A cleansing fire
In my last post I argued that mankind’s position at the apex of Creation - however it came about - has been a disaster for us and for the planet. As I also wrote, “despite what the Bible suggests, it was not God who decreed this terrible state of affairs”.
If my hypothesis is correct, the Genesis story of mankind’s origins must surely qualify as the “mother of all” conspiracies, mustn’t it?
The others I have discussed, like the Birmingham Six and DIRT Enquiry scandals, are small beer in comparison. And the bigger international examples such as the Reichstag fire, the Iran-Contra affair – not to mention Covid-19 - diminish in comparison to the behemoth that is the lie about Homo sapiens.
Hard as it may be to swallow, there is an even bigger deception to be unravelled. That means taking another dive into the Bible, “the world's best-selling and most widely distributed book”.1
For Christians and Jews, the Bible is a collection of sacred texts, the earliest of which date back to about 500 BC. The Bible is divided into two parts: Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament was written by many hands over hundreds of years, and is an account of the ancient Hebrews and their relationship with God. The New Testament centres on the life and early legacy of Jesus Christ and includes the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The status of the Bible as sacred scripture was underlined by Martin Luther when he described it as “God’s Word and book”.2 But the Bible’s impact on our world is not confined to the Judeo-Christian portion of humanity. The Bible has shaped global history and culture to an extent that would require several thick volumes to elucidate. However I will confine myself to a brief evaluation that expresses the point better than I could:
If by some hideous accident at the divine computer keyboard the ‘delete’ key were pressed for the Bible, much of the content of Western culture would disappear and it would shrivel like a deflating balloon.3
For “Western culture” read “global culture”. Through centuries of empire-building and colonisation, Europe, as the home of Western culture, exported to the world its values and customs creating what Yuval Harari asserts is “a single integrated human society”.4 Those values and customs were derived from biblical texts that proclaimed mankind to be the crowning glory of God’s plan for Creation. That belief drove countless explorers and missionaries across the globe to exploit the planet’s vast resources, while teaching those they conquered to do the same.
And here we must pause to gaze at the elephant in the room, because it is a decidedly male elephant.
The biblical writers, the empire builders, the missionaries, the artists, architects, artisans, etc. who built the world we live in today, were invariably men. Yet the term ‘man’, or Homo as in Homo sapiens, has traditionally been synonymous with humanity or humankind, which of course includes both sexes. But the author of a recent book on women in the modern world has argued that:
The lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.5
The relegation of women to the sidelines runs deep in our culture and in our history. Writing nearly two-and-a-half-thousand years ago, Aristotle defined the female sex in nature as a “departure from type”, as if maleness were the default condition of humanity.6 The inferior status of women is also enshrined in the Bible.
The first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, deals with the “creation myth”, i.e. the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to one historian, whoever wrote it must have drawn upon “much older sacred and profane legends and annals, songs and tales”.7 So the Genesis account of Creation can be interpreted as the oral heritage of an ancient people, a kind of folk tale passed down through the centuries until eventually it was written down.
In it we read that God, having created Adam, decided that
“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him”.8
We are then told that God and Adam essentially auditioned all the other fauna, the cattle and the birds, etc., in order to find such a “helper”. When this process proved fruitless, God created a variation of the male prototype, a woman named Eve. Having already defined her as man’s helper, the writers of Genesis copper-fastened the impression of woman as a divine afterthought by having God tell her that the man “shall rule over you”.9
But is that impression correct? The appearance of a fourth party on the scene suggests not.
In a previous post I discussed how Satan tried unsuccessfully to tempt Jesus to abandon his mission. But the “ruler of this world” fared better when it came to Adam and Eve.
In Genesis, the tempter is depicted as a talking serpent who persuades the newly-created woman to lure her male companion into an act of defiance against God by eating from the forbidden tree. When God realises what has happened, he confronts the male who in turn fingers the woman as the real culprit.10
But if man stands at the pinnacle of God’s Creation, why did Satan not target Adam? He was the top dog, right? In the New Testament it was Jesus, not someone else like John the Baptist, who Satan engaged in spiritual combat. However, as I stated in that post, “Satan knew who the real authority was”.
Was the same true for the encounter with the woman? Did the tempter recognise that, in Eve, God had refined His original Creation, just as a software engineer today improves a computer program with a new version? In short, did Satan focus on Eve because he knew she was more powerful than Adam and that if she succumbed to temptation, Adam would too?
