Pieter de Grebber, God Inviting Christ to Sit on the Throne at His Right Hand (1645)
1,245 words
I was at one of my Twelve Step meetings the other day, and as happens to all such groups sooner or later, they are going through their “God is sexist” moment.
In case you don’t know, all the Twelve Step groups – Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and a host of others – are “God-based” programs. This means that the recovering person is asked to accept some sort of “God,” “Higher Power,” or “Something Greater than You” into their life and then surrender their addiction and related difficulties to that higher force.
The Twelve Step community has always been careful to never specify what “God” is. That is a purely private and personal choice. If you’re Catholic and want to go for the old school, traditional, Catholic God, go ahead. If you’re a vegan, cat-identifying, gender weirdo and want to worship a Space Goddess, you can do that. Atheist newcomers to AA who don’t want to acknowledge any sort of God are often told, “Think of your AA group as your Higher Power . . . or the Moon . . . or the doorknob in your bedroom. It can literally be anything you want as long as it’s not you.” This never-defined God strategy has been a key to AA’s success and longevity.
However, Twelve Step groups are still subject to the various social movements that pass through the mainstream culture. Thus, one of the recurring issues in recent decades has been the question, “Is God sexist?” Or to be more specific, “Is the use of masculine pronouns when referring to God oppressing our female members?”
Here’s an example of the use of “Him” and “His” pronouns to which some women object, from Alcoholics Anonymous’ (AA) eleventh step, which reads:
We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Since AA was formed in the 1930s by two Christian-Americans, there’s a lot of language like this, much of it within the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization’s foundational text.
As one can imagine, contemporary females see a God described as “He” as a problem. Believing they must always be strong and independent, they do not want to submit to masculinity in any context. Never mind that the whole point of AA is to encourage alcoholics to forgo some of that strength and independence, to give up some of their self-will, and instead trust in God and the cumulative wisdom of their fellow alcoholics to overcome their addiction. Submitting yourself to a higher authority is the secret ingredient of AA. Your plan for how to stay sober obviously didn’t work. That’s why you ended up in AA.
But nobody brings that up. When the AA feminists ask to amend the eleventh step (and many other texts), AA’s men typically shrug and give in. “Okay,” they say, “if you want to rearrange a few words to make God gender-free, we can live with that.”
Girolamo dai Libri, God the Father with His Right Hand Raised in Blessing
In AA groups, the most common solution to the gendered pronoun predicament has been to remove the pronoun entirely and replace it with the word “God.” This leads to some repetitive sentence structure, but it generally does the job. Using this strategy, the eleventh step then reads:
We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
In the past, during my blue-pilled days, I considered this slight alteration to be a reasonable compromise. I have been in many meetings in which such changes were suggested, voted on, and passed unanimously.
Now, though, I find myself looking more closely at such disputes. It occurs to me that to remove the masculine association from a cultural figure (God) who is believed to represent strength, authority, and wisdom is to separate those qualities from men. It’s not a blatant separation in this instance. It’s barely noticeable. But as I am learning, if feminists think something is worth fighting for, it is probably worth fighting against.
I would also raise another point: Who says God isn’t a “he”? If God is – in an anthropological view – a mythic entity who exists primarily as a manifestation of the billions of people who believe in him, and if, over the course of history, the vast majority of those believers assumed God was a “he,” then isn’t he one?
When I first arrived at AA, I was an atheist. I didn’t care what God was. I listened skeptically as the other people talked about prayer and faith. I rolled my eyes. But almost everyone around me found this stuff to be beneficial, even the other atheists.
And so one night, before bed, I decided to try it. I knelt down, next to my futon, adjusting my bare knees on the hard floor. I put my hands together, did one last eye-roll, cleared my throat, and commenced speaking to God.
It wasn’t a long conversation. But I did notice a certain calm come over me as I whispered in the dark. Also, it clarified in my mind what was really important in my life at that moment. That I stay sober. That I support my family and friends. That I be a good person to whatever degree I could.
I felt a sense of completion and satisfaction when I was done. Who, specifically, I was talking to when I did this, I could not determine then, and have never bothered to figure out since. My “God” is neither an old man on a cloud or the supernatural father of Jesus. He remains the same formless presence that appeared across from me that first night.
