Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

The Church of England forms committee to consider gender-neutral pronouns for god.

Church of England to consider use of gender-neutral terms for God | Anglicanism | The Guardian

 

For the most part, God has no body and is therefore genderless. He is referred to as He for two reasons: Mostly, because Hebrew is a gendered language, so every noun is masculine or feminine, depending on the make up of the word itself. The table is male but the house is female. Almost all of God's names are masculine nouns. To a much lesser extent, even though the above is true, sometimes the Bible will describe God in physical ways because that's what we humans can understand (God's eyes, or right hand etc.). In some of the metaphors describing God and His relationship with the human world, the metaphor is intentionally and seemingly meaningfully gendered and male.
If anyone made it this far, and actually wants examples or further explanation, I'm happy to expand by PM without clogging the thread.

 

I think religion and language share more than a few traits. Their origins of long-established religions and languages are usually murky from the modern perspective. Both tend to evolve and are influenced by cultural changes and politics.

I think that linking words referring to the Christian god to make terms was deliberate. Societies during the origin of the religion were overwhelmingly dominated by males. Referring to a god as he, king, father, etc., would be natural for a deity at the top of everything. In societies with well-defined gender roles, with female almost always subservient, identifying god or the savior in feminine terms was a bridge too far, even for an upstart religion that was challenging other traditions.

At the core of Christianity is the humanization of god, and the gender of the son of god is obvious. I think it will be quite some time before most denominations make a shift from male to neutral.

 

Exactly. While what Guy wrote isn't wrong, it ignores the fact that these texts were written by men in a male-dominated world. They were codifying the world as they knew it, including the gender roles at the time. Traditional interpretations of most religions are going to come across as sexist. By our modern standards, they are sexist and that leads some to try to force women to stay in subservient roles.

 

The point I was making is that God in reality is outside of gender. In terms of the metaphors for the human perception, I'd agree that while I think grammar was the main 2factor, sociology was another one. I will note that while most of the parental imagery is God as father, there are instances of God as mother, It's the spousal relationship metaphor that is more consistently and intentionally gendered.

 

I’m OK with pushing the confines of that point a little more by contending that god, in reality, is outside of reality. If a supreme being that has control of everything everywhere exists, it is beyond human comprehension. Attempts to understand and codify the incomprehensible will say far more about the humans making that attempt than the deity they try to comprehend. “God” will almost always inculcate social norms or the norms that those defining the deity want to promote.

That deity becomes more a human construct that might or might not resemble what might or might not be there.

 

Genesis

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.


Seems pretty straightforward.

 

Montana taliban

 

I very nearly had a severe coffee mishap just now.

 

Why? A supreme being could do anything it wants if it has all control - including the act of being perfectly comprehensible.

 

Taoism is based on what I consider the most plausible concept of "God." Cribbing from wikipedia: "Laozi in the Tao Te Ching explains that the Tao is not a name for a thing, but the underlying natural order of the Universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to circumscribe because it is non-conceptual yet evident in one's being. The Tao is 'eternally nameless' and should be distinguished from the countless named things that are considered to be its manifestations, the reality of life before its descriptions of it."

More simply, as the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything."

 

Never understood why Adam and Eve were banished for doing the fig leaf thing - if that was the "original sin" - should we not be wearing clothes?