Let's stop pretending .....

....that all faiths are equal. Shall we? From the Sunday Times, UK hat tip wolf

Religions and cultures that deny women basic equality, or exploit and abuse them, are, as far as I am concerned, a bad thing. I don’t feel the slightest obligation to respect them or to allow them to bring their practices into this country. However, the problem for Cherie Blair, not least during the visit here of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is that in the western liberal agenda we are supposed to offer equal respect and equal rights to all cultures and all religions, and to people’s universal right to live according to them and to practise their faiths as they understand them. But you simply can’t. You can either have universal human rights, or you can have the universal human right to ignore them for cultural or religious reasons - not both.

If a culture or a religion does not share Cherie Blair’s absolute belief in universal human rights, then how can she respect it? And, for that matter, why should she expect them to respect her opposing beliefs? She spoke on Radio 4 of honouring people’s religious beliefs, when freely adopted, but why? Incidentally, as for Islam being freely adopted, a large proportion of young British Muslims think that the penalty for abandoning the faith should be death. There is not a great deal of freedom in Islam which, after all, means submission.

My point is not particularly to criticise Islam. It is rather to criticise this long-standing liberal article of faith that all religions are equal, equally deserving of respect, and believers should be equally free to practise them. In truth, nobody believes that - whether Muslim, gentile, Hindu, Jew, wiccan or heathen. Nor in terms of Christian and post-Christian British culture is it true. We have been misled culturally by trying to pretend it is true and we have damaged our society in the process. The IPPR and Christmas deniers are still being misled and are trying to mislead the rest of us. “Bah, humbug!” as Scrooge would have said.

Comments

[Thomas Carney]

Contrary to what the Leftards say, Christianity raised the dignity of women in the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire and the Greek City-states that preceded it, women were property, pure and simple. A woman could be justifiably (under Roman law) murdered for suspected infidelity. Not so for men.

Women were forced into prostitution in Corinth, where they "served" as "priestesses", in pagan rituals.

Now, before the libs blast me for saying that Christianity is oppressive to women because in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches women cannot be priests, let me put it in the way that the late, great Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it, "..men are givers of the seed, women are receivers [in both spiritual and physical arenas] and this is the reason why women cannot be priests."

Jesus Christ had great respect for women.
Who were the first to hear the news of the Resurrection?? The Myrrh-bearing women, not the Apostles. The Canaanite woman who had her daughter healed through public entreaties had broken the taboo in speaking out in public as she did. Who did the Archangel Gabriel go to to announce the Conception of Jesus?? No, not Joseph, but Mary herself, the betrothed of Joseph.

Let's go to Judaism for a moment. In Judaism there are many great women... and there are those who could explain better than me.

Find great women in the Koran, go ahead, find ONE great woman in the Koran, the Hadith or the Sunnafi.