Guy A. Aldred Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: PDF's from Marxists.org and OCR/Editing from RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The Bible is not a divinely inspired book. Its every line is not sacred. Its very periods are not inspired. Its whole prospect is not awful. Penetrate the gloom with which the Christian centuries have surrounded the ancient “book above books,” and you will discover nothing more than an old-time “book of books.” In this literary miscellany, it is impossible to discover an even distribution of talent. The books are not equally good. Every passage is not expressive of a common level of ability on the part oi the authors. Many sentences challenge publication. As many merit oblivion. Outlooks, it has in abundance from that of Moses, gluttonous for power, to that of Isaiah, stern for the righteousness of liberty. Minor priests rub shoulders with minor prophets. Drama is found in job, cynical materialism in Ecclesiastes, and the championship of secular authority only in Saul. Pentateuchal polygamy is mingled with much divine imbecility. Sinai storms at sense. But the captivity is followed by denunciations of useless ritual and canting ceremony. The God with “back parts” gives place to the God of spirit; the jealous to the zealous deity. His holiness hungers not for sacrifice from the strong, but thirsts to sustain the weak. It abandons dominion to cast out oppression. Works recording so radical a transformation of the divine character or characters must boast a little genius in places. Suspicion of such cannot be avoided entirely.
Of this natural magazine of literature, or collection of writings, no mention will be made in this essay. We shall write only of a supernatural “books of books.” This is a, circumspect “line in literature” which time has rendered acceptable to the kirk elder and the bethel deacon. Since it is treated to no variety of appreciation, it is discovered to possess no divergency of style, nor lights or shades of merit. It is the book. Not a fossil, but a whole geological stratum.
This is what the Hebrew literary museum has been hallowed into being by the Church, which has disciplined the intellect of man to stagnation. One day we shall understand the stratum so well that we shall discover not merely fossils but living forms—the living forms of past struggles for freedom. In the fetish, we shall glimpse the truth. At present, we can see nothing beyond a rod of authority, which narrows our vision, curbs our liberty, and commands our slavish devotion.
Mankind evolved and embraced this rod of authority in the ages when darkness was its only light. Rod and victim experienced a common degradation. Where all was divine equally, the vulgar was divine mostly. The power of the rod consisted in its rudeness. The subjection of the people lay in their lewdness. Wisdom was the flourish of accidence, which ornamented the ecclesiastical crook. The Bible itself was its most imbecile portions. Pearls were refuse because husks were gems. God’s “blind mouths” secured social sanctuary, whilst power destroyed perspective, and interest nursed misery.
We are devout neither about nor towards this Bible of despotism. We dare not pretend a respect for the Bible of reality, for the Christian world knows of no reality outside of the Bible of pretense. Its worthlessness calls for exposure. We will discuss its relation towards w0man’s freedom, because our social greatness, involving woman’s subjection, is held to -be founded upon the said holy writ.
God’s word treats woman not to a lesson, but to a dirge. It ‘compliments our mothers and sisters by insisting on their vicious curiosity and ambition. Woman’s inherently corrupt nature is presumed to corrupt all her male posterity. In the female line, there is so much spontaneous sin that no room remains for any inherited taint. Fatherhood is virtue, whilst motherhood is vice. It is unclean to suffer the pain of “presenting” one’s masculine proprietor, called husband, with a child. It is clean to have been the cause of the presentation. But it is doubly unclean to bear a female instead of a male child. One wonders how the father ‘escapes contamination in this event.
What the Jewish Code of Leviticus says in this connection, the Anglican Service for the Churching of Woman retains. Female hysteria applauds the lie.
God decreed that woman should be subject unto man. He destined her for child-bearing at her husband’s will and domestic drudgery on his behalf. Obedience must be paid to his every whim, care given to his comforts, ministering to his passions, and submission to his castigation. The most exemplary attention to the servitude of this underpaid housekeeping is rewarded with pain and sorrow. From Eve to Dorcas, the records oi the duet woman ‘characters in the Bible, preach the same dreary morality.
Even when exercising the virtue of most complete humility, woman remains an abomination. Even when exhibiting no initiative, she exerts an evil influence. Good dwelt in Nazareth, but it has never dwelt in woman.
Leah and Rachel were so much cattle given in wedlock to Jacob as a reward for seven years’ service each. On the most flattering estimate they were but good wages. Maybe their lord and master often viewed them less charitably.
The Jewish Lord oi Hosts was a God of Rape. In Deuteronomy, he bade the Hebrews force beautiful captives from among their fallen enemies--unto whom they might have a desire-—to be their wives. In judges, he has the sons of Benjamin waylay the daughters of Shihol.
