Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

(I posted this on MySpace ages ago, but since I am really going to kill my MySpace, I thought I'd preserve this here)

When anyone wants to start a new religion, it’s usually best to begin with de-deifying Christ. After all, if He’s not ’"THE Deity anymore then you can pitch most/all of what He said and start over as you see fit. Should a new religion’s founders wish to keep Christ around, the best approach is then to reduce Him to "A" Deity and elevate yourself to "A" Diety as well. By doing this, you can keep enough of Christ around that people will not think you are a cult, but insert enough of yourself into things that you can always switch to cult status down the road when you have enough members.

This brings me to women starting religions vs men starting religions. The Christ/deity thing doesn’t seem to fall on gender lines. From the bit of reading I’ve done, men and women equally take both paths when it comes to dealing with Christianity. Where men and women differ, however, is in the area of sex.

Joseph Smith, David Koresh and Warren Steed Jeffs all amassed for themselves child brides pretty quickly upon establishing their religions. The documentation I read says that 33% of Joe’s brides were 14-20 when he married them. The hundreds of kids they picked up in the raid on YFZ Ranch in Eldorado reportedly identify multiple women as their mothers. And that whole things was predicated on a call to an abuse hotline from a 16 year complaining that a "sister wife" would hold her infant while she (the caller) was beaten by her 50 year old husband.

Compare that to Mother Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, and Anna Spafford who led the American Colony in Jerusalem after her husband (Horatio Spafford) passed away. Both of these women ran religions that required celebacy amongst the members. Ann divided everybody into to "families" and they grew their numbers through adopting orphans. The American Colony commited itself to public service and flourished because they did not evangelize in the heart of Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

I don’t recall Ann Lee’s background off the top of my head, but Horatio and Anna Spafford are best known for Horatio’s writing of the hymn "It Is Well". If you have attended an Protestant church, you know the story. Anna and the four daughters travel by sea to England. The boat is wrecked and Anna is the sole survivor. She sends a telegram "saved alone" to Horatio. As he travels to England to meet her, he pens the lyrics over the spot where the boat is wrecked. Apparently, they got a little loopy after that and started the American Colony so they could be in the Holy Land during the turn of the century. They felt that Christ would return for the event and they’d be there to meet Him. But I suppose that if my four children died at the same time and that only one of my two children born after that survived, I’d be a little loopy and looking for the Kingdom too.

Which brings me back to when women start religions. Do women just ultimately not like sex and take the first chance they have to abolish it under the guise of holiness? Or is an aversion to what causes children just the byproduct of the loss of five of your six children?
I think I have to side with the women here as being the lesser of two evils. At least they can put the USDA stamp of "no children were harmed in the making of this religion", unlike the con-man Joe Smith and the rest of the pedophiles founding religious sects in the last 100 years.