Well, I disliked James' comment about feminists. Feminists do not make women inferior to men. Feminists can, however, see where women are treated as inferior to men. Open your eyes people!!

How can you say that (in this country at least) women are treated as equal to men when there is still an 18.5% pay gap? That means that it is likely that a woman doing the same job as a man will get paid 18.5% less than him!!! That sucks. They should get paid the same. (Please note that as a feminist, I think they should get paid the same! I'm not one of these really radical feminist jobbies, I just think that everyone should be equal.)

This whole equality thing does involve doing things like removing the "for us men" from the Creed. I know this is a contentious issue, but I really do think that it should say "for us". I know that probably when they're saying the Creed, most people don't really consider the implications of using "for us men" - I guess you could even hold the opinion that either: it's easier than saying "for us men & women" or "for us humans"; saying "for us men" doesn't really say anything about making women inferior. Well, I'm sorry, but it does. The people who agreed on the wording of the Creed are most likely from the same crew who in translating the Bible, have decided that the people in Romans 16:7 were both men. Even John Chrysostom had them down as a man and a woman - probably a married couple, but later translations have them both down as men. There's a bit of a problem with this, in that if they were both men, one of them has a name that didn't actually exist. Junias was not a name. If, however, this person was a women, she would be called Junia, which was a common name. So, methinks that this was a woman, and that there's just a few oddballs out there who don't want to admit that women were so prominent in the early Church, and that Paul - of all people! - wrote to them, and actually seems to have respected them a lot.

But, hang on! Surely Paul was a mysogynist?!!! Well, um, no, actually. Paul was always at pains to address both sides of a partnership, and he also wrote directly to women. He also acknowledged the pretty much equal rights and responsibilites of men & women. It's just these silly interpreters that have taken what he said in the wrong way.

1 Corinthians 7:4 - Whatever authority is given to the man is also given to the woman. No mysogynist there so far as I can see!

Then you've got the infamous passage in 1 Corinthians 11. But, if you look particularly at 1 Corinthians 11:10, you might find a bit of a male bias in the translation. Here, Paul actually appears to be talking of the authority that a woman has. A head covering GIVES a woman authority, it does not take it away.

I guess it does have to be considered that Paul maybe did introduce ideas that could put women down, but he most certainly could not be dismissed as a male chauvanist pig - that title belongs to those who interpreted his writings in such a way.

In the deutero-Pauline & pastoral epistles, there are things that clearly do place men above women...They were all written under a huge influence of patriarchalisation - a process that should be demolished; not even so that it can be replaced by matriarchalisation, because that would be just as bad, and really, through it, nothing would have been achieved.

OK, moving on to another of James' points...Why does the word "woman" make women dependent on "man" - surely these words actually so interdependence. The word "man", is a shortening of "woman" and the word "woman" is a lengthening of "man". Surely, men & women just can't exist without each other, and it has to be accepted that they should all be equal, as they are equal in the eyes of God. Therefore, the movement - feminist or otherwise - for equal rights of all people should be pursued.