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TheMadFool
13.8kDespite my love for detective fiction, I'm afraid none of it rubbed off on me and I remain a perfect example of a careless thinker as oxymoronic as that sounds.
First, God has been referred to by many names but one that's of interest to me is Father and the divine pronoun He. Father is, for certain, the male half of parentage and He is a masculine pronoun. The suggestion/implication here is that god is male and not female. @Bitter Crank had passed a comment a long time ago regarding this matter but I seem to have forgotten about it. Hope he chimes in at some point in the discussion.
Second, I've heard it being said, more times than I could care to count, that 1. the language of the universe is mathematical i.e. god chose to write the laws of nature in math. and 2. that the laws of nature when transcribed into math have a beauty to them i.e. the mathematical equations that describe the laws of nature have an aesthetic quality to them that jumps out at the viewer in an immediately apparent way. In short the equations of science are beautiful.
Third, I've almost never heard the words "beauty" and "beautiful" being used on men/males. Too, the personification of beauty in all cultures seem to be women/females. For men/males, the correct adjective is handsome.
Fourth, this suggests, if not implies, that the universe has a feminine character - the universe is beautiful (womanly) and not handsome (manly).
Fifth, it's not lost on me that, in the past, in the present and probably for a while more in the future, men have been the purveyor/assessor of beauty - most artists are men, most scientists are men, most mathematicians are men, most of almost everything to do with the creation and judgment of beauty are men.
The question that needs asking is: is the fact that all/most works of beauty are the work of men indicate that women are aesthetically-challenged, at least comparatively, or is it a mere accident that this is the case? Millenia of living under the thumb of men could've stifled aesthetic expression in women, etc.
Sixth, this, again only, suggests that the universe, being beautiful in its form and content, could be a man's work. Men seemingly better at creating aesthetically pleasing works.
Seventh, if it turns out that the preponderance of men in the aesthetic domain is merely an accident brought about by socio-cultural factors like suppression in male dominated societies and that the fact of the matter is women are more aesthetically talented and inclined then, given how beautiful the universe is, god, the creator, could be a woman.
Is God a male or a female? Why? -
Book273
768In a nutshell...Yes. "God" is whichever the beholder needs "God" to be. Is the Ocean male or female? The ocean doesn't care what you call it, and neither does "God". People seek to determine, or establish, the gender of the divine, most likely to increase relatability to it, but the divine has no gender to speak of. It consists of both, equally. Or none, if that is preferable. When the bible was written (primarily by men I am told) the predominant pronoun would have been masculine, not because the deity is masculine but because the writers were. Had the writers been predominantly female the pronouns used would have reflected this. Assuming the gender of the divine based on the anthropomorphized version presented by the narrator is limiting at best, outright wrong is more likely. -
BC
13.2kGod knows what I said about the matter at hand; I don't remember. Hopefully it was nice,
Third, I've almost never heard the words "beauty" and "beautiful" being used on men/males. Too, the personification of beauty in all cultures seem to be women/females. For men/males, the correct adjective is handsome. — TheMadFool
It's not the "correct" adjective, it's merely the current adjective. "Beauty" certainly can be ascribed to males in an entirely masculine way, and "handsome" can be applied to a very attractive woman.
Fourth, this suggests, if not implies, that the universe has a feminine character - the universe is beautiful (womanly) and not handsome (manly). — TheMadFool
The universe is awesome (in its formal meaning). Beautiful, sure, but not in a sexed way. It is fearsome, too. Ineffable. Manly or womanly are just too small terms to bother with.
is the fact that all/most works of beauty are the work of men indicate that women are aesthetically-challenged etc. — TheMadFool
Men may just be more visually oriented than women -- the male gaze, and all that. Camille Paglia pointed out that middle class/upper class women have long had access to arts education -- which they have made use of -- without producing a whole lot of great works.
Is God a male or a female? Why? — TheMadFool
In ancient and modern polytheistic religions, both. Some gods are male, some are female. The three middle-eastern Abrahamic religions happen to be monotheistic male sky god affairs. Why? Don't know.
But look: Human beings create religions, we create gods. Humans see constellations in the sky -- we imagine figures that are not really there. One of the interesting things about the Abrahamic god is that he was conceived to be above and beyond human understanding--not like us, not approachable. Invisible, present from the beginning and in all places. All knowing, Totally unlike us. Male, sure, but not the guy next door,
Religions are perhaps our greatest art form. We produced them. The gods are our work, not the other way around. If you want god to be female, she can be. If you prefer god to be male, he can be. You would not be the first person to call god mother, father, and both.