But if I actually stop and think about it, I would have to admit that this invisible entity definitely feels more male than female. To me, God is like a wise older man . . . a father, or a coach. But he isn’t always older. At times he’s like a close friend, a person who knows me better than I know myself, and whose perspective is larger than my own. In that sense, my personal God probably is male. To be totally honest, I cannot picture God as a female.
I can only imagine the response I’d get if I said this at my AA meeting. “But what if God actually is a guy?” It would be fun to watch the heads explode. But I can’t realistically do that, as I have to go back to that meeting every week.
Fourteenth-century Georgian fresco, The Ancient of Days
But I do plan to fight the de-gendering. I’ll use the classic excuse of, “We shouldn’t be messing around with these historic texts. This is how the founders wrote it. If you want to engage in gender politics with your God, go ahead, but leave the original texts alone.”
We’ll see how that goes. I noticed that this time, when the sexist pronoun question came up, there was a slight hesitation among the usually compliant men in the room. Could this be a turning point? If I suddenly feel compelled to push back against these encroachments, maybe other people are feeling that way, too. It might be time to retake some lost ground.
27 Comments
The West will never recover unless we first recover our patriarchal God who declares we are made in His image, who has delegated authority to us and who has commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. Either He will have power over us all, or the globalist elite and their social engineers will do all they can take God’s place.
Personally, I think we need to also recover the screw-ups God chose to be patriarchs in Genesis. While the Jews might see these guys as roll models to be emulated, look at what they’re really like. They’re worse than most of us!
Abraham pimped out his wife twice and his son Isaac pimped out his wife once, just because they were frightened their hosts might kill them. Jacob was a thief and a con-artist and Joseph robbed every Egyptian peasant and forced them to become Pharaoh’s slaves. If God can use screw-ups like that, God can use the screw-ups in AA. If patriarchs can keep their heads together, deal with their mistakes and still have kids, so can we.
White men have been the victims of 70 years of relentless psychological warfare to make the world a safer place for the you-know-whos. We need European heroes to aspire to, but they are often so magnificent they can make us feel failures in comparison. One healthy contribution that the Bible brought us was the idea of recovery for the broken, restoration for severed relationships and forgiveness for guilty consciences.
That last point is important. Whether we like it or not, Christianity has flourished in Europe, either because we have always been a guilt based culture (rather than an honor/shame based one) or because it made us evolve towards becoming one. Once Christianity only gave us ten things to feel guilty about (the ten commandments), but after we abandoned the faith, we didn’t get rid of guilt, like the Freudians promised we would. Instead, we handed over the power to inflict guilt and grant forgiveness to the social engineers. That’s why we’re so messed up today. We’re made to feel guilty about being white, about being men and we were made to feel guilty about what the weather might be like in two hundred years time.
In comparison, the first four of the ten commandments forced us to get to gather with our local community and meet with people we would never speak to otherwise. The last six reminded us of the things that sustain a civilization: Family, loyalty, respect for property, truth and avoiding envy.
Anyway Anton, stay strong. Keep recovering and keep an open mind to these things.
You seem to assume that Christianity succeed because the peoples of Europe were suckers and that Christianity simply overwhelmed the existing beliefs. Christianity has no special franchise on guilt as a religious concept. Germanic/Norse ‘religious’ texts contain plenty of references to ‘guilt’ (such a the attitudes towards Loki). Conversion of European peoples occurred largely through transferring ‘honor’ culture from warriors to ‘saints’ and the ‘cult of the saints’ was (is) incredibly strong among European Catholics. The Suffering God is a deep archetype, going back to the Old European agriculturalists (see Gimbutas), of which Odin is an expression, one remarkably similar to Jesus. It’s not hard to see that, as Christianity gained momentum in Europe — often by force — that the European natives just mapped their gods onto Christian saints (much in the same way that Santaria and the Sante Muerte cult has done). For all it’s flaws, Christianity in practice brought a level of order to Europe that it would not otherwise have had, which came in handy when the Huns and the Muslims came to conquer.
If God is – in an anthropological view – a mythic entity who exists primarily as a manifestation of the billions of people who believe in him, and if, over the course of history, the vast majority of those believers assumed God was a “he,” than isn’t he one?
