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vison, plenty of Christians reject that set of beliefs--not just a private rejection, either. Protestants do not accept the elaboration of stories around Mary beyond what's in the Bible. My church rejects the inerrancy of the Bible and with it the literal truth of the Genesis story. You write as if Christian women are required by their faith to go around seething with self-hatred. The attitudes you rightly attack are held by a very small subset of Christians.

As a Christian woman I'm more distressed by the branches of the church that place women on high pedestals to honor their feminine virtues of motherliness and home-centeredness and self-effacing generosity and sacrifice and--in short anything that keeps 'em happily in the kitchen. Sentimentalized and trivialized and sidelined. But not evil.

Vison


I've lived in a largely Hindu society for 10 years now, though I'm not a Hindu myself. The place of women in Hinduism is...interesting. Shakti (literally 'force', or 'energy') personified is represented as a woman. The trinity of Gods are all 'male' but wealth and learning are both associated with female Gods (I don't use the word "goddess" for the same reason I don't use "poetess") Kali (insane destructive woman/god who goes around killing people and drinking their blood) is female.
The supposedly male Gods of the trinity occasionally take on a female form if it suits their purpose. Shiva (my favourite God ) has been known to incarnate himself as a woman called Ardhyanareshwari ("half-man-woman-god")

And yet women are still treated like shit.

Primula_Baggins wrote:

vison, plenty of Christians reject that set of beliefs--not just a private rejection, either. Protestants do not accept the elaboration of stories around Mary beyond what's in the Bible. My church rejects the inerrancy of the Bible and with it the literal truth of the Genesis story. You write as if Christian women are required by their faith to go around seething with self-hatred. The attitudes you rightly attack are held by a very small subset of Christians.

As a Christian woman I'm more distressed by the branches of the church that place women on high pedestals to honor their feminine virtues of motherliness and home-centeredness and self-effacing generosity and sacrifice and--in short anything that keeps 'em happily in the kitchen. Sentimentalized and trivialized and sidelined. But not evil.

I know, Primula me dear. But this is quite a new thing, and history, like art, is "longa". Once, Woman MUST have been the equal of Man, not a thing made of a spare body part. Once, we must have had enormous value to our folk, once upon a time we weren't relegated to the kitchen or boudoir, once we were Godesses. And, given what God has come to mean, I think I'd rather be a Godess..........

And I agree with you, by the way, about the view of Woman as a doormat. Barefoot and pregnant, as they used to say.

And, as is so very often the case, I was aiming to start a fire. I think it's time for a slugfest, Manwe style.

No. No. No, I don't. Peace and luv, every one.........

Meneltarma, I wish I knew more about Hinduism. I recently read a book called "A Fine Balance" by a Canadian writer named Rohinton Mistry. It is a WONDERFUL book set in India, and I came to love the characters as if they were my family. The main characters are Parsee and low caste Hindu, they lived in the years belonging to Indira Ghandi. Such a great book. I don't like sentimentality, and ususally suspect a book that makes me cry. But it made me cry and it wasn't sentimental, I assure you.

Rohinton Mistry is a VERY good writer - and from what I can tell from interviews, he's a lovely person too. I plan to read A Fine Balance this summer.

I'm currently reading On the Subjection of Women by J.S. Mill ( )who attacks the concept of placing women on a pedestal because by raising them *above* public life society denies them the ability to participate in it.

I'm finally turning into a feminist.

I think it's utterly ridiculous to think of God as either male or female. It's a GOD. If it wants to take a form, it can take ANY form it wants, be it male, female, star, planet or chipmunk! I think it's incredibly presumptious for any human to assign a gender to a god.

If I feel the need to imagine an intelligent purpose to the universe, I tend to visualize the entity involved as being the whole universe, that we are ALL a part of the entity that directs the flow and manner of things happening, every rick, cot and tree.

In other words, the concept is so vast that I can't comprehend it, and I don't even try any more.

vison wrote:

Those women, and all their sisters, have been left out of the books, and worse (worse for them, at any rate), they were left out of god's reckoning, too. Women, in our "culture" have been designated as sisters and daughters of Eve, Eve who heard the serpent's tempting and ate the apple and caused the Fall. Eve, that vessel of sin, helpless before the lusts of her body, that body made to lure men into sin. "The woman made me do it," Adam said. We despise Adam, we women, but he's supposed to be our master. Women knew/know that Adam is "the weaker vessel", but god set Adam to rule us, we are to Adam what Adam is supposed to be to god.

