Kolokotronis wrote: "Kosta, at least those of us who grew up with old Orthodox relatives around, people from the old country, have all heard these stories. Of course the Church was wrong. I certainly have no problem saying that. Perhaps I haven't been following this thread well enough. Was someone denying that the Church acted inappropriately regarding women and natural functions in the past?"
What I am going to ask could sound like a snide comment from the peanut gallery, but it isn't. It's a real question, one to which there isn't a snappy answer. One that ought to make us pause and think.
We have been reading here in part about the hard minded practices of the old Russian Orthodox Church concerning women and their periods and attendance in Church. And we are just about to put all of that to bed as bad old superstition.
But then query: in the Torah, God lays out rules just as specific and of a very similar nature concerning female spiritual impurity at the time of their monthly cycle. They were not to partake in sacrifice, they were not to touch sacred things, etc., etc. That's in the Bible itself in black and white. So, when God imposed those rules, that was not divine, but when the Russian Orthodox imposed the same rules, it was superstitious tradition? Is that the truth? Or is it more true to say that some of the ancient Jewish superstitious traditions about the female cycle crept into the Bible, in the same way that traditions concerning the divorce of wives appear in the Bible, but Jesus says that they never came from God?
I apologize for the repeat posting.
Incompetence.