Over the course of history, from the Stone Age and onwards, most people have been Pagans. And that normally includes a belief in both male and female divinities, which is still the case in Hinduism and other polytheistic ethnic religions. The belief in one single male god is of a much later date, and mainly stems from Judaism.
Generally speaking, Pagan men prefer male gods whereas women prefer goddesses, even if almost all acknowledge divinities of both genders. This is probably natural and has very little to do with gender politics.
So whether we assume that the Divine is purely masculine or not, probably depends on if we follow the Abrahamitic or the Heathen tradition.
‘Pagan’ just means ‘rustic’ or ‘rural’. The Romans who worshiped Jove would have punched you in the mouth for calling them ‘pagans’. No one really knows what Stone Age people believed. All we have are stones and some — often complex — paintings that remain quite difficult to interpret, except in light of the ‘spirtiual’ beliefs of very primitive peoples who are, basically, animists. The Hindus are not polytheists, they are henotheists, which means they are monetheists who accept there are multiple facets of the One God and many paths toward apprehending the One God (Brahma). Ancient Jews were not monotheists, at least not as this term is currently understood. It’s clear that Yahweh was a tribal god, one with whom tribal leaders (such as Moses and Enoch) could directly commune. The Jews have never believed in a transcendent alien God, and they still don’t. For them, God is the Jewish God with whom their people have a sacred covenant and will restore them to dominance come the Messiah. The Ancient Egyptians appear to be genuine polytheists, but, again, their writings in this area are quite obscure and much centered on the Afterlife. Overall, there are simply no people that we have yet encountered that do not have some kind of belief regarding what the Romans called fas, the World Behind The World and nearly all of the Bronze Age people beliefs are the result of revelation to one or more persons who then communicate the perspective of God to ‘the people’. I would argue that a far more consequential dividing line in spiritual beliefs and practices is not male/female, but esoteric (‘cult’) and exoteric (‘relgious’).
I disagree with the broader argument here. Outside of a few rare instances of non-monotheistic religions being matriarchal (I hesitate to use the word polytheistic because that in itself is too specific to cover *all historical religions), there has generally been a near-universal tendency to recognize a dominant masculine god in various pantheons.
Yes there are goddesses, or feminine entities who wield some power, but their submission to an ultimately MORE powerful masculine god is unquestioned, and just as human women, they rely on subversion, trickery, manipulation, and sexual power to occasionally thwart or undermine the dominant God.
When you specifically examine the Greco-Roman tradition, human nature is always interwoven into the mythology of the Gods, and women only maintain any power through insubordination and treachery. It is a reflection of the very REAL way that women of aristocratic blood would undermine (and often poison or murder) their lords and masters in order to jockey their own sons into positions of power.
Ultimately, it was almost always about getting THEIR sons into power, and not about any need for power for themselves.
In short, with very rare exceptions, even non-monotheistic religions are almost always patriarchal in hierarchy.
And in fact, it almost REQUIRES that a religion be monotheistic for this hierarchy to even be called into question, because only a monotheistic religion can eliminate hierarchy by submitting EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING (both male and female) to a single omnipotence that is ambiguous in gender. THAT, in fact, is the Judaic flaw and nature of Christian monotheism. While I consider myself a Christian from a moral and cultural standpoint, I can fairly critique the very human hand that we inject into it.
Our current religions are a palimpsest of beliefs, some by people who no longer exist. The traces of those beliefs are not always easy to discern. The ‘spirtual’ beliefs of the Europeans as they stand today are a combination of hunter-gatherer/pastoralists -> Old European agriculturalists -> Indo-Europeans -> Christianity -> Capitalism. From at least the time of the Indo-Europeans, male gods have been dominant, but it’s not altogether clear that beliefs (or even practices) of the pre-Aryans have completely disappeared. Some folks are draw toward ‘mothering’ in their deity than ‘fathering’. But, ‘mothering’ need not require a female figure to express this. The 23rd Psalm reads to me like a combination of both nurturing and guiding, hence the ‘shepherd/flock’ imagery. Marianity is often as strong among some Catholics as Christianity.
Outside the Aryan sphere, I often wonder if ‘The Mandate of Heaven’ isn’t the primary deity of the old Chinese belief-system and it doesn’t appear to be gendered at all.