Well ... there are plenty of quite powerful women in the Bible. Just sayin'.

Quote:

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the feminine face of the church, as far as I'm concerned. A virgin, miraculously impregnated by the will of god. I think I understand that Mary herself was born of an "immaculate conception", that she was conceived without sin?

So even the feminine face of the church is horrible to me! Mary was not a woman, she was a child, a virgin child, she had not yet given in to the vile lusts of her weak female body. She was that unreal construct, The Virgin Madonna, and all other women are the other thing: The Whore. And Mary is supposed to make women think they are important to the church? Certainly women are important: since it's our fault that men lust after us and our sin-filled bodies, we have to bear the consequences, forever. .

Protestants like myself don't believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary because we don't believe such a belief is substantiated in the biblical texts. Thesame would go for the 'immaculate conception' - the doctrine that Mary herself was born without sin.

I agree with Hal. God is beyond gender. Since I believe in a God of revelation(who uses the language of symbol to reveal truths about His nature to us mortals), He does seem to choose in Scripture the Father metaphor of speaking of and about Himself. I don't have a problem with that. The Bible also uses some feminine metaphors to describe God's nature and character.

IdylleSeethes, very interesting indeed what you say about the Holy Spirit being referred to as 'Sophia', the spirit of wisdom, in the feminine. My church has just bought a new hymnbook with a very rich collection of hymns and worship songs from all branches of the Church, including Celtic, charismatic, Taize, Iona, alongside traditional hymns and familiar contemporary songs. I was very chuffed to see a hymn in this collection which addresses the Holy Spirit as 'she'.

I understand that it is indeed a Jewish tradition to refer to the Spirit of God in the feminine gender: 'ruach', Hebrew for 'Spirit' being of the feminine gender. (Can any Hebrew scholar here put me straight here? )

U2 have a wonderful song about the Holy Spirit, also referred to as 'she', called Grace, on their album All That You Can't Leave Behind.

Melly: Kali (insane destructive woman/god who goes around killing people and drinking their blood) is female.

And it is also her dancing with the Lord Shiva that dances the world into existence, is it not?

The chaotic balancing of joyousness and obliteration in Hinduism is quite lovely, imo.

MariaH: If I feel the need to imagine an intelligent purpose to the universe, I tend to visualize the entity involved as being the whole universe, that we are ALL a part of the entity that directs the flow and manner of things happening, every rick, cot and tree.

This is exactly now I picture it, too.

Jn

Jny- yep. And I agree. Hinduism balances the various forces wonderfully.

Vison and Meneltarma - I too read 'A fine Balance' and loved it. It tends to be somewhat melodramatic at some points and with a lot of misfortunes (some of them very improbable) fall on the leading characters but I enjoyed it a lot. There were a lot of elements in there that reminded me of a Bollywood movie (minus the songs). A very good read.

Meneltarma - I have been studying Hindu philosophy for the past three years and I find it fascinating. There is a lot of truth and wisdom in those texts.
I find the idea of Kali a necessary one. You need to have destruction in order to start again and death in order to be reborn. Now, why this force of (necessary) destruction had to be represented by a woman god, that is what I don't get.

Vison and Primula - Regarding the Holy Virgin, I think that I read somewhere that Mary was not a virgin until the 8th or 10th century. The reason that the Councils decided that Mary should become a virgin was because of a heretic who rejected the divine nature of Christ. By depicting Mary as a Virgin no one could claim that Crist was not a god.
Or so the argument goes.
We need a historian here, pronto.

Vison - I agree with you. Women have it bad. And the organised religion supports this. But don't forget that Christianity was formed at a time and place where societies where higly patriarchical. It is only natural that this leading ideology became part of the ideology of religion.
But don't blame only religion for this.
For exampe, there is nowhere in the scriptures that says that women must be faithfull to their husbands whereas men are allowed (or condoned) to sleep around. Yet this is a strong belief of the western world.

Hal and Di - I agree with you that god has no gender. No one here really believes that he is an old man with a white beard and bushy eyebrows. This was clarified at the beginning of the thread.
We are only discussing how us, humanity and the Christian world in particular, understand god and the image that we have of the deity.

I never understood the big deal about women being included in the male pronouns...I mean, they're just words. I don't understand the anecdote about 'Mankind' and 'Womankind'...because Mankind does mean all humans and Womankind just means chicks... maybe it's just the way tradition grew it, and most of that tradition was nasty to women, but I still don't see the big deal.

