Women wear the hijab in solidarity
Some non-Muslim women in San Francisco are wearing the hijab (veil) that enables racists to target Muslim women. While this is potentially dangerous, it is also a great way to spark discussion with all kinds of people who will ask why you are wearing it.
Action idea from:
http://www.9-11peace.org/action.php3?item=3415456
Discussion point - from a book review of "So far from God" and on the power of religion to oppress by causing victims to identify with their own oppression.
"It always creates a space to discuss health and healing in relation to culture, environmental racism, labor exploitation, sexism, homophobia, faith, and political organizing . Ana Castillo's characters ask us to consider the costs of internalizing oppression, as well as present transformative ways of being in the world. A hopeful novel about the need for social change and personal transformation..."
Some oppression to internalize and identify with from 1st Corinthians 11 (the notorious pregnant man argument)
I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is man ... any woman with her head unveiled dishonors her head, it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her wear a veil. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.) That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels.
More oppression to identify with and internalize
1st corinthian 14
the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached? If any one thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord.
Titus 2
and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste, doers of housework, kind, and submissive to the authority of their husbands
Romans 1
God gave them up to disgraceful lusts. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with lust for one another, men committing perverted acts with men and receiving in their own souls the due penalty for their error. They are filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve the death penalty
Jude
They left their proper placve and have been kept by him in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day; Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which acted immorally and indulged in perverted lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal hell fire. these men in their dreamings defile the flesh, reject authority, and revile the glorious ones. by those things that they know by instinct as irrational animals do, they are destroyed. Woe to them! For they walk in the way of Cain, and abandon themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error, and perish in Korah’s rebellion. These are blemishes on your love feasts, as they boldly carouse together, looking after themselves; waterless clouds, carried along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own disgraceful shame; wandering stars for whom the nether gloom of darkness has been reserved for ever and ever. It was of these also that Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam prophesied, saying, "Behold, the Lord came with his holy myriads, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness which they have committed in such an ungodly wayfollowing their own ungodly lusts. save some, by snatching them out of the fire; on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.
The Story of The Garden of Eden (updated)
Once there was Garden planted in Eden where the man and the woman lived completely naked, and they were not ashamed. Well, one day a Christian (or muslim or Judaic) snake cmae and said to the couple, 'Just look at yourself. Why, you're naked for shame. Well its just disgraceful. Your sinful and shameful parts are showing." The couple blushed with shame, and accepted the sacred and holy apple being peddled by that snake, the apple that promised them holiness and that would make them 'wise like God'. As soon as they had eaten the apple of religion pushed by mullahs, priests, and rabbis they realized for the first time that they were completely naked in Eden, and they were deeply ashamed. They gathered some fig leaves and covered their wicked and shameful parts, but even this was not enough for the snake. "Some of your sinful flesh is still showing," barked the shake in accusation. So the woman took on the Hajib (as ordered in Christian and Muslim priestly documents) and soon no part of her wicked human body was showing except for the unfortunate exception of a small slit for her eyes so she wouldn't walk into walls. The man was similarly covered, but, given, as the sacred scripture stated, that 'the man's head is the glory of God, but the woman's head uncovered is her shame, as nature teaches us" (end quote) the man while covering his entire wickedness was allowed to go about bare headed to the glory of God.
Well shortly after the snake had cleaned up the vice and sexual immorality of The Garden of Eden and tuaght the couple true holiness and fed them the sacred priestly apple, Yahweh came walking through the Garden in the coolness of the Evening breezes, and the couple hightailed into the bushes to hide. "Why are you hiding,' they were asked and they replied, 'well we heard you coming and we were afraid so we hid in the trees." This new "fear of God" was another novel invention the couple had just learned since taking their afternoon snake tutoring. Well noticing the woman wrapped up from head to toe and the man wrapped up (with the exception of his glorious head) the couple was asked "who told you that you were naked? Did you eat that apple that snake was peddling that I kept telling you not to eat?" "The snaked must have tricked us into eating it," they replied.
Well the anger of God blazed out at the destruction that had come to Eden that day. The two humans were corrupted and their moral sense completely defiled and from that day forward wouldn't be able to tell right from wrong or true virtue from true vice, inequality and injustice, spending most of their time concerned with their filthy and immoral bodies, you know, those bodies they were born with by some sort of frreak sinful mistake by a God who you know, just hated that sort of thing.
And so the couple were expelled from Eden to live in slavery to snakes who would also bring them into captivityto the kings and the overlords, for whom they would pull donkey carts and offer themselves as cannon fodder, when they weren't going to churches or mosques to be taught sexual morality. And God said to the snake, "why did you do this terrible and disgusting thing to these people. From this day forward you will be cursed, and you will crawl on your belly like a snake."
And as for Eden it was completely ruined and soon was covered by thistles and thorns.
The moral of the story? Well I can empathize with protecting people from attacks, but taking on or enabling the oppression of the people by systems of religion is another matter altogether. To me there is more in that symbolism of taking on the priestly fig leaf than simply protesting racism. Let us just say that if the human body is evil, then let us say that any God worth its salt should have refrained from creating something so evil and then making it so desirable in the first place (in otherwords their is a worthless irrationality at the very core of religion that must be challenged.)
As for me, I remain a guerrilla fighter for the Eden Liberation Front. On Earth Day, 2001, we gurrilla fighters placed a ticking spiritual time bomb into every church and every mosque and every synagogue on the planet, which will bring down that high wall, that high wall of oppression and perversity, already cracked, cracked and bulging and about to collapse ... And they were warned-we did put in a call to warn them that we placed a ticking time bomb at that base of that wall, that cracked and bulging wall on the verge of collapse, a bomb which would most certainly go off at such and such a time. DOWN WITH THE WALL! Who will save the world from salvation? In solidarity with the oppressed victims of religion! In soldiarity with all those who refuse religion and are stoned or hounded or oppressed. In solidarity with prostitutes, tax collectors and other 'sinners'! DOWN WITH RELIGION and DOWN WITH RELIGIOUS OPPRESSORS and their tools of oppressing humanity, the poisoned apple in the Garden! ONWARD TO FREEDOM!TOMMORROW IN EDEN!
Earth Day 2001 Eden Liberation Front Eden Wing Banner
Into the Fire
Mother teach me to walk again
Milk and Honey so intoxicating
Into the fire
I'm reunited
into the fire
I am the spark
Into the fire
I yearn for comfort
Open the doors that lead on into Eden
No more cheap disguise
Follow the signs marked back to the beginning
No more compromise
I will stare into the sun until its light doesn't blind me
I will walk into the fire until its heat doesn't burn me
And I will feed the fire
The conflicts over the status of women in the Bible
http://www.awitness.org/nt/pseudopl.html
The influence of Greek stoicism on religion
http://www.awitness.org/bible_criticism_methods/canon_stoic_christ_cult.html
On the distorted morality of religion
http://www.awitness.org/news/november_2001/response_marx_religiion.html
And by the way support Iran's student democracy protestors. As they say in their own words, "Iranians living in the US East cost and specially in New York gathered to protest against the persistent repression in Iran. They are siezing the occasion offered by the presence of the Islamic president, at the UN, to show their rejection of the Theocratic rule. On Sunday November 11, 2001 From 11:00 AM till 01:00 PM In front of the Islamic republic office at the UN Located at the junction of 5th and 86th avenues in New York..."
http://www.awitness.org/news/october_2001/iran_protest_student.html
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