May 22: Discussion on religions and women

We discussed for a while about what to discuss during this meeting. I had some material with me about eco-islam as a leaflet (you can download the leaflet and mor info from http://www.ifees.org.uk/ ) and hare krishna's ecologically self-sustaining community in Hungary
( http://krisnavolgy.hu/english/day/index.html ) so I thought maybe we could discuss about religions and the environment. Robert brought with him a funny film called Victor/Victoria ( http://imdb.com/title/tt0084865/ ) but many of us had to leave early and it was unrelated to religion, so we didnt watch it. He also suggested a channel 4 movie called beautiful thing ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115640/ ). Anyway after a while we ended up discussing religions' approach to women (ironic for 6 guys to discuss, but no less ironic than the womens week at university few months back when there were 6 athiest or cynical women discussing women in religion, and 3 religious men).

Anyway, we discussed the bahai faith approach to women, especially the positive aspect that bahais are supposed to educate their daughters in preference if they have limited means, so that they can grow up to be good mothers. We discussed the buddhist problems about nuns having less rights than monks and the controversial part about women cant get enlightened. We went on to Christianity and discussed how perhaps (controversially for some) Jesus could be interpreted as a radical feminist in his time, since in the gospel are accounts where he touched women to heal them (perhaps not appropriate as per traditional jewish laws of the time), was anointed by a woman, had a woman wash his feet with tears before he washed the disciples' feet, was served water by a samaritan woman etc. we discussed the hindu concept of mother goddess, about God being depicted as androgynous ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardhanareshvara ) in certain places etc, yet the fact that some women are yet oppressed. I had to leave a bit early, so missed the rest of the discussion. Perhaps Kevin or Robert could fill us in on that.

Thats all for now, think we shall meet again next week if people are willing to come along.