Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/24/god-will-no-longer-be-he-o.html
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Sweden is still one of the few truly civilized countries in the world. Nice.
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I guess there’s something to be said for applying progressive values to your fantasy fiction. Good for them.
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Sadly the rest of that fiction contains a lot of truly horrible stuff (like their deity demanding human sacrifice) and still has to be taken as truth by the believers.
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“God will simply be God.”
Adressing God as Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Björn or Benny is still okay, though.
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There is a right way to do this. I have been to a number of liberal Protestant churches and sometimes they do this without doing violence to the ear or to the theology. It’s not easy, it requires some thoughtfulness. I am not sure I expect a government to do it well.
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Not the government. They used to be the state church, but that was then, and this is now.
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Well, just the parts people agree with. The bible is kind of like the Rorschach test of literature. You can tell a lot about a religious person by the parts of the bible they focus on, while ignoring the parts that don’t fit into their ideals.
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I agree, and I’ve also seen that with some Catholic priests. The problem is that most variations of Christianity explicitly prohibit critical approach to the Scripture, treating as literal truth instead of a work created by multiple authors.
Exactly. Some ideas in New Testament are quite progressive, even for today, but those are conveniently skipped by the more hate-focused believers.
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This just seems intuitively sensible to me. Progressiveness aside, how the hell does God have a gender?
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God is a She when I want to rankle Abrahamic monotheists. 
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At any rate, I can’t find any reference that ascribes God a gender.
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Patriarchs of Abrahamic religions have created God in their own image 
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Yup. Since all supernatural belief systems are just some form of projecting the human psyche onto the rest of existence, I can’t say a gendered deity is less rational than any other Higher Power since they’re all irrational. But religion clearly is with humanity to stay, and I’m for any reforms that help to dismantle the patriarchy. 
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I can’t say about all of them, but in those I had contact with, projection is painfully obvious. For example the wrathful, judging and punishing God of Old Testament is clearly based on behavior of religious leaders.
Some (but not all) forms of Buddhism seem to lack the projection.
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Uh, they might have to rewrite the book of Genesis in that case.
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Just remember, Winner takes it all.
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I mean to build a Protestant church focusing heavily on Isaiah 5:8. Now get off my lawn.
“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”
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Not necessarily. According to Wikipedia, biblical Hebrew only has masculine and feminine genders, meaning that the choice could very well just be arbitrary. If there was a neuter option then there would be a better argument. I’m sure we have someone on the BBS who understands biblical Hebrew and could set this straight though 
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