Kevin Dahl-skog

“But the most catastrophic display of misogyny in all religion lies at the very heart of Christianity—in the story of the Virgin Mary. That Jesus was born of a virgin is a fundamental narrative upon which all Christianity is based. It is one that is carried through to Islam, where the Quran holds Mary in great esteem.

The implications of this have historically been devastating to women.

...Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ as a virgin, with no man ever having touched her. She is therefore described as pure, chaste, undefiled, innocent—being the product of an “immaculate conception” herself (as per Catholic doctrine), and now hosting God’s immaculate son in her unblemished womb.

What does this mean for women who are touched by men? Are their conceptions corrupted? Are their characters and bodies now impure or unchaste? Have they been “defiled”?

...Was all of Mary’s beauty, sanctity, chastity, and innocence confined to her vagina?

Fetishizing Mary’s virginity—as Christians and Muslims both do—is a sickness that directly leads to a dangerous, unnatural glamorization of celibacy and sexual repression.”

Excerpt From: Ali A. Rizvi. “The Atheist Muslim.” iBooks.”
― Ali A. Rizvi, The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason

“Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos