I'm very disappointed. I took out a book from the library on fictional and legendary heroines a few days ago. But reading it, I was amazed at the author's ignorance and clear agenda with statements such as: Our first mother, Eve, was expelled... from the Garden of Eden because she sought knowledge forbidden to woman, but granted to man for no other reason than his sex. Anyone familiar with the Bible will be able to tell just what's wrong with that claim.
Also, she says, When the French theologian Jean Calvin finished his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, he posited predestination, or determinism, as a fundamental doctrine of Calvinism.... By extension, the theory that a woman's life is already predestined even before she is born explains why certain woman, and all prostitutes, are considered totally depraved. They can be neither helped nor cured, certain people think. They are, according to this theory, irredemably lost.
The reader of the following pages, however, is now again requested to accept or reject this theory of total depravity. Does such a condition exist in a human being? Are such women and girl children totally evil? Were their parents "demons" in human form?
And I really laughed when I read that portion. She seems to think that the notion of 'total depravity' was applied only to women, or especially to immoral women, while in truth it applies to the entire human race. The idea that people who are immoral 'can neither be helped nor cured' is also a distortion of the concept of predestination in Christian theology, especially since it includes the idea that no-one knows for certain who is considered one of the elect. And I can't for the life of me think of anyone who has ever claimed that the parents of immoral people are 'demons in human form'.
Even worse, she refers to Rousseau as a 'Calvinist', and says that 'Sophie' means 'love of wisdom.' It really bothers me when I encounter such incredible stupidity in a supposedly serious book.
When I returned the book to the library, I had learned a valuable lesson about taking the information in books seriously.
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