According to popular wisdom, a good father respects the women in his life.
The argument in favor of God respecting women I think goes something like, "He most definitely loves all of his daughters as much as he loves his sons! He's given women the amazing role of motherhood, which makes them not just beautiful but indispensable to the human race!" Sexist but respectful is the way to go.
The fact is that when it comes to examples and laws on how to treat women God has come up with some pretty shitty ideas (like giving some men many wives and concubines). Men always come first. It's clear that God thinks he has to talk to boys first and that women should be obedient to his sons.
The Creation and the Fall are two more classic examples of where a man (Adam) comes first and where a woman (Eve) gets shat on for disobedience.
A whole slew of disgusting rules and regulations have been created and persist to the present day restricting the kinds of things women can and cannot do from how to speak, how much to speak, with whom to speak, when to speak, where she can go, with whom she can go there, which doors she can use, what she can wear, what she can own, greater punishments for misdeeds, etc. The list is really quite extensive, if you care to look into it.
God's will has been one of the many excuses throughout human history for treating women first and foremost as the property of men and more recently/currently as second class citizens. You'd think that an All-powerful Father would work just a little bit harder to clarify the dignity and equality of women, wouldn't you?
And yes, even the Mormon version of God IS VERY SEXIST. In the LDS Church it begins young and follows you into adulthood. But there are some changes even conservative Mormons can get behind that would make things a little better.
*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre
as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.
The story of Adam and Eve was an easy favorite for me as a child, second only to the story of Noah's ark. Probably because even though it had just as many animal species it lacked the adventure of the roundup and the violence of the Flood. I loved that Adam got to name all the animals and live with them and Eve happily in a kind
of Tarzan-Jane-like existence. Even thinking about it now makes me happy.
Despite the thrill of such a wonderful story I knew there were some problems with it. For starters there were the likes of these guys
and plenty of others. Then again my parents never showed any indication of subscribing to young earth creationism. In fact my dad had taken me and my siblings out trilobite hunting once or twice and he was sure to explain that the fossils we found pre-dated the dinosaurs, who were themselves hundreds of millions of years old and probably never in the Garden of Eden. I was told at home, in church, and later at BYU that the details of the Creation would be revealed to us at some point after we died, so I kept the whole issue of where prehistoric creatures came from on the shelf labeled "We won't know, so we don't care" for a surprisingly long time. Admittedly I noticed the shelf bowing horribly when I was studying the Old Testament on my mission and read quote after quote from general authorities stating that the Church's stance on the matter was unbendingly pro-young earth and therefore aggressively anti-scientific. It hurt to read that kind of senselessness. I didn't want to be wrapped up with it, nor did I want to place my faith in something so demonstrably inaccurate.
Now let me return to the question of Adam and Eve. I was taught that they were literally our "first parents", meaning that all human beings can trace their ancestry back directly to them. I believed that my physical existence resulted directly from their procreative efforts so many millennia ago. (No, Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve do not fit the biblical narrative, people!) As a youngster I oscillated between thinking they were folks who looked like my family and our church-going neighbors and thinking they were probably special cavemen who had, you know, touched the obelisk or something.
It's embarrassing now to think back on these things. It's painfully embarrassing to hear people defend creationism and attack evolution. The last two times I've attended LDS church services I was treated to witnessing explicit attacks on Darwin and the scientific method! Of course this was only a couple of months after Mormon apostle, Russell Nelson took a stab at refuting the Big Bang in General Conference with a snide and ignorant remark about an explosion in a printing press producing a dictionary...
How does anyone stay a believer when this stuff is obviously wrong even to a small child? These are issues that extend far beyond Mormonism to all of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. How could this absolute nonsense persist and flourish still today among billions of people? I'm guessing that many people do what I did: they doubt their doubts and not their faith.