Some Christian denominations have been trying to de-emphasize the sexing of god--not neutering god, but using fewer masculine terms for... the last 40 years. "Lord" for some people is too masculine. Father is out the window for some. Jesus stays male in most groups, and the Holy Spirit is counted as female quite often. Degendering hymns, scriptures, and prayers can sound truly wretched, and I don't particularly like it. Tough bounce.
J. B. Phillips wrote a book in 1952 by the title of "Your God is Too Small": too limited, too anthropomorphized, too domesticated. He asked believers to think bigger.
God may exist, even if not the one that we created. If God really does exist, my belief is that this entity would be altogether unintelligible to us, not fitting into any category that we could devise. That sort of being doesn't generate a lot of warm fuzzies so wouldn't be very popular. -
TheMadFool
13.8k:lol:
I wonder if the whole "the universe is beautiful" deal isn't itself an accident, one that followed the accident of male-domination of aesthetics. It's 7 AM, there's thick fog clinging to the blacktop, moderate snow, the road is slick with ice and meltwater, vehicles speeding by at 100 mph or thereabouts...krraaash...baaanng...krrruuncch..."mutliple vehicle collision on the grand trunk road. all emergency personnel report to station" -
TheMadFool
13.8kWhen the bible was written (primarily by men I am told) the predominant pronoun would have been masculine, not because the deity is masculine but because the writers were. — Book273
This doesn't add up. Historians were mostly men and yet histories have been written about women, perhaps queens and princesses mainly, nonetheless women and they didn't use "he" or "him" to refer to these women. I suspect the authors of the Bible were convinced that god was/is a male and thus chose the masculine pronoun over the feminine one.
gender of the divine — Book273
I don't know how much evidence there is to support the claim that women and men differ in attitude, values, etc. but if it's right on the money that women and men don't think alike, wouldn't it go a long way in understanding our world if we could get wind of god's gender?
God knows what I said about the matter at hand; I don't remember. Hopefully it was nice — Bitter Crank
You said something important! Damn my memory! It had to do with the masculine pronoun "he" and the word for god - "father" - not implying that god is male.
It's not the "correct" adjective, it's merely the current adjective. "Beauty" certainly can be ascribed to males in an entirely masculine way, and "handsome" can be applied to a very attractive woman. — Bitter Crank
It's, let's just say, rare to call a man beautiful and a woman handsome. This practice is falling out of use to my reckoning. Thanks though!
The universe is awesome (in its formal meaning). Beautiful, sure, but not in a sexed way. It is fearsome, too. Ineffable. Manly or womanly are just too small terms to bother with. — Bitter Crank
Most perceptive. I'm just trying to build a theory out of general trends, practices, attitudes, and points of view. I'm sure you must've come across people saying how beautiful scientific equations are. I'm running with that sentiment in this thread.
As for the "fearsome" bit, it muddies the waters - how could someone being decapitated or having faer chest crushed in a vehicular accident be beautiful? Yet, scientists and mathematicians insist that the equations that describe these very events down to the tiniest detail are beautiful. It's like a man condemned to the electric chair being enamored by the physics of electricity. Is there something off about this? Mind if you look into it and see if you can make sense of it?
Men may just be more visually oriented than women -- the male gaze, and all that. Camille Paglia pointed out that middle class/upper class women have long had access to arts education -- which they have made use of -- without producing a whole lot of great works. — Bitter Crank
Sad to hear that! Perhaps what they couldn't achieve with their minds, women did with their bodies. This also seems to hint at something which, at this moment, I can't seem to figure out.
J. B. Phillips wrote a book in 1952 by the title of "Your God is Too Small": too limited, too anthropomorphized, too domesticated. He asked believers to think bigger. — Bitter Crank
I watched a video interview of Richard Feynman the physicist and he too made a similar point, describing how vast the universe is, how insignificantly small earth is, and the claim that god chose earth out of a countless billion other worlds to bring his message of love and whatnot to was, quote, "...to provincial." -
BC
13.2kAs for the "fearsome" bit, it muddies the waters - how could someone being decapitated or having faer chest crushed in a vehicular accident be beautiful? — TheMadFool
OK, forget fearsome. I was thinking of a phrase from the Psalms, "Blessed are they who fear the Lord and walk in His ways". The blessed are not scared -- they are awed. But never mind, There is a better word -- sublime -- that describes a certain quality of great things -- like the universe, the earth viewed from the moon, or the starry night sky. The sublime is not merely nice, beautiful, impressive, etc. It is "used to denote the extreme or unparalleled nature" of something.
