In my experience respect for all theological notions tends to dissipate the more one applies thoughtfulness.
I’m with H L Mencken: “Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration; courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all love of the truth.”
(I don’t know what to write… Oh well - Yo)
I offer nothing but the uncertain promise
That I’ll honestly pursue the crooked path of the conscious
Not just another body in the battle for the soul
Never sold self for it’s weight in platinum and gold but
Man we’re getting grown
Wisdom got us thinking in the interest of our children even if they ain’t been given their flesh
Their bones
Their homes or their names yet
I’m aiming for the change in my pocket for the payback
The change augmented by the government to nothing
The change of a whirlwind unraveling the coming of that next shit
I can’t wait for when it comes, shit
It better be worth the shit that I paid most my life with
It’s nice when it rains sometime
Cleansing minds in my habitat
Imagine that I’m digging to find
What was hidden by the myth of a god up in the sky
Knowing that She meant for me to rhyme
So I
Give thanks to the most, the least that I can do
I wear this skin to find the me inside of you
When I dream that I’m dreaming I feel most alive
Sacrifice nights
Write to survive
Proper hand gestures conjure ancestors
Drinking from the bottle that was meant
For the message that was sent from the tired and the true
I give thanks to the most, the least that I can do
Way back I used to call upon the Father often
I fought the devil last night and almost lost -
Now I’m drinking bottled water
Flushing out the toxins
Vomiting and coughing feeling closer to the coffin
Than I ever had
Every morning that I arrive
Is a night that I survive
Just to be alive - sipping chai
Listening to my favorite dj
Communicate the music, what my rhymes would say
If they were written
With a needle
To the groove
Of a paper
Stylus to papyrus, record to the player
It’s more than just therapy or excessive energy
I undo the mechanism meant to imprison me
Spiritually
The view from up is not enough
I dwell below to find the god that I rebuff
Redesigned, redefineed what it meant to be divine
Knowing that She meant for me to rhyme
So I Give thanks to the most, the least that I can do
I wear this skin to find the me inside of you
When I dream that I’m dreaming I feel most alive
Sacrifice nights, Write to survive
Proper hand gestures conjure ancestors
Drinking from the bottle that was meant
For the message that was sent from the tired and the true
I give thanks to the most, the least that I can do
Our Father
My art is Heaven, hallowed be
The drums beating me and my tongue into submission
I can hardly speak breathing this indelible high
From an endless supply of Godspeed, and I need
A brand new prayer to read
Seems the old ones grew tons of mold cuz they’re narrow as hell
Sometimes they be thinking that this heavens for sale
Worse than that, they still think God is a male
But
Moms used to hang up pictures of white Jesus
Fist clutching rosary beads, over the years
I began to question this Father Almighty
Made in His image but don’t look nothing like me
But we be the children of the most high
Ghosts of the colonized lost in the time
Redesign, redefine what it meant to be divine
Knowing that She meant for me to rhyme
That’s… that’s basically admitting it’s a huge game of pretend, isn’t it?
The LORD our God has vouchsafed unto us a revelation which just so happens to come precisely at the time it aligns with our current politics. GLORY BE!
Do you also mention that She’s black?
Gender is the last of the worries IMHO, Lets talk about the sheer absurdity of even the concept of gods in any form first. once that is sorted, maybe then we can debate the gender.
At the moment it’s like debating the gender of space-elves on alpha-centauri…
Yup, Biblical Hebrew is heavily gendered; even some of the verb conjugations agree with the gender of the subject. You have to know the sex of a dog just to command it to stop biting you. Or of the God, I guess.
God must be female. She’d hardly have planned a later son by creating a carrier as an afterthought now would she?
Pi-yimminy!!
That article was clearly satire, right? Because these days you can’t be too sure.
In fact, not at all a new idea.
Apophatic theology had quite the hey-day in the second and third centuries. The gist is that God is fundamentally unknowable, because God is so far beyond your puny human understanding and puny human language, that any affirmative statement you could make about God is wrong, because God is so much more than that. God isn’t wise, because God so dwarfs your pathetic understanding of what wisdom could ever be. God isn’t good, because God entirely transcends and subsumes your absurd categories of good and evil. God isn’t male, because God is so mind-bendingly ineffable that you can’t hope to place God into such wholly inadequate ontological labels like gender.
Therefore, the only true statements about God are negative statements, and the only way to even approach an understanding of God is to contemplate all the things God is not. God is not wise, God is not good, God is not male, for the same reason that sonnets are not purple. Your sad language cannot ever describe what God is, because God so wholly exceeds and transcends all the words and concepts you have. Think of the greatest grandest most amazing words you can, and if you try to apply them to God, you are nowhere near the ball park, the light from the ball park will take millions of years just to reach you, you are so so so so so wrong. So this is just going back to a real theology heritage, a pre-Augustine heritage.
That always raised the question for me though: if this being is so fundamentally unknowable that the only thing I can know about it is that I will never know anything, why are we having the conversation in the first place? Why not just ignore the big ineffable whateveritis, stop worrying about trying to know the unknowable, and get on with learning things we can actually know? See how that goes?
