Men, Women, and Gods; and Other LecturesGardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Religion
Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures
Gardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Free thought
Next we have God's opinion (on Bible authority) as to the use of wives.
They were to be forcibly changed around _as a punishment to their
husbands_ and for offences committed by the latter.
11 Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against
thee out of thy own house, and I will take thy wives before
thy eyes and give them unto thy neighbor.
--2 Sam. xii.
The latter part of the verse is omitted as being unfit to read. Don't
understand that I think any of it is exactly choice literature; but that
cover has been used to silence objection long enough. If it is fit to
teach as the word and will of God for women, it ought to be fit to read
in a theatre--but it is not.
What do you think of a religion that upholds such morals and such
justice as that just quoted? What do you think of women supporting the
Bible in the face of that as the will of God? Of all human beings a
woman should spurn the Bible first. She, above all others, should try
to destroy its influence; and I mean to do what little I can in that
direction. The morals of the nineteenth century have outgrown the Bible.
Jehovah stands condemned before the bar of every noble soul. What Moses
and David and Samuel taught as the word and will of God, we, who are
fortunate enough to live in the same age with Charles Darwin, know to
be the expression of a low social condition untempered by the light of
science. Their "thus saith the Lord," read in the light of to-day, is
"thus saith ignorance and fear"--no more, no less.
If you will read the 12th chapter of Leviticus, which is unfit to read
here, you will see that the Bible esteems it twice as great a crime to
be the mother of a girl as to be the mother of a boy; so highly esteemed
was woman by the priesthood; so great a favorite was she of Jehovah.*
* See Appendix K.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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