An ocean of ink has been spilt on such questions of whether God Is A He Or A She, so you have tapped into a deep vein. -
BC
13.2kYou said something important! Damn my memory! It had to do with the masculine pronoun "he" and the word for god - "father" - not implying that god is male. — TheMadFool
Maybe that "he" is the English default for person. He, mankind, men... She, womankind, woman just isn't the default. If a writer says, "all womankind" one would assume the reference was to all women, not all people, while "all mankind" refers to both men and women. Some languages are gendered -- like French, Spanish, Latin, etc. Anglo Saxon may have been gendered (don't remember) but over time English became less and less inflected, so it became simplified. Mother, father, man, woman, brother, sister... are gendered while person and people are neuter. The pronoun for person is he, she. "It" is for objects, not persons, and gods are persons. So, god is either a man or a woman. Athena is a female, Apollo is a male. Jesus was a male, Mary was his mother, and God was his father. That's the way it was conceived, so to speak.
Sometimes woke writers will use "she" instead of "he" as the default. It is less jarring than it used to be, but still requires invoking a mental subroutine to acknowledge what the writer is doing and make allowance for it. I'm 74 and I'm not adopting major new linguistic habits here on out. English doesn't have a neuter gender for individuals, though "we" and "them" are neuter plurals (at least for the last several hundred years).
The masculine default is very deep in English, and might be the default across the Indo-European family of languages--but my knowledge of Indo-European is extraordinarily thin. I'd like to be an expert on everything, but... just wasn't paying enough attention in class. -
Nils Loc
1.3kGod is a He because he wears the pants in His household. Or, his wife "fell down a set of stairs" after her kids were born and this has been kept a secret.
The kids still wonder, if God is like a man, why did he make women? Are they the less favored of the natural binary? -
Sir2u
3.2kGod is a He because he wears the pants in His household. Or, his wife "fell down a set of stairs" after her kids were born and this has been kept a secret. — Nils Loc
He/she/it could not have kids, that is why she/he/it had to send his cronies to screw up the life of a poor virgin.
They don't have stairs in heaven either, shit man how could they get any further up.
The kids still wonder, if God is like a man, why did he make women? Are they the less favored of the natural binary? — Nils Loc
I believe if god is male, then god must be gay and that the only way he could have kids was by being a sperm donor. That fits the story better than anything else I have heard. -
TheMadFool
13.8kMaybe that "he" is the English default for person. He, mankind, men — Bitter Crank
I still feel that's not it but this will suffice for the moment. Thank you. :up: Another word for "human" is "man" and it shows up elsewhere too e.g. "mankind". It's not too much of a stretch then to infer that "he" is, in the sense above and in the sense used to refer to God, gender-neutral or a unisex pronoun. Actually, it makes complete sense now doesn't it? Man is synonymous with human and the appropriate pronoun for man is he...all the pieces come together and a picture takes shape...God is not exactly a he or a she, not a man or woman, but he is human, more accurately, a perfection of what it is to be human: knowledgeable (all-knowing), loving (all-loving), and, capable of translating his love and knowledge into real deeds of incalculable value (all-powerful).
less and less inflected, so it became simplified — Bitter Crank
KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid! :lol: While simplicity is a good thing as the worldwide appeal of the English language evinces, of course this only if English is actually simple, I think it comes at the cost of losing some linguistic/semantic nuances e.g. gender which I suppose the English language doesn't care much about. Anything further you might want to add? -
BC
13.2kAnything further you might want to add? — TheMadFool
Old English wasn't simple, but it was the Germanic language of an agrarian people who decamped from Western Europe and took up life in England. The Angles and Saxons pretty much dominated the people already living there, so they didn't have to borrow a lot of words from the natives. That changed in 1066 when William the Conqueror (AKA William the Bastard) invaded and took over England. The Normans didn't make any effort to stamp out Old English, but since they spoke Old French and were running things, it behooved the English to pay attention to French words. a lot of French was added to OE, and usage gradually changed OE into Middle English. Just one of many changes, pork (Fr.) was added to pig, hog, and swine (all Old English). Cow is from the Germanic, Beef (boef) is is from the French.
A lot of the complexity of Old English was milled out of Old English over time. Old English became Middle English, which with some effort and patience a Modern English speaker can learn fairly easily. Middle English became modern English as the result of use. Intellectuals began writing in English, and late Middle English had a relatively lean vocabulary. Writers reached into French, Latin, and Greek for more complex word-stock that could carry big ideas.
