Submit to the WTF File: God as a Demographic
Stole this off of Drudge, as the news in the ’sphere has been a bit on the lean side (not really, there was just nothing that pissed me off. Come on news!!! You like me when I am angry!!!)…
Apparently there is a group (as mentioned in this article) that has redone a Jewish religious text by removing any reference to the MAIN DUDE being male by making HIM more androgynous. Point to be made following the body of the article:
The survey showed around three quarters, or 73%, of those who classified themselves as Christian considered God as male.
Just under a half, or 49%, of people think all religions “fundamentally discriminate on grounds of gender” and 56% think all religions discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation, according to the poll findings.
But when asked whether religion has “no place” in modern life only 29% agreed while 62% disagreed.
The poll was commissioned by the Movement for Reform Judaism in Britain to coincide with its launch of its new daily and Sabbath prayer book, or Siddur.
The prayer book removes male descriptions of God such as King, Father and Lord, in favour of “gender neutral” expressions such as Eternal One and living God.
It includes mentions of prominent women from the Old Testament for the first time in prayers such as the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.
I am not going to get into a religious debate on this website; there are PLENTY of other places for you, as the reader, to do that; followers of our material should know that or all places this is the last one to do the “my god is better than your god” train wreck.
The only direction I would like to head with this is such: What was wrong with calling the highest person in your belief system a dude?
I mean, the Hindu peoples have an 8 armed god that has a friggin ELEPHANT’S HEAD; at least the Christian one is pictured as some dude in a robe. You can identify with a dude in a robe, right? Makes it easier to digest a Deity if you put him / it in more human terms, doesn’t it, instead of referring to said higher power as some sort of free-floating gas or sparkly bits?
I also seem to think that God existing as a male figure has pre-dated our little presumptuous civilization by quite a few years, namely (according to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) FROM THE BEGINNING OF TIME. The early religions from the B.C. era had no issue with calling him a “Him”… but that was probably because they were to busy taking care of shit that mattered, like lowering an extremely high infant mortality rate or just finding something to friggin EAT instead of trying to get the barista to use SOY milk instead of the real stuff because of your lactose intolerance. Religion was a source of hope for them, a thought that something existed beyond their understanding that was looking out for those that believed in it, and was not something that overtly concerned itself with being socially applicable and “up with the times”. What higher power should even give a shit if it’s cool?
It’s fucking GOD.
This is embarassing. I hate it when religion panders.
(Finally I got to use this graphic. I also could have gone off on a long rant to day about this, but I will leave that to Muslihoon)
This makes my head hurt.
*reaches for another Stella Artois*
Mmmm. Stella.
God made pot.
Man made beer.
Who do you trust??
(I suppose you being Americans – in God you trust??)
Stella is brewed in my backyard (Labatt brewery) … indeed … hmmmmm….
I trust beer.
i like this argument…..if it works out we can all be gender shifters like shape shifters…..sounds like fun times
Actually, it’s an important point that most religions (including Christian followers of the long haired dude, and Hindu followers of the eight armed elephant) acknowledged long ago–the idea of God’s trandscendence, meaning that God is beyond all descriptions and categorizations. It’s the very reverse of “humanizing” God. (Which is, indirectly, one of the main points of Christianity: we can’t humanize God, but God can humanize God, and did so through the person of Jesus.) God preceded the Universe, so God can’t be described in terms of things that exist in the Universe. God is not a he, nor a she, nor, strictly speaking, is God an it. God is not good, God is not evil. In fact, to say that God exists is strictly speaking not true, since God is beyond descriptions that involve either existence or non-existence. God does not exist, but also God does not not-exist. [After reading that, you may well feel that the question of whether God should be called He, She, or It is a minor quibble.] The only accurate thing that can be said about God is that God is God. The rest is just human approximations. But we should be able to make use of prior human experience and use it to make better approximations. So we progress from the ancestral “He” to the modern non-gendered terms, and hopefully our descendants will come up with even better approximations.
But referring to God as “He” is pretty ingrained in our culture. For instance, almost everytime I wrote “God” in the above paragraph, I first wrote “He” and then went back and corrected myself.
It might sound modern, but this Reform prayerbook is simply catching up to Maimonides nine hundred years ago.
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