Patriarchy and Religion: Built to Oppress Women.

Patriarchal religions revolve around a male god, and “superior beings” are created through the union of “a divine male and a mortal female”. Below is my monthly column for The Freethinker entitled: Religion is fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman, 25 May 2016 As US suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said:. It sees the father as the head of the home, responsible for the conduct of his family. You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.

Women are associated with nature and mortality, and while older religions valued nature, patriarchal religions value things removed from life on earth, thus creating a hierarchy of gender… Another example of patriarchy is the last name that is given to a child. Some religions are patriarchal. The way that patriarchal religions are structured and organized explains the resentment and enmity towards women. That is because all religions are reflections of the societies which invent them, and most societies are still deeply patriarchal in their power structures.

There is nothing in the nature of belief that means all religions are inherently patriarchal.

05/21/2014 10:13 pm ET Updated Jul 20, 2014 Originally posted at PopularResistance.org.

However, men are not known to take on the names of …

The term is most often used to refer to theories of prehistoric matriarchal religions that were proposed by scholars such as Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Marija Gimbutas, and later popularized by second-wave feminism. Not all institutions should be based on the actions of one.

In the 20th century, a movement to revive these practices resulted in the Goddess movement. Similarly, even when a man and woman get married, the woman is traditionally known to take on the family name of her husband and abandon her own family name.

Children born to a couple traditionally have always been given the family name of the father, and never of the mother.

However, that does not mean that all religions are patriarchal. For example, the Catholic church, which does not allow women to be priests or hold other top leadership positions.

The social roles of men and women, according to religious teachings, are not only sacred truths but many people believe that they are scientific facts. All religions are fundamentally patriarchal and anti-woman. A matriarchal religion is a religion that focuses on a goddess or goddesses.

Biblical patriarchy, also known as Christian patriarchy, is a set of beliefs in Reformed Evangelical Protestant Christianity concerning gender relations and their manifestations in institutions, including marriage, the family, and the home.