Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hitler, the Una-bomber, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy, some of these men were considered very smart and well educated…but their reasoned conclusions were faulty. Of course the ECF’s were not serial killers or mad dictators, but what they preached caused millions of women to endure humiliation, suffering, torture, and death….for centuries. So when you get down to the brass tacks of it....who was worse?
Because the subject matter is so basic, that is the fair treatment of women, and they went so far off the rails to preach hate, harm, and evil….I do not trust anything they said at face value. Because like I said reasoning is not about information, it is the correlation of information formulating a conclusion. It is the processing of the topic and this process, this ability in their minds was flawed, so it could possibly affect their conclusions on any topic.
So I have to question everything they believed and said. Not that they were not right on some things, but the serial killers were also right on some things, but their conclusions that drove their beliefs and actions was clearly wrong…and of course very harmful. It was like these guys thought that God hated women, so they took the ball and ran with it. God made every to do with relationships and procreation, from physical attraction to love to sexual relations to the delivery of babies. These guys disregard the truth and developed conclusions that it was all attributed to Satan and sin. WOW! Christian leaders have to consider the ramifications of what they preach!
MARTIN LUTHER 1483-1546
When he posted his 95 theses, on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31 1517…Luther was a thirty-four-year-old Catholic priest and professor of theology at Wittenberg University and later became the key reformer that lead to Protestantism.
And here is what he wrote of women.
“For woman seems to be a creature somewhat different from man, in that she has dissimilar members, a varied form and a mind weaker than man. Although Eve was a most excellent and beautiful creature, like unto Adam in reference to the image of God, that is with respect to righteousness, wisdom and salvation, yet she was a woman. For as the sun is more glorious than the moon, though the moon is a most glorious body, so woman, though she was a most beautiful work of God, yet she did not equal the glory of the male creature.”
The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes. –Martin Luther, Reformer (1483-1546), Works 12.94
Now on a related top Martin Luther wrote an article on marriage called the “Estate of Marriage” written in 1519, It is pretty long, but if you want to read it here it is.
Like I said one of the things he said was that he could not condemn or forbid polygamy because the Bible does not condemn or forbid it. And what he does not say is anything about wedding ceremonies.
Now I am speculating that Christians took note of what Martin said in 1519 and decided that it was time to make wedding ceremonies a requirement to be married. Wedding ceremonies performed in churches by a minister. Because not long after that the Protestant denominations started to make it a requirement. Now again, what I am
not saying, is that weddings ceremonies were not popular or were not occurring all along after the biblical era. Even though historically the first Christian wedding is not documented until the 9th century. I am sure there were a lot wedding ceremonies that occurred before that and after that….just not required. And most of this comes from the Gentile side of Christianity because it was part of their culture.
After the 2nd century there were Christian leaders that argued that intercourse existed for one purpose — procreation and anything else was a sin. Therefore, any sexual acts for pleasure were widely condemned. This became predominate with Christian leaders after the 4th century. So we come to
Perspectives….I say predominate with Christian leaders because we do not know how many Christians subscribed to these beliefs….
But as time went on as a whole Christian leaders preached that ugly, sadness, and suffering was good and beauty, pleasure, and happiness was bad. And then Christianity developed the belief in Flagellation, where groups would whip themselves and others with the beliefs associated with penance or suffering like Christ suffered and some even allow themselves to be crucified. This practice still exist today….with certain groups.
Thomas Aquinas, warned that if a man slept with his wife just for pleasure, it was akin to treating her like a prostitute. “Sex is not for enjoyment.
Aquinas warned, “It is only for procreation. Taking any pleasure from doing it was essentially the same as prostitution.” And thereby sinful.
Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th-century monk, put it this way: There is one evil, an evil above all other evil, that I am aware is always with me, that grievously and piteously lacerates and afflicts my soul. It was with me from the cradle, it grew with me in childhood, in adolescences, in my youth it always struck me, and it does not desert me even now that my limbs are failing because of my old age. This evil is sexual desire. Anselm described sexual desire as “The storm of lust that has smashed and battered my unhappy soul, emptied it of all strength, and left it weak and empty.”
The Catholic Church went out of its way to limit sexual intercourse — even between married couples. Religious laws and proclamations issued by the Catholic Church tried to restrict when married couples could have sexual relations, and they ended up banning sex for most of the year. The Catholic Church put tons of restrictions on when married couples could have sex, and the conditions thereof. And most of all if you enjoyed it, it was a sin.
“No sex on Sundays!” one rule proclaimed, “That is the Lord’s Day, and it shouldn’t be contaminated by something as dirty, nasty, and sinful as sex! And don’t plan on doing it on Thursdays or Fridays, either, because those days should be spent preparing for communion.
Intercourse was also banned during Lent, before Christmas, and at the Feast of Pentecost, which together added over five months during which it was disallowed. On top of that, early Christians were not supposed to have sex on Feast Days. You might think it was just casual rules but they were watching when women had children and calculating if they conceived during these no sex periods. The stories of the punishment for this get pretty wild so you can look it up if you want.
Many of the monastic fathers saw women as evil, associating man with the spirit and woman with the flesh so that “every act of intercourse was seen as the spirit of man being corrupt with the sinful flesh of women and women were viewed as insatiable and innate temptresses to lead good men to ruin. So the Church therefore exercised degrading, abusive methods to control women’s bodies. (The birth control pill was a nightmare for them. I remember when it came out.)
So next we enter the era of the witch-hunts…Know this for certain, what happened at the Salem Witch Trials are the G-rated version of what went on in Europe. And the Salem Witch Trials were pretty much the extent of the Protestant involvement with the witch-hunts.
In 1231 Pope Gregory the IX officially initiated the Inquisitions and the processes known as auto-da-fe.....torture! The Inquisition or Inquisitors, were a large body of clergy and monks that served in several countries. They were trained by the Church, they were funded by the Church, and under complete control of the Church. Just a few years later Pope Gregory offered the services of the Inquisitors to the witch hunters. In 1244 at the Council of Narbonne he ordered that in the sentencing of witches, no husband should be spared because of his wife, nor wife because of her husband. Children were allowed to be tortured and killed as young as nine and a half years. Many times children were forced to watch their parents die.
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the Bull Summis Desideranter, authorizing two Dominican Inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, to systemize the procedures for the interrogation of witches. Two years later in 1486, they produced a manual called the Malleus Maleficarum, which is Latin for The Hammer Of Witches which was more or less a torture manual for women. The Church financed and supervised the publishing of the manuals that were ordered and sent out to all Inquisitors. This manual was published with 14 editions between 1486 and 1520, and at least 16 other editions between 1574 and 1669. All editions were financed by the Church and printed under the supervision and the authority of the Church and distributed by the Church to the Inquisitors.
Some of the so called truths that the Malleus Maleficarum stated was that the belief in such things as witches was so essential to the Catholic faith that believing otherwise was in itself heresy. The Church believed it had the authority to torture and kill people because people did not own their own bodies.
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