This is grossly incorrect. The Buddhist society had four sectors, lay men, lay women, bhikku (priest) and bhikkuni (nun). And every one has the same potential to achieve “nirvana”, and gender does not matter.

1) description – ethnography, phenomenology, history (comprehensive, accurate)

2) interpretation – text translation, participant observation, narrative (intelligible, understandable)

3) explanation – psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, cultural theories (predictable, accurate, meaningful, comprehensive)

4) evaluation – And, as you say, and as some comments indicate, this is the political and often most deeply personal one that most professional scholars try to avoid as any criteria will reflect a moral or political conviction reducible (or deconstructable) to arbitrary socio-cultural circumstances (or metaphysical faith commitments) without academically defensible claims to universality, perfect objectivity, or righteousness (!). Sure.

So how to proceed? Taking a cue from Cathy Albanese, I start by adopting a value that is so general that most or all people can agree on it: human life. Religions that foster it are “good religions” and ones that advocate for killing or otherwise stifling human life are the “bad religions.” Sure they are broad categories, but it starts the process of clarifying terms like “fostering” and “stifling,” etc. Next I remind myself and my students that our mental frames, attitudes, feelings, discourse and rationales are occurring in the context of a wider culture war being waged all across the country in politics, courtrooms, and in the media, and that we can choose to participate (and continue the polemics right here in our class) or not participate (and find a perspective where surprising similarities are found between “us” and “them” – a shared sentiment or value, a similar moral indignation that invites respect even, or a shared sense of existential fear (or joy) behind the rhetoric).

How to get there? Two ways that I can think of: 1) by being exposed to good scholarship that does 1, 2, and 3 above + honestly recognizing one’s own biases and where they come from in terms of life experience, personal development, or religious formation + open-mindedness + imagination; and 2) by modeling that perspective in lecture and class conversation.

For instance, sure, I think the gospel of prosperity is bunk, but I can also admire its utility for enculturation and acculturation. I can appreciate what it reveals about American culture in general and the “flexibility” with which evangelical preachers wield Christian ideas to generate a community of shared feelings. I might not like the political agenda of militant fundamentalists, but I can sympathize with their anxieties about loss of moral agreement and loss of the sacred, and can even empathize with the relief and celebration they experience in the comfortable and confident space of their religious communities. What could be more human? And I remind myself and my students that the inclination to reduce religious faith, ideas, beliefs, or commitments to (publicly verifiable) propositional truths is itself the result of socio-cultural conditions and a (often unacknowledged) faith commitment to scientism (or logical positivism) that operates functionally to occlude a vital part of our own humanity. Karen Armstrong would say that vital part consists of a recognition that modernity or modernism has been a failure, and I would add another part: the painful realization that technology (alone) will NOT solve the ecological problems we face – and indeed, more generally, that science (alone) will not and can not repair the moral community.

The perspective that finds an alternative to cultural warfare (or worse) is one that recognizes the unique powers, importance, and utility of BOTH science AND religion, both mythos and logos. A balancing act indeed, as Ewf says above, but one that ANYONE can learn, practice, and get good at!

Jeff Danese

I never forced this on my son and I always told him that he does not have to follow my faith, only if he wants to. He grew up to love his faith and he had freedom in our house to do his prayers and rituals as his faith expected of him. Through the years I made contact again with his father’s sister( we used to be quite close) who has two daughter almost the same age as my son and he started spending lots of weekend with them. They also came to my house for weekends as well and we used to do a lot of thing s together.
My son became more religious and was exposed to a lot of muslim people. I even paid a fee to a certain Imam ( muslim priest) at my son’s request for special classes after school. During the month of Ramadaan (the fasting period) I used to get up before my son (an hour before sunrise) to prepare him food and in the evening at sunset I would lay out the table for him like the tradition is. I would even invite his muslim family to come and break their fast with him and vice versa.

Through all this I attend my Church ( I am an Anglican), read my bible etc.

