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Today Goddess misinformation has entered the curriculum in far more places than most people realize. The Goddess actively promotes "alternative medicine," especially in schools of nursing. Davis quotes from one prominent neopagan book: "Women have always been healers, and the knowledge of healing - of aura work, colors, herbs and homeopathy, reflexology, midwifery, massage, crystals, and trance states - have always been part of the goddess' mysteries." The Goddess misrepresents the history of religion, depicting it as a struggle between warm and nurturing female-oriented religions and exploitative, death-dealing male-dominated ones;
conventional scholarship knows nothing of this supposed struggle, or indeed of those categories of religions. (The Goddess Kali, worshipped widely in India, demanded human sacrifice. She ruled over a society in which a person's caste was fixed at birth, and widows were burned on their husband's funeral pyre. The Goddess writers, notes Davis, present their evidence highly selectively.) Indeed, the Goddess misrepresents the entire history of civilization, portraying it as a struggle between early utopian, female-dominated societies, and later violent, hierarchical and patriarchal ones; professional historians dispute that there ever was a "matriarchal" or "woman-centered" stage of civilization.
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Goddess Worship
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