TheEV1LGEN1US

I went to a Jezuit Catholic university, and in the theology classes that I took, we were taught that the only reason God was considered to be male was because of the patriarchal society that existed during the writing of the bible. In reality, God really has no gender and could be represented as any gender without a problem; its simply a limitation in language. Perhaps my teachers were just progressive in their ways and their teaching, but this was at a Catholic university. I really don't have an idea of what the official statement is of the Catholic or any Christian church.

Oh yeah, and for the record, I'm atheist. God could be a pink and yellow hemaphroditic horse, for all I care.

Agemegos

Perhaps it has. Perhaps it is sheer linguistic accident that the word for a god ended up in the same grammatical category at the word for a man, that therefore that people spoke and thought about their god using the same pronouns they used for men, and different pronouns than they used for women.

babelfish

God is a male because he was created by men, in their image and likeness.

Women were too busy raising the kids to engage in fanciful pursuits like creating deities.

Agemegos

Why not? It only seems strange if you obsess about the similarity of sound between "feminine" and "female". There is no particular reason that the word for 'penis' should belong to the same grammatical category as the word for 'man', any more than the word for 'table' should end up in the same grammatical category as 'catastrophe'.

If the philosophers who discovered gender had named the three genders of Greek 'arble', 'bargle' and 'cargle', instead of fixating on the coincidence that 'woman' and 'man' happened to belong to different genders, none of this confusion would have arisen.

Columbus

Bingo! I think this hits the nail right on the head.

For reasons a little more complex than patriarchal oppression, although not much more, cultures with feminine or mixed gender gods lost out over time. Not because they were inherently less worthy, but because warlike male gods incited more violence against other tribes. Patriarchal theists of the Abrahamic tradition were one of the most inherently violent, so their idea of "god the father" won out. For a people recently graduated from bull-worshipping henotheism this isn't to surprising.

Ever wonder why the Israelites made a "golden calf" the first time Moses turned his back for one minute? It's because they were actually bull worshipers. Not some wobbly kneed new-born cows. They worshipped physically huge, sexually potent, violently masculine, and good to eat BULLS. ( goodness, let me stop and fan myself for a moment! )

The idea that god is a gender neutral concept is relatively new. It is mainly embraced by liberal Abrahamists with more education than the average. Try going to CF and starting a conversation about God and It's Son. Or Jesus and It's Resurrection. The idea of a genderless God is a modern invention that hasn't caught on much yet. But the Bible is the story of man re-inventing God in increasingly sophisticated images of himself. The story isn't over yet.

Tom

French Prometheus

The standard French word for penis is masculine : un pénis. There are other words for it, some are feminine, others masculine. Slang words usually have another meaning : queue = tail, bitte = mooring bollard. Both words are feminine. Zob is masculine and comes from colloquial Arabic.

Norseman

God has a gender so he can make little godlings.

BDS

Thanks. Actually, I don't speak French, and got my infomation that "penis" was faminine from David Sedaris's "Me Talk Pretty Some Day".

striderlives

I think the Hebrew god YHWH is male because that's how the ancient polytheistic semites thought of him. He was the god of War, after all. The bible itself refers to a number of other gods - Shemoch, Baal, Asherah....and my alltime fav, Peor, the Hyman-Breaker. :notworthy

All had specific genders, just as all greek, norse, and roman gods.

Julian

Well, he had to be able to please his consort, Asherah. Although Asherah still appears in the bible the refernces are vague but he really did have a consort back when he part of a pantheon.

Julian