Rebekah Calhoun: Another Blog "Post" in "Response" to a Peer's "Post"s

Meghan, I also really love Sojourner Truth's statement about the first woman, and how she turned the whole world upside down. In one simple sentence, she reveals the absurdity of Christianity's perceived superior moral judgement and opens the doors for us to challenge it. She knows that brevity is indeed the soul of wit. She knew she had to get a lot across in very little time. I picture a bunch of people clapping and shuffling her off stage, in a big hurry to let other people talk.
Yes, that speech brings tears to my eyes.
I went to religious school early on, and I remember never questioning the story of the creation of Adam and Eve, or Cain and Abel, or Noah, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or even the story of Isaac and Rebekah. So that's why it especially freaks me out now that I realize how people used the Bible to justify all types of prejudices and oppression, and how other religions do it too.
So I'd like to share a quote from White Oleander, which I claimed before to be my favorite book. In this scene Ingrid, a poet in prison, is angrily trying to prevent her daughter from following Christianity with her foster parents, who have been guilting her into going to church:
“I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. ”
-Janet Fitch

 Here are some others from White Oleander:
“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”


“Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.”


  “If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering?
But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”

 
“history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.”


Sorry to blog about this book again. Here's one more quote from a male author about christianity:

“To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume