A3

Hi All,

My personal idea on the subject is that God is above gender and created male and female at the "same" time to portray His essence of being Love itself and Wisdom itself. There is a constant force to unite the two and make them into a perfect marriage of two equal parts.
As I posted in the thread about the soul:
We live on two plaines at the same time. The natural and the spiritual. This concept I picture as a simple egg. The top quarter of this ‘egg’ is our unconsious. The yoke would be our mind and also sticks partway into the top or unconsious section. The very top and thus unconsious part of the egg-white would be our soul and I see that as the permanent ‘docking station’ of the whole egg. This is where the love and wisdom, and thus life, flow in from God. This would be where "God is with us."
The yoke, much like an egg, has also two parts, an inner and an outer section. These two sections of the yoke (our mind) are will and understanding. From the soul, our ‘docking station,’ the will receives love, and the understanding receives wisdom. In the masculine mind these two are arranged so that the inner section is his will and the outer is his understanding. In the feminine mind these are reversed. The core of her mind is understanding and the outer is her will. This determines the priority of each to life’s situations. This is the underlying cause of the saying: “man are from Mars and women are from Venus.”
The three-quarter bottom section of the egg-white I would consider the body. From the soul there are connections or strands (DNA?) running down to govern the body, how it is first built and later maintained and even repaired. The body is full of activities that we are totally unconsious of which I see as executed by the soul. When we cut ourselves, or worse, it would be the soul that arranges the defenses and makes repaires. We have nothing to do with it, but can help by living healthy and giving it better materials to work with.
I’m sure this description has its faults but it seems close to what I think and I hope it helps somewhat.

Kind Regards
Adriaan

Mageth

Adriaan:

I noticed that you're a Swedenborgian. I watched an interesting biography of Emmanuel Swedenborg on PBS a few weeks ago. A fascinating, brilliant, yet little known (at least in my circles) historical figure.

Perhaps you might consider opening a thread in General Religious Discussions on Swedenborgianism to fill us in on its beliefs.

[ December 03, 2002: Message edited by: Mageth ]</p>

Oxymoron

Say what? That needs a whole thread in itself. I think A3's eggs are about to be grilled

In essence, it doesn't help. It's just a made-up mish-mash of badly understood spiritualism, philosophy and pseudo-science with no real empirical or theoretical basis behind it.

In any event, the charge is that christinsanity (et al) have an utterly bogusly 'male' God. Anyone can make up their own pick-n-mix god with attributes selected to weaken particular arguments but my reply is then "so what?" 19th Century philosophers ranted incessantly about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, the "can I invent a genderless God" challenge is much the same sort of waste of time.

Sabine Grant

So what?.. just to restore the reality that judeo christianism is not the only source of discrimination in reply to Oxymoron's post. Or do you disagree with my comment?

In fact the verse in Genesis does mention a "they".However if one can comprehend the intricacity of the trinity concept, the" they" still represents 3 states of God all in one god.

Mageth

So what?.. just to restore the reality that judeo christianism is not the only source of discrimination in reply to Oxymoron's post. Or do you disagree with my comment?

Again, so what? I don't let my son get away with excuses like "Well, Bobby was talking in class, too." My response to him would be along the lines of "So what? We're talking about YOUR behavior, not Bobby's."

Sabine Grant

Jobar, hello! here is the dilemna... is there really one unique christian theology? I doubt it. As I expressed earlier, I believe that the Bible is often understood as part of a subjective interpretation.
If you lurk into christian forums, you will have an example of the different " theologies" which are debated all under the same label as christian.
I have no doubt that several christians would debate me on the post earlier where I commented on the Creation of man and woman.

rdalin

I can't resist throwing in my two cents here. It has been my experience on various forums that there is no such thing as 'Christian theology' in the sense of a single set of beliefs to which all Christians adhere. What actually exists is a whole bunch of different Christian theologies, each of which claims to be the one and only true theology. What you have written here seems to be your version of Christian theology. I've seen many others, each of which differ in some respect from the others.

My question is, Why, then, should I accept your version over the others as being the real one?

doodad

I guess God could have been an it, but that wouldn't have fit the chauvinistic concept of a leader of mankind.

doodad

Common angle worms are unisexual (?), so why couldn't men have been created that way? Do worms have headaches?

doodad

Perhaps "mankind" would be a better choice of words if one views it as being gender neutral.
This still leaves the issue of what his image should look like. Maybe man created him in his image, and not the other way around. Some religions have a faith object that is not personified in human terms. Wonder why the Abrahamic religions express it that way? Maybe it's more sophisticated and humanized than worshipping a rock. Makes it easier to relate to if the dude is human-like.