Posts tagged Religion

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/05/on-wanting-to-eat-your-baby.html

How can you say, at some points, that we need to accept the context of some of the Bible, while simultaneously assigning relevance to the fact God is presented as masculine in ancient Scripture? The times in which the Bible was written were unquestionably misogynistic: should God have come forth as female, God would have been ridiculed and ignored. While God was not interested in pleasing people, God does want to be heard: and should He have been She, that would not have happened. Context.

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God appeared to Moses as a burning bush.  If the ancients could believe a guy who dialogued with burning shrubberies, I think they could believe in a god who wants to present herself as a female.  (Now, if you’re clever, you’ll say, “But the people didn’t believe Moses until God made miracles through him.”  To which I’d say, yes, and if God wanted to present himself as a female couldn’t God work the same miracles to the same result?)

Furthermore, this doesn’t account for why Christ would continually refer to God as Father.  Sure you can chalk that up as well to the misogyny of the times.  But Jesus was kind of a rule breaker if you noticed.  He ate with sinners, traveled with women, didn’t make His disciples wash their hands, threw the moneylenders out of the temple, died for the sins of mankind, somehow, I don’t see the misogyny of the time preventing Christ from calling God mother if he so wished, so the fact that he didn’t suggests a precedent for us. 

Remember, religious experiences are initiated by God, not by man, so we should follow His lead. 

Now, some might argue that Christ did call God a woman in the parable of the lost coin, but that is a bit sketchy.  Christ didn’t mean, God is literally a woman with 10 coins, but God is like a woman with 10 coins.  This is a lot different from Christ literally calling God, “Father” and telling us to do so as well.  Sure God is like a woman in the same way that God is like a man, as He has the perfection of both masculine and feminine traits but He has never presented Himself as a woman to us in the same way He has presented Himself as a man.

My spiritual adviser wrote a book where he used the term “Godself.”  So, “…God has never presented Godself as a woman to us in the same way God has presented Godself as a man.”   (This term hasn’t really been adopted widely.)  Essentially, if in your own private spiritual reflection and prayer it helps you to use the feminine when referring to God no one can really stop you and if that’s how you best pray, then do what is best for you.  If God presents “Godself” to you as female, then sure use the feminine in your own prayer.  However, as my spiritual adviser said, (paraphrasing,) “In one’s private prayers, God the life-giver and nurturer can quite rightly be thought of as feminine, but  I’m not going to use ‘she’ in a homily to refer to God because it would distract people from the mass.”  This is not a question of sexism because God does not have a body to have a sex.  He is the perfection of both genders and so if a man thought that the use of the masculine somehow confers some greater status on men, that man would be very much mistaken.

However, to say that the misogyny of the time period would render God’s choice to reveal Himself as a Father-figure unimportant would be a mistake.

Are you against InnerChrist as many Tumblr Catholics are? If so, why? I’m curious: I’m Roman Catholic and disagree with him on many key theological and moral points, but he succeeds where many fail: non-believers and similar are drawn to God by his words. The truth will not remain hidden: and while I disagree with much of what he says, he believes it (so it is not based in willing dishonesty), and any who honestly seek the truth are now more likely to find it.

Are they really drawn to God by his words?  I mean, he certainly is celebrated by many non-believers, but I don’t see them professing belief in his religion.  They are more saying “You silly Christians, you should be more like James.  He is far more tolerant than you.”  Which is true, he is far more tolerant than us because he seems to tolerate anything and everything including sin so long as it doesn’t challenge him to change his life.

Essentially, the reason people like his teaching is because people are lazy and don’t like their beliefs challenged and James fosters an environment where people can believe that Jesus meant only to love us without challenging us. He tells us the true God is love, but what form does that love take?  It surely is not a Christian love because there is no sacrifice in it.  He remembers Christ’s forgiveness but not His command to go forth and sin no more.  The love of James’s God is an indifferent permissivism.  That is not the love of Christ.  If I may quote CS Lewis:

You asked for a lov­ing God: you have one… not a senile benev­o­lence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold phil­anthropy of a con­sci­en­tious mag­is­trate, but the con­sum­ing fire Him­self, the Love that made the worlds, per­sis­tent as the artist’s love for his work, prov­i­dent and ven­er­a­ble as a father’s love for a child, jeal­ous, inex­orable, exact­ing as love between the sexes.

When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved.  Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.

James’s God is not so different from the kowtowing parent who is so fearful of their spoiled child’s demands that they give into every one of them because he actually believes the child’s logic that if the child is not allowed to do whatever he wants, he is not truly loved.  The true God however expressly tells us not to do whatever we want because he desires that we inculcate the Christian virtues within our souls to prepare us for eternal life with Him.