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Is this some kind of discrimination with ladies ?
- Thread starter chinu
- Start date
gnostic
The Lost One
It is about the history of ancient religions that got lost, when were replaced by another.
You asked chinu about Allah having a wife. He did, in the older pagan religions. He even had daughters.
But Muslims tends to ignore that part of their history.
That was my answer, and then I elaborated.
There are goods and bads in every religions and in every cultures and history.
I am just sad that so many things were lost or barely a trace of it.
Spirit of Light
Be who ever you want
Thank you for clerify your original view, it might have been I that misunderstood you.
chinu
chinu
Perhaps, same age of God.
chinu
chinu
stvdv
Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
Is this some kind of discrimination with ladies ?
Humans are all female compared to God's masculine power
Humans are all female compared to God's masculine power
PAUL MARKHAM
Well-Known Member
Men wrote all the different bibles long before this PC world. When women were regarded as lesser than Men so everything was Male in its orientation.
gnostic
The Lost One
Islam is part of Arabia’s history too, as are everything that Muhammad did and the successive empires that followed.
It is just unfortunate that some things were sacrificed in the process.
Cultural/religious views, not language genders. My particular take follows that of the Tibetans--sun is feminine, moon is masculine.
@QuestioningMind @chinu I personally feel some posters on this thread are, perhaps, being a tad overly pedantic about the use of masculine 'gender pronoun' language in reference to 'God' within a number of ancient religious scriptures (where this was, essentially, the linguistic norm in their prevailing cultural context).
Granted, this 'masculine imagery' is not an ideal way of speaking about a divine, supreme and omniscient Being, whom the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 described in the following emphatically sexless and dry-scholastic terms: "there exists a certain Supreme Reality, incomprehensible and ineffable...eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable....absolutely simple essence...one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible...This reality neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds."
There is a valid argument to be had, certainly, as to whether it is prudent or enlightened for people today (in these post-patriarchal times in the West) to continue solely using masculine gender pronouns for God. Feminine ones are equally applicable, as are pronouns and metaphors that transcend any gender-binary whatsoever. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 239) states plainly: "God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature." Some Catholics thus refer to God as "She", as an entirely personal choice in addition to the traditional "He". The Church accepts that while Father is the traditional preference used by Jesus himself, as a first century Galilean Jew, God can equally be referred to using the feminine imagery of divine motherhood. Jesus, indeed, referred to himself as a mother hen gathering her brood in the synoptic gospels!
In the Jewish Tanakh, we likewise have the feminine personification of the Divine Wisdom (as the emanation of God's presence on earth or within people) in the sapiential texts of pre-Christian Judaism, namely Chokmâh rendered into Greek as Sophia, in both cases grammatically feminine.
We can find this female personification of God's divine activity in the Book of Proverbs in the Tanakh, in the Book of Sirach (200 BCE), in the Wisdom of Solomon (first century BCE) and other ancient Jewish 'wisdom' literature within and without the Bible. In Prov. 8:1–30, for instance, we read: "Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?....I, wisdom...before the hills, I was born (holalti), when he established the heavens I was there...when [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like an amon; and I was daily his delight, playing before him always."
This can also be seen in the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish text written in the first century BCE) which refers to Wisdom as the eternal 'breath' of God:
"...She is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation (aporroia eilikrinēs) of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. (26) For she is a reflection (apaugasma) of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God (tēs tou theou energeias), and an image (eikōn) of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets..."
(7:25)
Jesus even employs such feminine language in the New Testament, for this feminine noun applied to the Divine Being:
Here, Jesus refers to God (the Divine Wisdom) as "her" because it was grammatically appropriate to do so.
For people to be enraged over ancient societies referring to God in the normative 'personalised' manner appropriate in their languages - which in most cases happened to be 'masculine', even though 'feminine' imagery was used whenever deemed appropriate, as well - seems overwrought to me.
God is genderless in essence: the divine being does not 'beget' as men do in fathering children (save by analogy, as in the Christian theological 'image' of God the Father and Jesus the Son, which is not meant to be literally understood in a biological fashion) and this truism is strictly doctrinal, not only in Catholicism but in all forms of Abrahamic theism. Thus the Qur'an informs us, most succinctly and poetically, in Surah Al-Ikhlas: "Say, He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent."
This Qur'anic declaration of divine unicity and transcendence neatly summarises what I'm intent on addressing in the rest of my post: it makes clear that God does not 'beget'; which is the fundamental character of a human biological male, referring as it does to his generative desire and capacity to reproduce by 'fathering' offspring through fertilization of a human female.
Both the Lateran Council and Qur'anic statements - binding upon Catholics and Muslims respectively - affirm as an unimpeachable truth of faith that this kind of 'male physiognomy' or sexual identity has no applicability to the Supreme Being. In essence and being, 'He' - and I use that here purely as a personal pronoun without natural gender imputation - is utterly beyond any male - female reproductive sex characteristics, as the 'Creator' who fashions the universe and conscious life ex nihilo (from nothing).