Once organized violence for territorial (resource) acquisition was invented and advanced, the martial — hence patriarchal — virtues became dominant, along with deities to exemplify these virtues. Since war has been invented, human communities will always need warriors…and warrior deities to lend their blessing.
Outside of those who experience the triggering revelation of ‘divine truths’, everyone else is working from faith (or argument or fear of reprisal). I take the Heraclitian view that all is the product of struggle, even stability (which is the product of stasis of equal opposed forces). Thus even the stable reference to God as male is subject to instabilities (welcome or not).
I do have a problem with women wanting to change the wording of foundational texts to be less patriarchal because what they should be doing is creating their own groups and spaces and leaving men alone to have theirs.
…There has generally been a near-universal tendency to recognize a dominant masculine god in various pantheons.
Normally I’m loathe to dispute a sentence couched in qualifiers like “generally” or “tendency,” but even with these, the statement is simply wrong. The notion of a pantheon proves easy for the Christian to understand, but does not correlate well with the messiness of pagan religious practice, in which there was hardly ever a fixed number of Gods, let alone a neatly ordered one. Additionally, folkish religions from Shinto Japan to pagan Greece accord divinity to a number of entities the Christian would struggle to recognize as worthy of worship – he wants his mighty Jove, by God, and preferably a nice neat number like twelve. Once we get over that, we find the city of Thurii, for instance, consecrating itself to Boreas, the North Wind, and maintaining a priesthood for him. Or we find hermits dedicating themselves to a river nymph or some other numinous presence, devoting their lives to honoring them.
What exactly do you mean by “dominant”? Having the most power? If so, surely we must accord that to the Fates of Greek mythology, before whose will even Jupiter must bow, and who are described as feminine (as are the Norns of Norse mythology).
Also keep in mind that many sources on paganism were written either by Christians or by writers of ambiguous allegiance during a period of Christian domination. Having a dominant male deity, even if he was either the Devil or a figment of one’s imagination, was not as offensive to Christian monks and missionaries as the notion of truly venerating a Goddess, heart and soul. Hence the maniacal efforts to efface Freya from historical memory or to re-package her as a mere tart. Even so, Snorri Sturluson admits that devotion to her stayed on long after the other Gods had been stamped out or conveniently stuffed into saints’ clothing. But the notion that “women only maintain any power through insubordination and treachery” would have been news to Frigga, whose wisdom and guidance Odin sought.
And in fact, it almost REQUIRES that a religion be monotheistic for this hierarchy to even be called into question, because only a monotheistic religion can eliminate hierarchy by submitting EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING (both male and female) to a single omnipotence that is ambiguous in gender.
But that’s the thing, an ambiguous divinity satisfies no one but some intellectuals and devotees of esotericism. Human nature will out. Christianity brought in your unquestioned patriarchal deity only to turn around and crown Mary Queen of Heaven.
Outside of a few rare instances of non-monotheistic religions being matriarchal … there has generally been a near-universal tendency to recognize a dominant masculine god in various pantheons.
Patriarchal societies will inevitably create patriarchal religions with gods such as Yahweh, Zeus, and Odin at the top of the hierarchy. This implies that the other gods and goddesses in some cases have to submit to the patriarch, but in general they don’t seem very submissive.
Take for instance Athena. Frankly I can’t see her as particularly submissive or how she relies “on subversion, trickery, manipulation, and sexual power to occasionally thwart or undermine the dominant God.”
In most cases these mildly patriarchal pantheons also seem to have been preceded by more equal ones. For example, in Scandinavia the Vanir gods of nature, fertility, and wisdom, are generally believed to be older than the Aesir gods who arrived with the Indo-Europeans.
If we go further back to the Stone Age we find very few traces of patriarchal gods. What we do find, however, are a large number of “Venus figurines” which resembles mother- or fertility goddesses.
‘Pagan’ just means ‘rustic’ or ‘rural’.
It does not “just” mean that. The meanings and connotations of words change over time, as is evident even from the last few decades of American English. Already by the 1st century A.D., “paganus” (as in “pertaining to the pagus,” a rural district) had acquired a pejorative connotation similar to “redneck” today, used either as an adjective or as a noun. By the late 4th century, it was already denoting someone who maintained allegiance to the old Gods, as this was most noticeable in the rural areas. As to whether a Roman would have punched Svea in the mouth for using the term, I cannot say, but I think they were more concerned with the forcible destruction of their ancient temples and altars.