So, a lot of words were added to English in the 1400s and 1500s. By 1600 English had become pretty much the language it is today.
Bringing this back to God Almighty, William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible came out in 1525. It had a strong influence on a more famous version, the King James Bible, published in 1611. For his scholarly efforts, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, strangled, and then burnt at the stake in what is now Belgium. Tyndale had completed the NT translation, but hadn't finished the OT books when he was executed. Religious authorities were very touchy back then, and just didn't like democratizing the Word of God, which was their bailiwick. -
TheMadFool
13.8kI don't know how far this is true but my guesstimate is any language that becomes the lingua franca or that dominates other languages is purely a function of political/military prowess, nothing to do at all with the linguistic elements like simplicity, expressiveness, or who math-friendly or science-friendly it is, etc. Do you agree/disagree?
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BC
13.2kI think your guess is pretty much spot on. English didn't become a world language on the merits of the language itself. The British Empire projected English into North America, South Asia, and Africa. Later on, the United States continued the process. Conquest, trade, politics, religion, etc.
Latin and French, two other lingua franca, achieved their status in the same way.
The fussy French have guarded the development of their language much more closely than most languages have -- "The Académie française was established in 1635 to act as the official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, and to publish an official dictionary of the French language. Its recommendations however carry no legal power and are sometimes disregarded even by governmental authorities."
Curiously, Google Translate French to English doesn't even recognize "lingua franca" as French. It thought that it might be Corsican.
Esperanto was invented to serve as a universal language. There are language hobbyists who learn it, but it hasn't caught on yet. It was created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. There are a couple of million people who speak it. If someday you find that you have absolutely nothing else left to do, you could become the first Esperanto poster on this form. -
TheMadFool
13.8k
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Miguel Hernández
66
No. My neighbor from 3.D says that he is "God". At lunchtime his wife says "God, pass me the salt." They have two dogs, Khomeini and Rabin, and a parrot. My father says that the parrot must be the Pope.
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Jack Cummins
5.1k[reply="Sir2u;481215"
I think that the idea being conveyed is that God is not limited to the restrictions of a physical body and its pleasures, but if (God exists at all), is way beyond our limitations of male and female, and bodies. -
Rxspence
80Please explain this. I cannot see the connection between sensory capacity and gender specification.
Sir2u
Our need for gender identification is to define their role based on their physical abilities.
Without physical advantages or restrictions we eliminate judgement, pain, pride, etc.
It also makes it nearly impossible to explain what comes after the bright light. -
Sir2u
3.2k[reply="Sir2u;481215"
I think that the idea being conveyed is that God is not limited to the restrictions of a physical body and its pleasures, but if (God exists at all), is way beyond our limitations of male and female, and bodies. — Jack Cummins
To reply to a post, just select the text to quote and click on the "quote" button.
If what you say is true then what would be the great thing about going to heaven? -
Sir2u
3.2kOur need for gender identification is to define their role based on their physical abilities. — Rxspence
No, gender has been used to decide roles in societies, but not based on physical abilities but the needs of the society. Strong women would have been warriors and wimpy men would have maids if only the physical abilities had been taken into account.
Without physical advantages or restrictions we eliminate judgement, pain, pride, etc. — Rxspence
No, people are judged by many more things than their physical state. Pain and pride are things that cannot be eliminated because they serve a very important part of life.
It also makes it nearly impossible to explain what comes after the bright light. — Rxspence
I have no idea what you are referencing here. -
Jack Cummins
5.1k
As far as I am aware from when I used to believe in 'heaven', and life after death, going to heaven did not mean actually becoming God. So, when I made my comment I was only thinking of God in his heaven, although it could be asked what kind of bodies do human beings have in heaven too?
But, if you want to discuss the topic of life after death etc, whether it exists or not, and your views, I would refer you to my current thread in the main discussions on 'what happens to consciousness when we die?' -
Sir2u
3.2kalthough it could be asked what kind of bodies do human beings have in heaven too? — Jack Cummins
Bodies are material, heaven not. They could not co-exist. Glad I am not going there. -
Rxspence
80No, gender has been used to decide roles in societies, but not based on physical abilities but the needs of the society. Strong women would have been warriors and wimpy men would have been maids if only the physical abilities had been taken into account — Sir2u
In no way am I suggesting that gender identification is correct,
However it appears you say No, and then agree with me.
Societal beliefs are not my belief
Walk toward the bright light means to give into death
Interesting that no two people have the same response to this either
Pain and pride are things that cannot be eliminated because they serve a very important part of life. — Sir2u
We are speaking of afterlife!
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