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| Dr. Elena Piscopia |
On the 25th June 1678 Elena Cornaro Piscopia
earned a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Padua in Italy making her
the first woman to be awarded a doctorate.
She would have earned a doctorate in theology had the Bishop of Padua
not refused her doctorate of theology on the grounds that she was a woman. She
later became a mathematics tutor at the University of Padua and was also considered
an expert musician. Perhaps she would have been less successful had she tried
to pursue a senior position in the Church.
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| Rev. Libby Lane |
Over 336 years later on 17th December 2014 The
Church of England appointed Reverend Libby Lane as its first female bishop. Surely
an organisation that steadfastly still claims moral superiority over the
faithless should have been first past the post rather than breathlessly
wheezing as it finally stumbled over the equality line three centuries behind academia?
The problem with adopting an ideology rooted in a purported divinely
revealed truth is that by its very nature it is extremely tricky to improve
upon that divinely revealed truth in the light of new evidence and thinking without
questioning the wisdom of the deity originally credited with it.
This particular example of lackadaisical Christian catch-up
is therefore far from unprecedented.
Galileo was put on trial and condemned in 1616 and 1633 by
the Roman Catholic Inquisition for contradicting its unquestionable scriptures
by daring to use the scientific method to theorise that the earth in fact
orbits the sun. It wasn’t until the 4th November 1992 that Pope John
Paul II issued a weasel worded vindication of Galileo, long after the Church’s
original position had become utterly untenable.
The speed at which the church was able to catch–up with what
now seems to be such obvious and basic gender equality is laughable. But it
will need to speed up its reform process to a rate that will be uncomfortable
to many of its members if it wants to try and keep in touch with the modern
world.
The only alternative to such sensible liberal reforms is to simply stand still.
In a post-enlightened world where society, morality and equality are advancing
at an accelerating rate, standing still and refusing to rethink frequently now
manifests itself as bigotry, with fundamentalism not far behind.
As religious views on women bishops and gay marriages become
more polarised how close are we to the ultimate Christian reform of jettisoning
the supernatural mumbo jumbo altogether? Bereft of its divisive mystical claptrap
surely Christianity could be distilled down to a laudable set of ideas about
being nice to one another that we could all rally behind.
How long will it be before Christianity officially abandons
the pious petitioning of supernatural beings, implausible virgin births,
credulous miracles, the wicked threat of eternal damnation and the fabricated bribe
of immortality to the bigots and fundamentalists who prefer to stand still?
I suspect it will be considerably less than the 336 years it
took Libby to catch up with Elena but In the meantime we still have the British
Humanist Association. But when the Church finally embraces this ultimate reform
I’ll be happy to go back, after all they do have the better architecture.