No one really knows what Stone Age people believed.
Only in the sense that I don’t really know what my own father believed, or what you or anyone else believes for that matter. I can only go off what you say you believe, what you consistently do, and the rites you attend. One of the hardest things for Christians to understand (and atheists, for that matter) is that prior to the rise of the Abrahamic faiths, religion was not about what you believe, systematized in a creed that the believer is called upon to recite. As for religious practices prior to Christianity, we have a wealth of textual evidence and archaeological evidence. If any punching were to occur, it would be an archaeologist punching you for suggesting we have no idea of what “Stone Age” people’s religious practices were, and that all we have are “stones” and paintings.
The Hindus are not polytheists, they are henotheists, which means they are monotheists who accept there are multiple facets of the One God.
So henotheists are monotheists? Where does this come from? Webster’s offers for henotheism “the worship of one god without denying the existence of other gods.” If that equates to monotheism, Christians have some very strange bedfellows indeed. But once again, the confusion comes from applying Christian suppositions, so they think that if there are, say, four dozen deities, a pagan must go through the list one at a time, or have some very long prayers. In reality, many heathens, ancient and modern, were henotheists in Webster’s sense, i.e. they acknowledged multiple divine beings but dedicated themselves to one especially, as Svea describes. That might change over the course of a person’s life, or it might not. We have abundant textual evidence to support this for Rome and Greece, as well as in Northern Europe, e.g in Scandinavia, where entire villages and regions centered their religious veneration around Freya, or Frey, or Njord, or sometimes all three, or an individual or family would have a special relationship with one deity in particular. In terms of Dumezil’s tripartite functionality, there are many Gods and Goddesses, such as Odin and Freya, who carry out all three functions of divinity quite well.
….Nearly all of the Bronze Age people beliefs are the result of revelation to one or more persons who then communicate the perspective of God to ‘the people’.
Where is the evidence for this statement? And are we limited to the Fertile Crescent here, or are we allowed to admit Europeans existed? What exactly are “Bronze Age people beliefs”?
Re ‘pagan’: I can agree that at some ‘pagan’ became less pejorative, but it didn’t start out that way.
Re Stone age peoples: I said ‘beliefs’ not ‘practices’. We do have evidence of some of the things Stone Age people did and the contexts within which they did them (burial, megaliths), we just don’t have any solid evidence for why they did them (their beliefs). Archaeology is pretty much hit-or-miss on finding evidence, so someday we may encounter material that gives us more understanding of the purposes of Stone Age people with regard to their practices, but right now, most of what archaeologists say they think Stone Age people ‘believe’ is just surmise.
Re henotheism: The definition you cite is one reasonable definition. However, when I first came across the concept, I did a little research and some material that suggested the view I described. Maybe it’s a stretch to say Hinduism is henotheistic, but I think it’s not entirely distorting considering the prominence of Brahma.
Re Bronze Age revelations: I was thinking of specific individuals, Moses, Zoroaster, Ankhenaten, Mani, Enoch, Mohammed, Odin, Saul/Paul. Clearly, some beliefs are more ‘organic’ in their origin and seemingly detached from any orderly system of beliefs (such those described in Ginzburg’s ‘The Night Battles’ and ‘Ecstasies’) about the fas.
The amazing thing about our people is how much we care about this kind of stuff. And there is absolutely no snark in that remark.
‘Pagan’ just means ‘rustic’ or ‘rural’. The Romans who worshiped Jove would have punched you in the mouth for calling them ‘pagans’.
It is the etymological meaning of “pagan” that is “rural.” Today “paganism” is rather used as an umbrella term for pre-Christian religions as well as their contemporary descendants. Another umbrella term is Hinduism which includes a large variety of henotheistic as well as polytheistic beliefs.
