Religion and sex integration

Religion and sex integration is the association of religion with the return of equality for women and the intermixing of women in religion. Members of both human sexes are capable of faith and spirituality. But, for the past 2,000 years, male control of religion has suppressed the female religious experience, pushing women back into an inferior standing. The single most significant predictor of female labor force participation across countries is religion: religion alone can explain 35% of the cross-country variations in female participation rates over time.
Original equality
The San people of southern Africa are among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity and may be the most basal branch of the phylogenetic tree comprising all living humans. The status of women is relatively equal. Sex segregation appears to be limited. San women gather fruit, berries, tubers, bush onions and other plant materials for the band's consumption. San men traditionally hunt using poison arrows and spears in laborious, long excursions. Kudu, antelope, deer, dikdik, and buffalo are important game animals. The San offer thanks to the animal's spirit after it has been killed.
Traditions of approximate sex equality find their origins in the Qur'an.
Spatial symbolism
The cosmological order underlying Polynesian notions of aristocracy apparently originating from high volcanic islands is compromised by spatial ambiguities when living on an atoll consisting of a ring of islets, and the hierarchical social order becomes insupportable leading to a more egalitarian basis for social relations.
God and deity
At many times throughout human history an occasional god or deity is male or female. Neith was an early goddess in the Egyptian pantheon. Ishtar was the main goddess of Babylonia and Assyria. In pre-Islamic Mecca, the goddesses Uzza, and were known as "the daughters of god". And, the Greek and Roman ruling male gods were named Zeus and Jupiter, respectively. In the years near the birth of Jesus Christ, Judaism included the worship of a goddess (probably Astarte). who regulated the stars and the seasons. She was the Ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, order, law, morality, and justice. The Egyptian law preserved the rights of women who were allowed to act independently of men and own substantial personal property and in time this influenced the more restrictive conventions of the Greeks and Romans.
Priests and priestesses
There were both priests and priestesses officiating at Isis cult rituals throughout its entire history. By the Greco-Roman era, many of them were healers, and were said to have many other special powers, including dream interpretation and the ability to control the weather, which they did by braiding or not combing their hair.
Sex integration and ancient Roman religion
While ancient Rome and its subsequent empire had many restrictions against women, many women engaged in politics, government and religion, usually behind the scenes. Some aspects of ancient Roman religion involved women and men. Deities existed of either sex. Prophets and prophetesses were known. Women and men could serve deities.
Roman goddesses
Rome was founded by descendants of Aeneas, a descendant of Venus. The Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus founded a Capitoline temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Servius Tullius built the Aventine Temple to Diana.
By late antiquity, numerous foreign cults had gained vast popularity in the farthest reaches of the Empire, including the mystery cult of the syncretized Egyptian goddess Isis.
Prophetess
The motives of private haruspices - especially females - and their clients were officially suspect: none of this seems to have troubled the populist politician-general Gaius Marius, who employed a Syrian prophetess.
Service of deities
Some deities such as Vesta were served by women.
Cults and games
Most cults and games (ludi) did not forbid the presence of women. Some specifically required it.
Priestess
The public cult to Vesta, goddess of the hearth of the Roman state and its vital flame, was served by six virgin priestesses. In one strand of Rome's foundation myth, Romulus and Remus were fathered by Mars or Hercules on a Vestal virgin of royal blood. Another tradition held that Rome's sixth king was fathered by a disembodied phallus on a virgin slave-girl who served at the royal hearth: the cult objects stored in Vesta's temple included a phallus and the Penates and Lares of the Roman state. A girl chosen to be a Vestal Virgin achieved unique religious distinction, public status and privileges, and could exercise considerable political influence.
Augustus' religious reformations raised the funding and public profile of the Vestals. They were given high status seating at games and theatres. The emperor Claudius appointed them as priestesses to the cult of the deified Livia (wife of Augustus). They seem to have retained their religious and social distinctions at least until the Christian emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus and began the dissolution of their order: his successor Theodosius I extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple.
Women from powerful families
The empress Helena was a driving force in establishing Christianity as the official religion of Rome.
Early sex integration in Judaism
The worship of a goddess in Judaism occurred near the birth of Jesus Christ.
Monotheism and sex integration
In the worship of Aten is the apparent abandonment of all other gods and the debatable introduction of monotheism by Akhenaten. The god is considered to be both masculine and feminine simultaneously. Akhenaten died in 1336 BC or 1334 BC.
Although God is referred to in the Hebrew Bible with masculine imagery and grammatical forms, Jewish philosophy does not attribute to God either sex or gender. At times, Jewish aggadic literature and Jewish mysticism do treat God as gendered, though these are not uniformly masculine or feminine.
The majority of Christians believe that God transcends gender.
In the Qur'an, Allah is most often referred to with the pronouns Hu or Huwa, and although these are commonly translated as him, they can also be translated gender-neutrally, as it. This is also true of the feminine equivalent, Hiya. Allah is neither male nor female, and is said to transcend gender. It is considered blasphemy for Allah to be placed in a human or animal sexual gender category. Qur'an 112:3-4 states: "He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him."
Other references include the first person pronoun, and the relative pronoun ma (that which), as in the phrase "the heavens and that which created them" (Qur'an 91:5).
Female Pope
Against the weight of historical evidence to the contrary, the question remains as to why the Pope Joan story has been so often believed and revisited. Some, such as Philip Jenkins in The New Anti-Catholicism, have suggested that the periodic revival of what he calls this "anti-papal legend" has more to do with feminist and anti-Catholic wishful thinking than historical accuracy.
Sex re-integration in religion
On July 29, 1974, eleven women were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church. The possibility of allowing women to be ordained clergy first arose in the Episcopal Church in 1920 at a Lambeth, England, conference of the Anglican Communion.
The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America is another female-ordaining denomination.
In Roman Catholic churches, men and women sit together in most Western Catholic parishes. Due to a shortage of male priests most of the three hundred priestless Roman Catholic parishes in the United States are "pastored" by women. In the 1960s and early 1970s, sex integration in American Catholic institutions of higher education virtually overwhelmed previous segregation.
Apparently, there are women clerics of Islam in Central Asia. And, women Mullahs exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran, although not officially sanctioned.
Within the various Jewish denominations there are different requirements for rabbinic ordination, and differences in opinion regarding who is to be recognized as a rabbi. Almost all types of Judaism ordain women as rabbis and cantors.
Within the Australian labour market, 'ministers of religion' is one of the least sex integrated occupations.
Neopaganism
Contemporary Pagan religious movements are extremely diverse, with a wide range of beliefs such as polytheism, animism, and pantheism. Many Pagans practise a spirituality that is entirely modern in origin, while others attempt to accurately reconstruct or revive indigenous, ethnic religions as found in historical and folkloric sources.
In Wicca, (especially Dianic Wicca) the concept of an Earth or Mother Goddess similar to the Greek Gaia is emphasized. Male counterparts are usually also evoked, such as the Green Man and the Horned God (who is loosely based on the Celtic Cernunnos.) These Duotheistic philosophies tend to emphasize the God and Goddess' (or Lord and Lady's) genders as being complementary opposites analogous to that of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy. Many Oriental philosophies equate weakness with femininity and strength with masculinity; this is not the prevailing attitude in Paganism and Wicca. Among many Pagans, there is a strong desire to incorporate the female aspects of the divine in their worship and within their lives, which can partially explain the attitude which sometimes manifests as the veneration of women.
Sacredness
When asked to explain the victories of the civil rights movement, activists often reply, "God was on our side."; thereby positioning segregationists clearly across the fence.
Segregation may be unconstitutional and a sin, making segregationists heretics.

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