For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. .....The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.

Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.

We humans are wired for empathy by evolution, but when children grow up in dominator families they internalize this male over female template for relations early on. They then automatically apply it to other differences, whether based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.

It is not coincidental that for so-called religious fundamentalists - whether they are Western or Eastern, Muslim or Christian - rigid male dominance and "holy wars" are priorities. Or that competing sects of the same religion, such as Sunni and Shia, are at each other's throats. In these cultures, women are rigidly controlled by men.

...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.

We are rapidly moving into the post-industrial age, when we must redefine what is "productive" work, as more and more jobs are being replaced by automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.