[Enlightenment, scientific revolution, human life expectancy doubles in 100 years.]
Huh. Turns out it works pretty well.
I dunno, how was Jesus a man?
I think the “scientific” was meant as a joke, but the examples they gave were true. (Under other circumstances I might point out that the cake Lljeroth was cutting was part of an anti-racism performance art piece , but as I lived in Norway for a while I feel obliged to stick to official Norwegian policy, which is that Sweden is a cesspool of terrible people.)
This language change does nothing but paper over genuine theological debate about gendered language in reference to concepts of ultimate reality and a gendered God.
It obscures actual etymology with flimsy social constructs.
The fact is that the word “God” is a useful translation of the historical origins of the god of Judaism and Christianity. But the word “God” itself is already a gendered word.
At any rate, I can’t find any reference that ascribes God2 a gender.
Allow me … here are some useful references:
The word “God” is likely derived from the Lombardic “Goden,” referring to Odin, the male god of Norse mythology.
It is already common theory amongst feminist archeologists and theologians that Yahweh was a male Canaanite god with a consort named Asherah (from whom she was later “divorced”).
El is the male precursor god to Yahweh in the Tanakh, representing an henotheistic or pantheistic origin of the Jewish god of Abraham Isaac, and Jacob. This prefigures the Christian New Testament.
The general Christian concept in trinitarian monotheism is that God has neither a male nor female identity, but that Jesus was gendered male and the relationship between persons of the trinity is gendered in masculine language. The reason for this is Christianity’s roots in gendered creator-gods.
Mary Daly, radical feminist theologian, believed that distinctions between gendered language and practical effect were semantic minutiae. To talk of “God the Father” was to talk of male dominance of the female. God is male-centered and therefore-- for all practical intents and purposes-- a male god.
This is why Daly moved away from theology toward a restructuring of religion using feminine language. Interestingly enough, she did not view trans-sexuality as an analogous expression of God’s attributes, but rather as a surreptitious form of patriarchal oppression.
Thus, radical feminism has its religious roots in bigotry against 4th-wave gender equality. IMO, gender-neutral language-policing is designed to keep peace amongst various feminist factions rather than the general public.
To be fair, the 2nd Edition rules removed such sacrifices, implementing a messiah scheme.
My time in Sweden has been confined to Stockholm (where there’s a huge immigrant population) but I found folks to be quite lovely. I guess YMMV.
Mmm - that is an over simplification of what a minority of Christians believe. Certainly not “most”. The Catholics, Orthodox, and all of the major Protestant branches have had rigorous critical debate on what is the Truth. Even those that shake out as Sola Scriptura and chose a more literal interpretations, have done so after debate. Their decision to go with a literal interpretation is still an interpretation.
Now, granted, a lot of the FOLLOWERS haven’t have these debates, but the founders and leaders certainly have. Indeed, the fact that there are so many Protestant flavors often stems from critical thought and debate being applied.
You touch upon a good point here. Philosophers concerned with language, such as Kant and Wittgenstein, would likely argue that apophatic statements of what God is not require us to admit the following: by using apophatic language we consider God’s existence itself a necessary attribute of God’s ineffability.
However, as Kant argued, the language of “is” requires a predicate (the copulative verb links subject and predicate; it is not a predicate in and of itself). Therefore, existence is not a predicate and the ontological argument fails: it proposes that God’s being must be greater than the idea of God’s being, and that consequently God exists because God is maximally greater in reality than in thought (per Anselm).
The ontological argument becomes a tautology: “God is because we think God is.” Wittgenstein would argue that this is a faulty language problem. In reality, there is no problem at all. The primary contemporary question of the revisited ontological argument then becomes whether or not existence is an necessary attribute of God.
But as you have suggested about God-language: if God exists, we must be able to think about the possibility that he exists (the “apophatic” negative relies upon the “kataphatic” positive statement of God’s existence).
If we can’t think about the possibility of God’s existence, then God’s existence becomes necessarily incomprehensible (the apophatic here is simply an ontological argument expressed in the negative). God’s existence would be irrelevant.
It wouldn’t matter if God exists or not. We literally couldn’t hypothesize about God. Occam’s razor would apply to matters of necessary thought. And thinking about something ultimately incomprehensible becomes ultimately unnecessary (Where did the idea of God come from? … Who cares?).
Thus, the question of God’s existence raises the possibility of what Paul Tillich described: “God is the ground of all Being.” In other words, God does not exist as Being, but rather as something Wholly Other to which Being points: offering an explanation of why something exists rather than nothing, or why we differentiate diversity of thought as meaningful.
This might appear instinctively true because meaningfulness lies on a boundary marker outside of our symbol-set, and cannot be proven true in any sense per Godel’s incompleteness theorems. In some small empirically-minded way, it might be possible to know what we don’t know when it comes to hope in an open-ended future.
Must… not… post…
I’ll see myself out.