One weekend (06 Nov 09) my son went to visit his cousins for the weekend and never returned. He very politely told me that he was told by a Imam that he cannot live with me as I am not a Muslim. If I want to keep him I was told to embrace Islam. My ex husband;s sister, whom I thought was my friend, has been doctrinating my child along with other Muslim leaders and he is living with her right now. I was so dumbstruck as I did not see it coming. I thought I was doing everything right.
I am heartbroken, I cry myself to sleep every night. I cannot concentrate on my work as my mind is on my child. On 31 Oct it was my birthday, a week before he left. He wrote me the most beautifull message. Telling me that I am the most greatest mom and how much he loves me. Then snap, just like that, he ups and leaves. I am so confused. I don’t know what to do. He has made contact with me once to ask how I was doing and I cried so much over the phone that i sdidn’t say what I wanted to say.

Someone out there, if you have advice for me pleeeeease help me.

I have become unsure of myactions. Is it all my fault. Should I have kept him away from Islam and his muslim family? Would he have turned out different? I haven’t been to church since this happened. I am so confused and messed up right now. I feel my child has been brainwashed!! What responsible adult, no matter what religion, tells a child to leave his mother!! To me thats bad people.

http://loga-abdullah.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-reasons.html

As a mom of two little boys and as a woman with a math-and-tech bent, I concur that the averages differences are real, but applying that knowledge — making the differences into normative expectations — leads to a lot of problems.

I live in New York City and attend Columbia University–probably one of the most liberal institutions in the country, both in terms of politics and in terms of student behavior. I’ve spent more nights than I care to remember, holding the hand of one my best girlfriends at the nasty end of a consummated romantic relationship; holding the hair out of her face while she threw up her dinner and tequila, thinking back on all the sexual favors she preformed before he dumped her. We like to think of modern western women as liberated because we have the “freedom” to dress scantily, seduce men openly, have sex however we want, with whomever we want, whenever we want.

To me, this is not freedom. Over the summer, I was reading the Washington Post and came across a story about Sarkozy banning women in “burqinis” from French swimming pools, saying ‘Such clothing imprisons women.’ The idea that bikini-clad women are the most free represents a wildly popular, and incredibly narrow way of thinking. Personally, I dress modestly because I feel more free when straight men I encounter are forced to look to somewhere beyond my surface because the surface is covered up. I feel more confident and less prejudged for my gender when I know I haven’t tempted men to view me as a sexual object.

When I tell men on the third date that I plan on remaining abstinent until marriage, it’s valuable to see who sticks around and who runs in the other direction. When I’m in a relationship with a guy, I know for a fact that he takes me seriously, enjoys my company, and isn’t just in it for the sex. I feel FREE to love (in the emotional sense!) without inhibition because if a guy is staying with me, it’s not for something so fleeting as sexual passion, but for something much deeper.

While women may feel, in this age of post-feminism, that there are no social taboos to govern our sexual decisions, it’s important to consider the pressure our modern culture places on us to have premarital sex, in the same way a previous culture pressured us not to. My father never took me to a Purity Ball, and neither of my parents ever suggested I would be cast into the lake of fire for succumbing to sexual instincts before marriage. I was lucky that they lovingly convinced me to wait at least until I finished high school, and that by then I had matured to the point of making the decision to continue holding out until marriage.

I realized that my hormones are present but controllable. The real pressure was coming, not as a consequence of nature, but of nurture. Most of my best friends have had sex, and we talk about their experiences openly, which makes me curious. The late-night television air waves are all abuzz with the sound of screaming orgasms. No need to check out porn for steamy sex scenes–the R-rated movies I’ve seen in theaters since age 17 should suggest an extra pair of panties in the adverts. I’m overwhelmed by the number of magazines displayed openly in grocery store check-out aisles, that want to show me how to make him hot and how to have the most incredible sexual experience of my life. I figure attribution for my growing sex drive could be divided in the following manner: 20% my hormones, 30% pressure from my rotten ex-boyfriend, and a whopping 50% in cultural suggestion.