I realize that ‘pagan’ is a kind of short-hand for non-Christian spiritual beliefs and practices. I just know that, no matter how history has treated it, it was never a very nice way to describe the people who practiced ‘old ways’. The first time I caught on to particular meaning of ‘pagan’ was reading at translation of one of the Roman writer (Cicero, perhaps), who described the practices of the rustics (paganus), so ‘pagan’ just wasn’t a Christian/non-Christian thing, it was a non-Christian urban vs non-Christian rural thing. Ash Donald is right, paganus was a pejorative between Romans meaning something like ‘hick’ or ‘redneck’. Every time I hear the song, ‘Old Time Religion’, I think’/How old?’
Without offering insult to paganism, because I truly do not have any sort of qualm with anyone else’s religious beliefs, nor am I myself a stickler for any religion myself, I think it is interesting that the goalpost always seems to get moved all the way back to the Stone Age, when people hadn’t even envisioned the usefulness of the wheel, were still dabbling in hieroglyphs, and barely had organized the feeble beginnings of civilization.
I do not argue that women were not venerated. Fertility was among the highest of concerns for our ancient ancestors, and the feminine was (almost always) the symbol of fertility. (Though I’d argue that phallus symbology was also important). But when civilization sprang forth and fertile land was at a premium for cultivation, our ancestors necessarily waged war, and when a people become warlike, their entire culture reflects masculine hierarchy.
This is why Hatshepsut had to don the regalia of the male pharaoh. I laugh at the notion that some put forth that Egypt was a matriarchy lmao.
Even Cleopatra had to seek out the power of Julius Caesar to save Egypt from impending collapse.
I’m not going to get into the cultures of Asian or African people. Those cultures are alien to me, and while I’ll admit my error in being too general earlier, I’ll still insist that the religions and cultures associated with successful and long lasting civilizations have always paid reverence to the masculine as the ultimate authority.
when a people become warlike, their entire culture reflects masculine hierarchy.
Feminists certainly agree with that statement, but I do not. What we find quite often is that the more European societies valued the warrior, the stronger became the role of the woman. Contrast Sparta to Athens, for instance. Athens was cosmopolitan and (despite her impressive navy in the 5th century B.C.) much less geared for war than Sparta. With a few exceptions we know by name, Athenian women had a fairly cloistered existence not all that far from the “white sharia” many seem to dream about.
In Sparta, however, where every male citizen had to be a full-time soldier, the freedom of Spartan women was well-documented by admirers and detractors alike. These women were in charge of the plantation economy, supervising the farming while their men were away; they could legally own and inherit land in their own name; they conducted public exercise in the nude (to the great shock of Athenians), and they tended to be more mature at marriage (18 vs. 13 or 14). A Spartan man called no man master (despotes) but called his wife mistress (despoina).
Plutarch devoted a whole collection to anecdotes and quotes of Spartan women, one of which bears repeating. An Athenian woman was under the impression that Spartan women enjoyed so much freedom that she asked “Why is that you Spartan women are the only ones who can rule men?” Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, replied, “Because we are the only ones who give birth to men.” We can dismiss the idea that Sparta was some kind of matriarchy, but there is no getting around two facts: 1) women enjoyed a kind of authority and freedom at Sparta like nowhere else in Greece, and 2) Sparta was a society entirely geared for war. Back in my academic days, feminists would dismiss all this by saying Spartan women were just “battery-hens for the production of soldiers.” A mountain of evidence from Herodotus, Plutarch, Xenophon, Aristotle, Aristophanes and others says otherwise.
I’m more pagan than Christian myself, but the idea that the Christian god is anything but male is not merely a matter of interpretation, it’s a whole new faith. I personally think that Christianity has to make room in Heaven for the gods of other faiths and even races, and I’m about as racist as it gets. But even that is a minor adjustment compared to making God female or androgynous.
Women who truly believe this as more than a social flex should simply declare a new faith. It’s much more honest than trying to Talmud Yahweh into a dress.
“we handed over the power to inflict guilt and grant forgiveness to the social engineers”
Yes, that’s a very good, important observation. Priests and pastors tended to offer much more forgiveness than the social engineers.
But as I am learning, if feminists think something is worth fighting for, it is probably worth fighting against.
Funny. I’m coming to the same conclusion myself. If misogynists think something is worth fighting against, it is probably worth fighting for.
Would you prefer to be referred to as Stunning, or Brave, or perhaps both?
