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Demonstrating your supposed superior nature by levelling abuse at anyone is a sign of its opposite. When you’re secure in who you are you neither feel the need to deliberately abuse, nor let yourself be abused. When you go further and challenge the idea of gender superiority and norms in general, even more so.
The spiritual, as opposed to the religious path, is about going beyond your identification with your gender and personality traits. Religion is full of rules about gender superiority and inferiority. No matter the religion there is a tendency for the male gender to be portrayed as the dominant or wiser party.
When already biased rules are then distorted by societal prejudices, abuse of power very often follows as a natural extension. Which is why many religious fanatics or right-wing fanatics use religion as a justification to abuse others, especially women.
Religious Texts
The assumption that women are inferior to men is based on many factors. At the root of those factors is the truth that it was mainly men writing religious texts and sociological and psychological studies. This root cause in particular and the societal bias it was built upon, further exacerbates distortions when it comes to gender.
These assumptions, biases and distortions have enabled those who women-hate. They feel they are given a free pass when it comes to expressing their prejudice against women. Some fully believe in their position in society as the dominant ones and feel good about that position.
Verbally Abusive Men
I recently had a brief conversation with someone online about the Tucker Carlson scandal. The scandal involves Mr Carlson-who is a presenter on Fox News, using extremely abusive terms and expressing extreme ideas about women. He pontificated offensively, as a guest on a shock-jock radio show, about how women should be treated and deserved to be treated. Even using the c-word at a certain point as a description of a certain type of woman.
The person I spoke to appeared to be justifying Mr Carlson position by stating that those comments were made 10 years prior. His argument was that nobody should be judged on things they’d said over a decade ago. I was left almost speechless. Because in a world where women around the globe suffer physical or verbal abuse daily; that type of leniency is so often demonstrated towards abusive men.
When it comes to extremely abusive comments being made repeatedly-which included references to very young teenage girls being seen as sexually attractive by an adult male; there is no time expiration. If the person that made those comments has not seen the error of their ways. If they have not since that time become an advocate for women’s rights and an educator on the negative impact of verbal and physical abuse, then they have not fundamentally changed.
Further, when that party is a public figure with a platform that gives them access to millions of people, the condoning of such abuse is even more detrimental. When the condoning comes from those who consider themselves to be Christian, then it is deeply disturbing.
Religious Blind Spots
The religion itself does not matter. These types of blind spots happen in every religion. What matters is if that religion justifies abuse as the norm through its inherent teaching that men are intrinsically superior to women.
It is only when we go beyond religion to who we are without its rules, traditions, indoctrinations and biases that we can see through our blind spots. When we seek to learn the original intention behind any religion, we hold ourselves accountable. At their root religions are meant to be about love, tolerance, kindness, awareness and forgiveness.
Yet even these qualities can be used by those who distort religions to their own ends to justify repeated bad behaviour. Forgiving someone who is not remorseful is not aware. Being tolerant of someone who’s abusive by nature, is not true tolerance. Justifying abusive behaviour by stating that person didn’t really mean to do what they did when they clearly did, is not kindness.
It is instead a wilful lack of accountability.
To go beyond our religious conditioning to our spiritual core is to hold one’s self accountable. It is seeing that there can be no superior or inferior gender. It is acknowledging how absurd it is to use the word God to justify bad behaviour and intolerance.
Going Beyond
To go beyond your gender to your core is the spiritual path. Exploring who you are underneath all the trappings you call you, is necessary. It requires that you acknowledge the privilege society has placed upon you. You don’t get to deny when a system is biased in your favour. Nor as the victim of that system do you have to succumb to being exploited by that system.
Verbal and physical abuse are the sign of a mind’s disturbance, not its sanity. A mind that is truly balanced does not spout vitriol towards another. It does not delineate between who deserves to be treated with dignity and care and who does not.
It does not consider one gender to be superior to another. Nor does it require those genders to play specific or limited roles in society. Instead, it calls upon us to question these supposed rules and get to the heart of what is true and unchanging. What is true and unchanging, is that love, tolerance, awareness, kindness and forgiveness when expressed authentically, do not change over time or within cultures.
This truth demands that we hold ourselves fully accountable whenever we are doing anything less than expressing these qualities authentically.
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