Just as women of the 1850s may not have known that sex out of wedlock was an option, today’s young women may not be aware that waiting for marriage is a viable option. It took a lot of soul-searching, a lot of research, and a lot of social experimentation for me to understand that I could wait for sex. The girls attending the Purity Ball are growing up in the USA. Trust me, they can see that the world will not end if they fall short of their pledge. However, everyone’s body and everyone’s heart is different. There are some girls out there who are perfectly capable of holding out for that one special man, and would be more comfortable doing so, but are convinced that that would be abnormal and socially unacceptable, and that sex is the only way to get close enough to a man that he would be willing to marry her. The fact that these girls have their fathers to counter those untruths is a beautiful thing, as is the fact that they don’t have to feel alone in their convictions, as they’re surrounded by other girls making the same pledge.

One last point: I know it sounds kind of weird that the girls intend to give themselves as wedding gifts to their husbands, and that it’s particularly politically incorrect. But can any men on this thread deny that when a woman consents to have sex with you, it’s a gift? If the man loves the woman he’s with and is willing to take his time and ensure that her physical needs are met, isn’t that a gift from him to her? We spend so much time trying to make ourselves desirable to the opposite sex (or same sex if we’re LGBT), and we appreciate their acceptance of us and the pleasurable sensations that ensue. If that gift is saved for marriage, it becomes a wedding gift. Perhaps a little jarring to read, but please don’t paint these people as freaks for terming it the way they did.

1) First of all, “salvation” in Mormon doctrine is not the same as in mainline Christianity. According to Mormonism, ALL people (married or not) who do not “deny the Holy Ghost” will live forever in a paradise beyond imagination, and NOT live with the devil forever, as in mainline Christianity’s concept of hell. You ought to know that most of your readers don’t understand that, and without that understanding, the Mormons and their God seem much more cruel to the outsider. That Mormons believe the highest salvation cannot be enjoyed without heterosexual marriage is true; however, an important caveat here is that the marriage does not have to happen in this life. Indeed, Church leaders DO NOT advocate gay members to enter heterosexual marriages in this life.

2) God will eventually tell us, but perhaps not until after we die. That’s also when we’ll find out why countless of innocent people had to suffer anything, from common colds to genocide.

3)True, and not just gay sex, but any pre- or extra-marital sex.

4) Sex within the bonds of heterosexual matrimony is not sinful, but rather a sacred act within its sacred context (marriage). There is no irony here: it would include polygamous heterosexual marriage here if such were the current practice of the Church. But since it’s not the current practice, but is CURRENTLY contrary to the will of God for polygamy to be PRESENTLY practiced, the only God-sanctioned sexual relations PRESENTLY occur in heterosexual monogamous marriages. That’s what the Mormons really believe.

5) Sex IS sacred. Trifling with sacred things is immoral. The only proper setting for sex is within the bonds of heterosexual marriage, which was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden. So sex-outside-of-marriage is immoral, not sex itself. Sex itself is not evil, but to treat sacred things lightly, or in a manner contrary to God’s commandments, IS evil, as you put it.

6) You are correct that Mormons believe self-denial of unclean things leads to greater self-respect, among other benefits. You are also correct in that Mormons do not believe sexual drives are the same as biological or even social NEEDS. History abounds in examples of men and women who have led admirable, fulfilling lives without sex.

I would like to add a personal thought here, which is not Church doctrine insofar as I know, but also is not refuted by Church doctrine, again insofar as I know. I would direct you to Matthew 19:12, wherein Christ, speaking on marriage (verse 10), says “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” Eunuchs were not only castrated men, as is evident in His description of the earliest eunuchs. So what could He be referring to? Celibates, perhaps? If so, who would those celibates be? Well, from the womb, there are people who are physically unable to copulate. In Christ’s time, there were men who “were made eunuchs of men” via castration for various reasons. It is the third category that is most intriguing. Who are those who have CHOSEN to be celibate “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”? I think it possible that He was including here the homosexuals who would practice abstinence because the gospel and the kingdom of heaven require it.

7 – 15) In these items you are less factual and go more on opinion, so I won’t go through these clarifying fact from half-truth. However, if anyone would like further discussion of these items, I’d be happy to share what I know and what I think.

I appreciate the integrity displayed by your posting this.