In our patriarchal world, we are all taught - whether we like to think we are or not - that God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness... that in order to propitiate God, women must propitiate men.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the patriarchal system that equates divinity with masculinity, suggesting that this belief undermines women's value and reinforces gender inequality.
Sonia Johnson's quote highlights the deep-seated beliefs in a patriarchal society where the divine is perceived as male, leading to the notion that women's worth is diminished in comparison to men's. This reflection calls attention to how religious and societal structures often compel women to seek validation through men, suggesting that the root of gender inequity is intertwined with spiritual and cultural perceptions of gender roles.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about gender roles in religious contexts.
There has been only one war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men's all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
'I am' is nothing but another name for the ego. Now you will be getting into trouble. If the ego is convinced that the only way is to drop the ego, then who is going to drop whom? And how? It will be like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. You will look just silly. Watch each word that you use. 'I am' is nothing but the ego.
News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.
The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
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