Man was the human being. Woman was the female. She completed that sex nature, which was incidental to his physical "make-up. After Constantine, the Church Fathers, who relished sacred writ, gravely discovered that she had no soul, and noted, without alarm, that she died like a dog.
To this day, a similar dictum prevails. Man is mankind and woman is the sex. It is the function of man to dispose of her body, as his own dependence on the laws of brute force, fraud, and purchase decide. She has no right to object, no need to consent. Everything is done for her. Man proposes, man disposes, and the ‘woman changes hands. What will be, will be.
When a man dies, his “relict” is permitted to survive. She continues his shadow until she completes another human being’s ;sex. Instead of a relic, she is now an appendage.
In the Jewish ritual, she is permitted to discharge no functions requiring individual initiative In the framing of the creed, canons, and codes of Christendom her voice has never -been heard.
Jesus denied the God of Abraham and placed woman on terms of equality with her accusers. The heresiarchs-—Cerdon, Carpocrates, and Paul of Samosata—applauded this view and repudiated Old Testament authority. Visiting them with excommunication, "the Church accepted ‘Constantine and Jehovah, and treated the world to those councils, doctrines, relics, monastic institutions, and forgeries which have been the wonders of sixteen centuries.
It invented the story of the resurrection. Thomas felt the wounds in Christ’s side. Mary was not good enough to touch “the risen savior.” Since he was man, an eternal soul, the testimony of Thomas counted. Since she was woman, the sex instrument of man, the evidence of Mary was of no moment. What she saw or heard could have no weight in the decision of the Church.
Much is made of the alleged fact, that Christianity has “honored” woman. Much, also, is said of the historical authenticity of the Christian Scriptures. In support of which authenticity, defenders of the saintly faith refer us to the Pagan Christian fathers.
Some of these fathers may be quoted in favor of Communism and they are not always completely heterodox. Did the faithful folk, who cite these worthies without question, believe in Jesus and understand the story of his teaching and its historic perversion and negation, they would be given less to this weakness. In the main, despite their varying degree of heresy, these gentlemen were mostly ecclesiastical time-servers. Each is the voice of the Church, not when he proclaims the truth of his particular heresy, but only in his appalling declaration of allegiance to superstition and oppression. The arrogance and ignorance has, oi these Church Fathers, combined to become the gospel of Christendom. Some of them may have urged Communism. All opposed the freedom of woman, -denied her equity and justice in her relations with the male human.
St. Chrysostom describes woman as “a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.” Obviously, cosmetics, lip-stick, sun-tan, rouge, are as ancient as the ‘Church Fathers! The same saint. asserted that “through woman the Devil has triumphed, through her paradise has been lost; of all wild beasts, the most dangerous.” Equally worthy of a Christian thinker, and similar in letter and in spirit to this sweetly sympathetic dictum is that of Tertullian, who addressed woman as “the Devil’s gateway,” and “unsealer of the forbidden tree,” “the first deserter of the divine law,” “who destroyed so easily God’s image, man.” Then there is the declaration of St. Gregory the Great, to the effect that “woman has the poison of the asp, and the malice of a dragon.” St. Jerome, who invented the doctrine of heavenly salvation and substituted it for the doctrine of mental health, eulogized woman in his quaint style as “the gate of the devil, the road of iniquity, the dart of the scorpion.” This vies, in strength of declaration, with the word picture created by the Christian genius of Clement of Alexandria. This noble soul denounces affection for a woman as leading “to the fire that will never cease in consequence of sin.’? Gregory Thaumaturgus placed it on record, that, “verily, a person may find one man chaste among a thousand, but a woman never." St. Bernard apostrophized her as “the organ of the Devil.” St. john Damascene contented himself with the comparatively mild description: “the daughter of falsehood, a sentinel of Hell, the enemy of Peace,” through whom “Adam lost his paradise."
Similar testimony is borne ‘by St. Antony, Bonaventure and Cyprian, who regarded woman, respectively, as “the fountain of sin, the arm of the Devil, her voice the hissing of the serpent”; “the scorpion, ever ready to sting, the lance of the demon”; and “the instrument which the devil uses to gain possession of our souls."
This is “the good news” that woman has welcomed down the Christian centuries! For a thousand years, the insane and inane denunciation of woman has been the teaching of Christendom. Even when it was no longer as the gospel of Christian civilization, this teaching inspires secretly the approach to woman as something uncanny if not positively socially unclean in herself. The parade of gallantry ‘conceals the real attitude. Whoever believes that the church fathers voice “the truth” of ‘Christianity must accept the degradation of woman as a divine decree. Whoever regards the god oi Abraham as the heavenly pater of Jesus, must look upon polygamy as compatible with God’s law. Holy writ boasts no express discharge against it, and the holy spirit often commends it.