Dubious wrote:The nature of god is usually connoted in such abstract terms that whatever pronoun is used it merely operates as signifier where in context, he or she no-longer denotes male or female but simply an entity anthropomorphized for lack of a more abstract pronoun. I don't know! Maybe Sanskrit has one!
...not among more advanced civilizations on the planet. Rituals may persist as formality and also because people desire ritual as comfort though no-longer giving credence to it's underpinnings. For example, if I lived in one of those Austrian, Czech or German towns with their incredible Baroque churches singing a Haydn or Schubert mass each Sunday I'd be there every time for the full event.Greta wrote:That's true for some people, Dubs, but as you know there's plenty who really do think of God as a big magic man. Oodles of them.
...because both Islam and Christianity are based on Judaic scripture which combined account for the majority of followers who profess to believe in a single god. Why male only? Because Jehovah, the epicenter of monotheism, was a warrior god forging the Jews into a nation. A female one would not have sufficed. What was needed was a god ready to exterminate and punish, the Pentateuch being the ancient Jewish version of Mein Kampf. A "command" authority was required to create a nation amidst disparity and the threat of surrounding super-powers. The OT amounts to a saga, a narrative to forge a nation by the command of a masculine god.Greta wrote:Many more believe in an inherently male creative spirit. Why would it be male?
...as you say it "only serves to reinforce the delusions of the naive"! The naive require their own enlightenment; until then whatever they think or say is not to be acknowledged based on so much that's already understood...meaning, what do you care what idiots think who can't manage to make themselves contemporary?Greta wrote:What of the female - unless creation itself is female in which case God is giving us jiggy jiggy (which may explain a few things, admittedly). So gendering God makes no sense and only serves to reinforce the delusions of the naive.
Why did Joseph Campbell for instance, have a much higher regard for mythology than religion? It was to incorporate the animate, the inanimate, the male & female, etc., within all the perspectives of existence as imagined then; at its core there was always a centralized power exempt of gender that could resolve itself any time and for any reason into a trinity or multiplicity of powers, beings or objects.
In short, we're only short of a genderless abstract pronoun which correctly refers to a genderless entity. But who knows if this universe or any other isn't "cooked up" based on the menu of a species that knows how to create one and to whom male & female, though understood, may be only one of many dichotomies.