Because it is obvious that you are one of the two, and maybe both.
Stunning, definitely.
In any event, this matter is decisively settled in Scripture itself.
Genesis 1:27
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Unless you are going to deny that women are fully-human image-bearers of God, then you cannot claim God is wholly male.
Gen 1:27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Lexi said, “Unless you are going to deny that women are fully-human image-bearers of God, then you cannot claim God is wholly male.”
If the creator God is not made of the stuff He created, men and women cannot be made in His image in a way that can be seen. So what do men and women share in common with each other (and with God)? Language, communication, logic, mathematics, design, creativity, imagination, justice, mercy, love, etc. None of these things are material but they can all be manifested in material things and forces. In other words, God’s sex is not the issue at stake Genesis 1:27.
In other words, God’s sex is not the issue at stake Genesis 1:27.
So you say. Nonetheless, the proximity of “our image” to “male and female” suggests otherwise.
Only a married couple (“one flesh”) reflects the totality of the image of God.
“Father, why hath thou forsaken me?”
“In the name of the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit…”
Xtian Feminists lawyering for Slay Qwain Yahweh are almost as ridiculous as gays lawyering over what Leviticus “really means.”
For everyone who wants the dissident right to be feminist friendly, here’s a preview: Lexi going REEE!!! on muh Scriptures while she grinds her Doc Martens into your face, forever.
Lexi going REEE!!! on muh Scriptures while she grinds her Doc Martens into your face, forever.
A denial that God is male is a boot in your face? Really?
I predicted recently that misogynists, having failed to make any empirical case for a backlash against women, would turn to the unfalsifiable, and here we are.
I have no issue with women, I take issue with the destructive forces of feminism.
There are no scriptural verses that say that women should be feminists, and thankfully, most women I know do not identify as such. In fact, most women I know resent feminism, because it has left very few of them with any choice other than having to work outside of the home to support their family, even if they are married and draw two incomes. Most women with children suffer depression because they don’t get to spend enough quality bonding time with their kids.
Yes, many will also say they would get tired of being home with kids all the time, which only highlights the “cake and eat it too” coddling that women want from society.
I don’t hate women. I love women. Well, at least the women who are dedicated mothers who wish to nurture their family (including their children’s father) first and foremost.
I also understand that most men fall very short of the ideal when it comes to being husbands and fathers. Our society has created a pandemic disease called selfishness that prevents strong family units from being created. For this I also blame feminism (at least in no small part). All democratization of human nature has consequences.
John Wilkinson:
“I have no issues with women.”
Also John Wilkinson:
“Women want to have their cake and eat it too.”
Which is it?
Both of these are very real issues. It is depressing to not have enough time with your children, and it is also very depressing to not have any adult company for most of the day. Many men in our circles say that women are children, designed to be content in the company of same for hours on end. This is false on both counts. Women are designed for communal not solo childcare.
In fact, most women I know resent feminism, because it has left very few of them with any choice other than having to work outside of the home to support their family, even if they are married and draw two incomes.
That may be true, but then again it may not. I strongly suspect that, if women hadn’t entered the workforce, immigration would have picked up the slack. Our elites haven’t exactly been shy about importing foreigners to “do the work Americans won’t do.”
I don’t hate women. I love women. Well, at least the women who are dedicated mothers who wish to nurture their family (including their children’s father) first and foremost.
So in other words, you love women who are subservient to men. This kind of reminds me of anti-Whites who claim not to be such because they only hate “racist” Whites who put the interests of other groups above their own.
I also understand that most men fall very short of the ideal when it comes to being husbands and fathers. Our society has created a pandemic disease called selfishness that prevents strong family units from being created. For this I also blame feminism (at least in no small part). All democratization of human nature has consequences.
You have it backwards. Fathers as well as mothers started encouraging their daughters to get an education and prepare to support themselves because men were unreliable providers, not all or even most men, of course, but enough.
If I were a coddled gender, I’d want my cake and eat it too as well.
Again, I have no issues with women who aren’t feminists.
I don’t really consider full-stop feminists to be women though, to be honest. They may be female in the sexual organ sense, but otherwise….
Our parent who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name. Thy dominion come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…. It might be worth going down the ,”a god is a god and a goddess is a goddess” route…