| Women as Sluts and Goddesses Both the Bible and the Koran have made women, using Eve’s purported behaviour in the Garden of Eden, first with Satan then with Adam, as both an object of desire and of contempt; making her out to be both the seductress and the easily seduced; blaming her alleged airhead nature for humanity’s exile from Paradise. The Prophet Muhammad and his patron's opinion of women is that they are weak-willed creatures, and the prison-like existence that they demand for them is for their own good; to protect them from themselves, to stop them from their natural tendency to want to seduce every man in sight, thereby bringing havoc to the orderly world of the Koran. The Catholic Church, having accepted some constructive criticism of its doctrine, no longer views women as irresponsible sluts but still denies them access to the Priesthood or control over their own bodies (as does Islam). Before women could be branded as sluts for an eternity, they first had to be denied access to the god club. After all, an Athena, an Aphrodite, a Diana, an Isis, an Ishtar, a Juno or a Venus would probably not have taken kindly to the pejorative branding of their sex by men. The Bible, the Old Testament, was the first to deny women membership in the god club which it whittled down to one all-powerful male who had little use for females. Islam would model its god on the biblical Yahweh. The Catholic Church, even after it dissected the monolithic god of the Jews into three components, could not bring itself to make even one of the components female, preferring to have a ghost complete the God the Father, God the Son Trinity. The foundation of Western Civilization is based on the Greco-Roman model. The Greek and Roman philosophers, to whom we owe so much, had no problems with a spiritual existence that included gods and goddesses. It took mostly uninformed desert tribesmen to dismiss the idea that females could possibly have a god-like existence. If the creators of the monolithic male god had given him a female partner, maybe He would not be such a vengeful, obviously frustrated, easily irritated ruler. Would the believers in this omnipotent male Divinity be so quick to kill and terrorize on His behalf if they had a God the Mother to answer to. Bernard Payeur
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