I don’t want to be uncharitable here, but are you saying that it is possible there could have been another world where people didn’t create anything we’d call religion and that we have a good reason to believe that other world would not have misogyny to the same extent our world did? Or maybe there is a case to be made that where religion has been outlawed/suppressed we’ve seen a more rapid decline in misogyny (e.g. did misogyny fall off more steeply in communist China or the USSR than it did in nearby countries were religion carried on a unregulated trajectory?).
When I look back in time I see religions that justify the dominance of men over women and I see a culture that thinks that men ought to be dominant over women. When I talk to my contemporary religious friends I talk to people who don’t think men should be dominant over women and who don’t believe their religion tells them that that is the case. Some Christians think the main thrust of the bible is that we should help poor people and be suspicious of rich people. Some Christians think the main thrust of the bible is that gay people are going to hell and we should make sure they get there sooner.
I think I see a lot more people justifying whatever they believe using what they call their religion than I see people actually doing what their religion tells them to do. To me, that’s the same mechanism as assholes who say there shouldn’t be change tables in the washrooms because it could spread feces around - start with a personal preference, extrapolate with an argument to some authority. When religion is an authority, it fills that role. But social pecking order, cleanliness, science, or whatever are all capable of filling that role because it’s never really about the thing being appealed to in the first place, it’s about the feelings of the person doing the appealing.