I'm reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando right now, and she writes among other things about the ridiculous limitations women had in the 18th and 19th centuries. I don't feel these as an affront to women or a conspiracy against them...but more like something that was simply wrong, like many habits of the world.

I have this feeling...it's a very timid feeling but nonetheless, I feel that while women are clamouring for more power on the grounds of long and lasting discrimination, men are being crushed and a new discrimination dealt to them.
At least in this Western world where we're really treated very nicely. Sometimes I can hear it in men's voices that they're terrified to offend me 'as a woman' and I want to scream...these poor fellows don't know what they can or can't say anymore.

As for God being male...that's how he chose to appear to us, in my understanding, as a Father. And I think that he chose to have Jesus a real child of a real woman because women are important. Not 'to show that women are important', mind, but BECAUSE they are. It wasn't just a privilege he gave Mary, or a compensation for not bringing in a female messiah, nor was she just a tool whose use couldn't be avoided. I think that the way it happened was exactly perfect, it gave tasks to those best suited to fulfill them...it treated motherhood as it should be. Mary wasn't discarded after the birth of Christ, and now she's the Mother of all of us.

I guess I mean to say, call God 'she' if you like to. But don't call him a woman...have you ever heard anyone say 'God is a man who does this and that'? I haven't...God isn't a man. He's God.

(yes I know I'm not very clear but that's why I rarely venture to post in such threads.)

Quote:

I haven't...God isn't a man. He's God.

Or she is.

[quote="J.R.R. Tolkien"]Now the Valar took to themselves shape and hue; and because they were drawn into the World by love of the Children of Ilúvatar, for whom they hoped, they took shape after that manner which they had beheld in the Vision of Ilúvatar, save only in majesty and splendour. Moreover their shape comes of their knowledge of the visible World, rather than of the World itself; and they need it not, save only as we use raiment, and yet we may be naked and suffer no loss of our being. Therefore the Valar may walk, if they will, unclad, and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them, though they be present. But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby. But the shapes wherein the Great Ones array themselves are not at all times like to the shapes of the kings and queens of the Children of Ilúvatar; for at times they may clothe themselves in their own thought, made visible in forms of majesty and dread.[/quote]


I dunno. It seemed pertinent!

JRRT wrote:

But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby.

I don't think you bolded the relevant part, Maria. Though I doubt he meant any of this to be taken as any sort of philosophical or theological statement, the bolded sections seem to me to reveal a certain viewpoint regarding gender & sexuality, possibly relating to the idea of god as a "father". He says, "that difference of temper". What difference of temper?

A while back, someone on Manwe did a thread (I think it was River, actually) about what it meant to be "masculine" and what it meant to be "feminine". Ie. whether there was any real difference of character & personality between men & women beyond those created by society. It seems to me that this is the real question that this thread is asking. If such a difference exists, then it is meaningful and significant that God is conceived of as "masculine". If no such intrinsic difference exists, then the designation is meaningless and, imo, becomes gibberish. Because, if the difference of temperment between the genders is fictitious, then all that could be meant by calling God a "he" is that he has a penis that can be used as a sexual organ to empregnate females of his species. Is that concept absurd enough for ya?

yovargas wrote:

I don't think you bolded the relevant part, Maria. Though I doubt he meant any of this to be taken as any sort of philosophical or theological statement, the bolded sections seem to me to reveal a certain viewpoint regarding gender & sexuality, possibly relating to the idea of god as a "father". He says, "that difference of temper". What difference of temper?

I agree. Eru is undoubtedly seen by Tolkien as the 'father' metaphor for God.

Quote:

A while back, someone on Manwe did a thread (I think it was River, actually) about what it meant to be "masculine" and what it meant to be "feminine". Ie. whether there was any real difference of character & personality between men & women beyond those created by society. It seems to me that this is the real question that this thread is asking. If such a difference exists, then it is meaningful and significant that God is conceived of as "masculine". If no such intrinsic difference exists, then the designation is meaningless and, imo, becomes gibberish.

Absolutely, and very good point, Yov.

There are some CS Lewis quotes relevant to this discussion I will have to find from somewhere. I don't agree with Lewis on everything - he could be a sexist old coot at times - but I do agree with him that gender matters, i.e. that it's significant.

The idea that gender differences don't exist is one that completely baffles me and which I am totally unable to relate to. Certainly I can't relate to it emotionally. I think I would experience the world in a completely different way if I was a man. In fact, I just can't imagine being a man. Full stop.

Di of Long Cleeve wrote:

The idea that gender differences don't exist is one that completely baffles me .

