{"quotes":[{"text":"Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and person...The main scandal of Jesus' career is properly JESUS - not Jesus and feminism, or Jesus and the abolition of slavery, or Jesus and Jewish emancipation, or Jesus and anything else. Those other causes are good, and they are implicit in Jesus' ministry. But they are incipient at best, and Jesus' accommodation to these various social distinctions needs to be acknowledged and then accounted for in one's paradigm regarding gender.","author":"John G. Stackhouse Jr.","tags":["complementarianism","egalitarianism","feminism","jesus","slavery"],"id":51387,"author_id":"John+G.+Stackhouse+Jr."},{"text":"Accepting experiences is through the understanding that everybody was born equal, no labels, no social status, no preconceptions just born a little person preparing to grow-up on what ever path is grown from development, environment and/or otherwise everybody has the right to have a roof over their head, three meals a day, a wage/payment which can support themselves and their families, a benefit system that cares for the disabled and people with mental illnesses, a government that looks out for all it's people, wars quenched not and man made barriers be fallen so every person knows the commonality of being human is that everybody is all different and let people be novices to other peoples experiences so another person gains anew. People all deserve the right to be equal.","author":"Paul Isaacs","tags":["egalitarianism","equality","human-rights","socialism"],"id":72152,"author_id":"Paul+Isaacs"},{"text":"Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people, and the divide drawn by the early iteration of God's Church helped to exacerbate the many ideological faults that already underlay the landscape. When they chips were down, Tear's people were ready to turn on each other, and the fall of the Town was very quick, so quick that this historian wonders whether all such communities are not destined to fail. Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.","author":"Erika Johansen","tags":["christianity","egalitarianism","god","idealism"],"id":77474,"author_id":"Erika+Johansen"},{"text":"When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now, however, that modern society is at least officially egalitarian, the scandal is that the church is NOT going along with society, not rejoicing in the unprecedented freedom to let women and men serve according to gift and call without an arbitrary gender line. This scandal impedes both the evangelism of others and the edification - the retention and development of faith - of those already converted.","author":"John G. Stackhouse Jr.","tags":["christianity","church","complementarianism","egalitarianism","feminism","new-testament","patriarchy"],"id":119960,"author_id":"John+G.+Stackhouse+Jr."},{"text":"In fact, no form of death places a greater burden on society than suicide, for the act of suicide is the way a person seeks to resolve his alienation from a cooperative society.","author":"Shinmon Aoki","tags":["alienation","buddhism","death","dying","egalitarianism","suicide"],"id":132790,"author_id":"Shinmon+Aoki"},{"text":"Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word 'victory' means conquer vs. Harmony and the word 'equality' means homogenization vs. Unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a 'minority' class to 'communal stakeholders' becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures.","author":"Cristina Marrero","tags":["change","community","egalitarianism","feminism","linguistics","opression","revolution","sociology"],"id":204529,"author_id":"Cristina+Marrero"},{"text":"In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Taoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth around, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.","author":"Kim Stanley Robinson","tags":["egalitarianism","equality","greed","power","wealth"],"id":230664,"author_id":"Kim+Stanley+Robinson"},{"text":"€¦egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand. To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of a society equal, and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, ‘We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.’ Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.","author":"Ryszard Legutko","tags":["despotism","egalitarianism","equality","government","power"],"id":233582,"author_id":"Ryszard+Legutko"},{"text":"Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.","author":"Thomas Mann","tags":["art","beauty","bias","bourgeois","capitalism","creativity","egalitarianism","ignorance","subjectivity","sympathy","wealth"],"id":247350,"author_id":"Thomas+Mann"},{"text":"We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.","author":"Susan Sontag","tags":["achievement","ambition","democracy","egalitarianism","equality","essence","glory","greatness","heroes","ideals","inferiority","intimidation","jealousy","mediocrity","overachievers","perfection","pettiness","success"],"id":266418,"author_id":"Susan+Sontag"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}