As one commentator observed:
Despite the fact that Adam has been warned by Yahweh [God] not to eat this particular fruit, he offers no objection and simply follows his wife’s lead.11
But that is not how Eve is remembered. John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, made sure of that. As another writer put it:
Milton’s voice, far and away the most influential in English in re-telling the story of the Fall of Man, put most of the blame on Eve and so provided antediluvian sanction for man’s scorn of women.12
Long before Milton, that scorn was already evident as men tightened the law to circumscribe women’s place in society. The 13th-century legal treatise, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (better known as Bracton) reflects this view: “Women differ from men in many respects, for their position is inferior to that of men.”13 This principle was already the lynchpin of marriage laws. The 12th-century codification of the common law, Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae (known today as Glanvill) spelt out the situation for a woman contemplating marriage:
For since legally a woman is completely in the power of her husband, it is not surprising that her dower and all her other property are clearly deemed to be at his disposal.14
Many of those legal and religious restrictions have disappeared or been loosened since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, despite the growth of feminism in the last century or so, it is still a man’s world. Caroline Perez has identified many areas of modern life which have been designed to fit the needs of men, while ignoring those of women. These range from car parks to public toilets to farming practice, to name but three.
The differences between male and female biology is another factor she discusses in her recent study.
The thalidomide scandal of the early-1960s is an example of how a drug known to be hazardous to foetal development was marketed to pregnant women. By 1962, Perez writes, “over 10,000 children had been born around the world with thalidomide-related disabilities”.15
Now, almost 60 years later, the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) is encouraging pregnant women to “get your COVID-19 vaccine when it's offered to you”, even though it also states:
The COVID-19 vaccines are new. We are still learning about the safety of them during pregnancy. The vaccines were not tested on pregnant women.16
Here in Ireland the deception of the public about Covid-19 is led primarily by men, whether they are politicians, medical gurus, or media pundits. The body responsible for steering the government response to the pandemic is the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). While a number of its members are women, it is men like Tony Holohan, Ronan Glynn and Cillian de Gascun who are at the forefront in promoting the culture of fear that so far has kept the public in line.
Why do we allow this to continue? Why do women allow this to continue? One female author believes that feminism has failed because its objectives were wrong – too safe, not radical enough.
Radical change is scary. It’s terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply allowed to participate in the world as it already exists – an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers – but are actively able to reshape it. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, government, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire.17
Would things be any different in Ireland, and in the world, if that fire were lit and allowed to burn away the lies and fear that pervade our society?
At least one man was in no doubt about the answer. In an interview with the New York Times, Leonard Cohen expressed his position:
I wish the women would hurry up and take over…Then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds, and the force that holds everything together, and men really are gossips and artists. Then we could get about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.18
That interview took place in 1968, and we are still waiting. If, like me, you share Leonard Cohen’s impatience please read my next post in which I will explore how his vision might be realised.
Guinness World Records, [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction], 1 May 2021.
Martin Luther, Table Talk, tr. William Hazlitt (Grand Rapids, MI., 2004), p. 17.
David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its history and influence (New Haven, 2003), p. 1.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (London, 2014), p. 322.
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (London, 2020), p. xi.
Quoted in ibid., p. 1.
Peter Calvocoressi, Who’s Who in the Bible (2nd ed., London, 1990), p. ix.
Genesis, 2:18.
Genesis, 3:16.
Genesis, 3:1-12.
Damian Bruce, From Eve to Mary: Female sexuality in the Bible (2008), p. 38.
Calvocoressi, Who’s Who in the Bible, p. 70.
Bracton Online (http://hlsl5.law.harvard.edu/bracton/index.htm), 22 January 2009.
Glanvill at University of Houston (http://vi.uh.edu/pages/bob/elhone/rules.html), 22 January 2009.
Perez, Invisible Women, p. 201.
HSE Our Health Service, ‘COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy’, 30 April 2021 [https://www2.hse.ie/screening-and-vaccinations/covid-19-vaccine/get-the-vaccine/pregnancy/], 1 May 2021. (See also Damian Bruce, Ragged Lines, 21 Mar. 2021, [https://damianbruce.substack.com/p/in-vaccines-we-trust], 1 May 2021.)
Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto (New York, 2017), p. xi.
Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen (London, 2009), p. 5.