hindu texts and traditions tell us, “Women are to be debarred from being competent students of Vedas.”

In Buddhism, the thinking is that if a person is reborn as a woman (reincarnation) it is because of one’s bad karma. Ouch!

In the Muslim Koran a woman is regarded as “half man” and inherently weaker in in rational judgment. To this day in many Muslim nations women must walk behind the man, live to serve him, not able to dive a car, vote, or do anything but cook and have kids.

Judaism taught men to pray, “Blessed be the God who has not created me a heathen, slave, or a woman.” Worse yet, or as bad, Talmudic writers proclaimed that it would be better to burn the words of the Torah than to entrust them to women.

Those are but a sampling of “godly religions” (?) around the globe. Tomorrow, I’ll begin the look at just our Judeo-Christian teachings which aren’t all that much better. But thankfully, Jesus came to correct all that and set women and all of mankind FREE! He needed to in light of the following opinions of women by our early church fathers:

St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Women are but failed man.”

St. Jerome said, “Woman is the gate of the devil, the way of evil, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous thing.”

And even Martin Luther said, “If women become tired, or even die in child-birth that is why they are there as a woman’s place is in the home”.

Isn’t it time we freed 50% of the world’s population?