Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [174]
While many people think that the world has become more moral with the repression of sex, this notion is simply not true. Walker also relates the general end product of the denigration of sex and women:
A change in the attitude toward rape was one of the contrasts between the ancient world and the medieval one in western Europe. The Romans and Saxons punished rapists by death. Normans cut off a rapist's testicles and gouged his eyes out. The gypsies' Oriental heritage demanded the death penalty for the rapist. Hindu law said a rapist must be killed, even if his victim was of the lowest caste, an Untouchable; and his soul should `never be pardoned." The Byzantine Code decreed that rapists must die and their property must be given to the victim, even if she was no better than a slave woman. Christian laws changed the picture. Serfs' wives, sisters, or daughters were always sexually available to their overlords under the new regime. Peasant brides were raped by the baron before being turned over to their bridegrooms-probably to be raped again. The Church made it illegal for any wife to refuse sexual intercourse unless it was a holy day when marital sex was prohibited. Therefore, marital rape was encouraged. . . . From the Inquisition's torturers, who usually raped their victims first, to Victorian doctors who attacked female genitals with leeches, many kinds of rape could be traced to what has been called "virulent womanhatred in fundamentalist Christianity." Recent studies show that most rapists were professed members of a religious sect and learned to regard sex as evil, in the traditional Christian manner.35
Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the idea of a sacred marriage originated in pre-patriarchal, Pagan cultures and was anathema to the early Christian fathers, who abhorred matrimony.
The destruction of the "works of the female" also had the effect of propelling the world into centuries of bloodlust and warfare. As Walker further states:
[War is a] primary patriarchal contribution to culture, almost entirely absent from the matriarchal societies of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages. Even when Goddess-worshipping was beginning to give way to cults of aggressive gods, for a long time the appearance of the Goddess imposed peace on all hostile groups. . . . Patriarchal gods tended to be warlike from their inception-including, or even particularly, the Judeo-Christian God. Stanton observed that the Old Testament's account of God's nature, purpose, and activities on behalf of his Chosen People boils down to "a long painful record of war, corruption, rapine, and lust." . . . But Christianity was never a pacifist religion.... All-male Christianity was disseminated by violence.36
The result of this degradation of the female includes the destruction of the planet itself, the Great Mother Earth. As Walker also relates:
. . . the Middle East [is] a true Waste Land: the great desert which eastern mystics attributed to Islam's renunciation of the fertile Great Mother. Western pagans also maintained that if the Mother should be offended or neglected, she might curse the land with the same desperate barrenness that could be seen in Arabia Deserta and Northern Africa.37
Christianity and Homosexuality
As Aquinas said regarding the prohibition of prostitution, the repression of sex and the hatred of women have indeed led to one of the behaviors most outwardly despised by Judaism and Christianity: "sodomy," or homosexuality. In reality, in many places in the ancient world homosexuality was not considered a sin but was practiced for a variety of reasons. The Christian world, of course, has never been devoid of homosexuality, and Christianity's early representatives