I always find it fascinating that people who are not religious themselves, tell religious people that they should say that God is both a woman and a man. A Father and a Mother. I will never understand this strange obsession with God’s supposed gender. Does anyone really think that God looks like a man, sitting high up in the sky?
Of course we, religious people, do not. God is God. God is Spirit. God is in Everything, and He is Everything.
But since God is referred to as “He” in every single monotheistic holy book, we assume that this is a correct way to refer to the Almighty. We experience God as a Father, as it were, but we should not make the mistake to think that God is like a man.
So the entire debate about God’s gender is nonsense; God does not – me thinks – do gender.
What’s more, as I said, it is interesting to see that those who demand that we, religious people, call God “He/She” (why not It then?) are seldom religious themselves. They try to tell believers what to believe, and how to believe what they believe.
And… if they are religious they simply display a lack of understanding. Instead of calling on fellow religionists to refer to God as “She” every now and then, they should try to understand their religion better.
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I read about this earlier and something occurred to me. I guess since nonreligious people think that religion is bunk, they seem to assume that any belief that we have is just made up, and can be subject to changing on a whim. They think that God is a creation of our minds, so they ask us to change certain characteristics of Him.
Bizarre, isn’t it? First of all, they’re obviously projecting; just because God to them is a fantasy, doesn’t mean that He is such to believers. And second, if they don’t believe in His existence, then there is nothing there to change- they’re asking people to change something that they’ve already decided is a figment of our imagination.
I read the article. I’m moderate to conservative (if those terms apply) in my Christianity. I didn’t read this author as "atheistic" but as a politically-influenced, feminist-oriented "theist". I don’t agree with the politics, but other than tradition and "sacred text" issues (i.e. "but the Bible doesn’t call God ‘She’"), I don’t see a problem with the use of "she". However, having said that, the use of "she" is for most believers a polarizing action that shuts down dialogue and inhibits unity.
When you talk about many things you people seek logic, question evidence, argue rationally and rightly so as it should be. But when it comes to religion, no, it is tabu, you shut all your brain filters but believe without questioning, isolate logic and facts, rational thinking goes down the drain. You dont question but take it as granted the creation by an entity called God and its holy book(s) and prophets and God’s son coming into existence from a virgin. So why are you stopping short when it comes to questioning your faith. If you need to believe, believe in the power of universe, evolution, physics after all it is not dogma and changes as our perspective widens and as our knowledge and science advances with time.
Judas, we do question, but we apparently answer the questions differently than you do. And that great power of the universe that you believe in, is exactly what we believe in too- but we believe that the power is God. Science can explore the physical aspects of His creation, but it can’t explain all the mystery away.
Most Christians believe Jesus is God. So this does mean God is male in Christianity.
As a Muslim, I believe that God created genders. If he had one himself, gender would be uncreated.
The usage of the male form is due to the fact that in semitic languages, the linguistic masculine is used for everything that is not specifically female. Please note that there is no neuter in languages Arabic and Hebrew.
Actually, the Germanic "God" originally was neuter, a substantivation of the adjective "good". (as in "the good one" or "het goed" in Dutch or "das Gute" in German). The word "God" only got to be considered as masculine when people started to identify the word with the man Jesus.
Though I certainly cannot (nor can anyone) speak for all people of the monotheistic faiths, I think you generalize to much when you say that
I think that there ARE people who will readily tell you god is male, just like there are people who will readily tell you that Noe’s Ark really happened literally the way it’s written in the Bible. That more sophisticated religious people may not feel that way may also be true, but not all religious people are educated nor sophisticated, by any length of the imagination.
C Stanley: I doubt that the clamor about "She" is theological. Many of the people you are calling nonreligious opine that "God" is a social construct. It is the constructs that they are determined to change. They are much more motivated by the dynamics of power among peoples than by the desire to investigate the religious images of transcendent truth.
I thought that was pretty much my point, GB. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough.