I was reading "The History of God" by Karen Armstrong, but it's slow reading because I react and think about every paragraph with my own thoughts. I have heard time and time again that only the male of our human race was created in God's image, and the female was created as a 'derivative' creation to help the male. This is the basis of the oppression of women and Christian sexism.

I decided to investigate the two creation stories from the book of Genesis and I was surprised to find out that the idea that the female is a 'secondary' creation aren't founded in the Bible.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26,27 (NRSV)

The second creation story describes this differently:

...then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:7 (NRSV)

In this version, woman is not created until verse 22.

This tells me that both men and women are made in the image of God. Since I try to avoid assigning gender-identifications to God, I interpret this to mean that both men and women are images of God. There is no Biblical basis for discrimination against women. Of course, there are probably several hundred references to the inferiority of women in the Bible, but going back to the spiritual beginning of the world, it is all unfounded.

¶ 1:51 PM