While I would be inclined to agree, I seem to remember that in the thread I mentioned, we really couldn't come up with anything that could be legitimately called intrinsic to one gender or the other. I think that, maybe, I could believe that men have a tendency to be more aggressive/competitive. Maybe. Other then that, I have a hard time finding anything that doesn't seem to be more cultural then natural.

yovargas wrote:

While I would be inclined to agree, I seem to remember that in the thread I mentioned, we really couldn't come up with anything that could be legitimately called intrinsic to one gender or the other. I think that, maybe, I could believe that men have a tendency to be more aggressive/competitive.

Oh, definitely.

I'm not being sexist towards men. I am not of the school of thought which sees all women as victims and all men as evil oppressors. And I sometimes wonder if the world really would be better if we women were running the show. But yes, I do think men are more aggressive and competitive. Generally speaking.

Of course culture has a HUGE influence on how we experience/interpret being masculine and feminine. Absolutely huge. But I still think nature plays a part as well.

In C.S Lewis' That Hideous Strength didn't the Eldil have more than two genders? Does anyone have the quote?

There are a handful of wiring differences in the brain that can be summed up as: men are generally better at focussing intently. Women are better at multitasking. But each is a bell curve, and there's a lot of overlap.

One of the reasons I went pagan is that there's an assumption that gender does matter, and that the divine has both masculine and feminine qualities, which we personify as a goddess and god figure(s).

tolkienpurist wrote:

Andri wrote:

There is also an elevated section at the back of the church for women only. That's the best place to sit because it has the best view. And you can talk as much as you like without having the priest frown at you.

This is what drives me crazy about gender-segregated services where the men are the only ones leading prayers! I have been to such Orthodox (Jewish) services, with separate seating, and the women's section continually talks. I'd be there to pray, and they'd be sitting around and talking about Shabbat dinner and the kids. Why they couldn't be courteous and go outside, I don't know, but being able to talk is not a perk of gender-segregated seating as far as I'm concerned...it's an inconvenience to those who want to talk outside of services and pray within. /rant

- TP

There's a school of thought that the chatter in the women's section is a form of subconscious protest in response to being locked out of all the most meaningful bits of worship.

=====

The discussion about the Hindi gods and the more recent inclusion of quotes from the Silm remind me of a discussion in the VTSG way back when in which we compared the Hindi destruction/rebirth cycle with that of Melkor and the Valar - he destroyed, they created, but both were necessary and part of the plan, integral to the system ie chaos/stagnation, birth/death, destruction/renewal.

Most systems have a dichotomy - male/female - but I don't believe that things are so clear cut. I like the yin/yang which describes a less defined dichotomy, in which there is a drop of yin in the yang and vice versa.

Andri,

There seems to have always been a Marian cult within the Church. The scriptural underpinnings are very weak. Common citations are:

Quote:

Gen 3:15
I will put enmity between you (the serpent, Satan) and the woman (Mary), and between your offspring (minions of Satan) and hers (Jesus); He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.

Lk 1:28
And coming to her (Mary), he (the angel Gabriel) said, "Hail, favored one (kecharitomene)"

There was a common tendency to speak of Mary as the "new Eve" in the 2nd century. Justin, Irenaerus, and Tertullian, among others, supported this idea. The "Immaculate" notion seems to have been an outgrowth of this line of thinking. Eventually the argument became that Eve was unstained as of her creation and that a similar condition must exist for Mary, the mother of God.

For the first millenium this seems to have been celebrated as the feast of St. Anne, who was Mary's mother. Prior to 700 this was limited to Palestine. In the later years of the middle ages it became more and more Mary's feast. Aquinas, one of the last great Christian thinkers, opposed the idea. In 1568 the Holy Day was proclaimed. In 1854 it became a matter of dogma.

The cult of Mary has been problematic for the Church. Because of its weak foundation, it was an easy target for first the Eastern Orthodox, who split before the offical Holy Day was proclaimed, and later the Protestants who split immediately after the Holy Day was proclaimed. It didn't help that Mary was frequently associated with the Roman goddess Diana (Artemis in Greek mythology) and sometimes to Sophia, although Sophia is more closely linked to Mary Magdalene.

IMHO, this is an example from the wave of mysticism that overtook the Church when the preponderence of learned thinkers shifted from the Church and into Protestantism. The shift was largely for political reasons rather than theological ones. Catholicism, for example, was outlawed in England at the beginning of its period of "Enlightenment".