Yet in stressing this article of faith, the Qur'anic verse also - yes - refers to Allah using the masculine pronoun huwa, because the word “Allah” is grammatically masculine in Arabic, not because Allah is naturally masculine (something which is expressly denied as heretical in that very passage).
As others before me have already noted, therefore, we are faced with two basic issues here:
(a) many theistic religions emerged in patriarchal societies, which accordingy tended to use masculine gender pronouns to refer to 'persons' (as continued, actually, in Western discourse right up to the 1980s - who can forget Neil Armstrong saying that his moon walk was "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" to refer to humanity as a whole) and
(b) this is not a case of "assignment of male sexual identity" to a divine being but rather that of a patriarchal culture employing the normative personal pronoun and grammatical construction available to members of that culture, in reference to their worship of a 'personal God' whose reality in principle is utterly inexpressible beyond any affirmations the human mind or speech could rightly conceive.
That God is a personal Creator, actually in substantive relationship with creation, is foundational to all forms of theism (thus distinguishing our belief systems from 'Deism', where God is thought of as a being detached from the created universe after the act of creating it). We therefore need some kind of personable 'language' to talk about God in personal terms - and so each culture 'does' that in whatever way it can, using the imperfect categories available to it. Otherwise, we'd just have to say 'nothing' - because nothing we say or affirm can ever hope to approximate what God is.
It should be recalled, therefore, that from any strict 'traditional theistic' point-of-view - all our statements about God are necessarily imperfect affirmations: unsatisfactory and ultimately analogical in nature, because God as Is can neither be conceived nor expressed with absolute accuracy in any categories available to human thought or language construction.
If I might refer to ancient Christian patristic theologians on this, to illustrate that both the radical insufficiency and inevitability of male gender pronouns in reference to God was understood even in that ancient context, consider the following words of St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 - c. 215): "For the Divine Being cannot be declared as It exists: but as we who are fettered in the flesh were able to listen, so the prophets spake to us; the Lord savingly accommodating Himself to the weakness of men"
In the above quotation, St. Clement first refers to God as 'It'. In the Greek tongue he was writing that in, just as with our modern English pronouns, this is not a very satisfactory way of expressing the personality of God. 'It' could quite easily lend 'itself' to the logical implication that God is an impersonal reality like the Chinese philosophical concept of Tao or the 'Force' from Star Wars.
Cognizant of this, in the second half of his statement after the semi-colon, St. Clement goes on to describe the process and dogma of 'divine condescension', whereby the Divine Being accomodates the supreme mystery of 'Itself' to human understanding in a specific historical time and in a given cultural context, through the mediation of human 'prophets' tasked with expressing the inexpressible in language intelligible to humans. And here, the church father purposefully refers to God using male gendered personal language, "Himself", to stress the personal nature of the Creator God.
This same dogma was reiterated by all the ancient church fathers. Origen (c.185 - 254), for example, writes in rebuttal of the pagan critic Celsus:
Granted, this 'masculine imagery' is not an ideal way of speaking about a divine, supreme and omniscient Being, whom the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 described in the following emphatically sexless and dry-scholastic terms: "there exists a certain Supreme Reality, incomprehensible and ineffable...eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable....absolutely simple essence...one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible...This reality neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds."
There is a valid argument to be had, certainly, as to whether it is prudent or enlightened for people today (in these post-patriarchal times in the West) to continue solely using masculine gender pronouns for God. Feminine ones are equally applicable, as are pronouns and metaphors that transcend any gender-binary whatsoever. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 239) states plainly: "God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature." Some Catholics thus refer to God as "She", as an entirely personal choice in addition to the traditional "He". The Church accepts that while Father is the traditional preference used by Jesus himself, as a first century Galilean Jew, God can equally be referred to using the feminine imagery of divine motherhood. Jesus, indeed, referred to himself as a mother hen gathering her brood in the synoptic gospels!
In the Jewish Tanakh, we likewise have the feminine personification of the Divine Wisdom (as the emanation of God's presence on earth or within people) in the sapiential texts of pre-Christian Judaism, namely Chokmâh rendered into Greek as Sophia, in both cases grammatically feminine.
We can find this female personification of God's divine activity in the Book of Proverbs in the Tanakh, in the Book of Sirach (200 BCE), in the Wisdom of Solomon (first century BCE) and other ancient Jewish 'wisdom' literature within and without the Bible. In Prov. 8:1–30, for instance, we read: "Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?....I, wisdom...before the hills, I was born (holalti), when he established the heavens I was there...when [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like an amon; and I was daily his delight, playing before him always."
This can also be seen in the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish text written in the first century BCE) which refers to Wisdom as the eternal 'breath' of God:
"...She is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation (aporroia eilikrinēs) of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. (26) For she is a reflection (apaugasma) of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God (tēs tou theou energeias), and an image (eikōn) of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets..."
(7:25)
Jesus even employs such feminine language in the New Testament, for this feminine noun applied to the Divine Being:
"The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Nevertheless, Wisdom is vindicated by all her children" (Luke 7:35)
Here, Jesus refers to God (the Divine Wisdom) as "her" because it was grammatically appropriate to do so.
For people to be enraged over ancient societies referring to God in the normative 'personalised' manner appropriate in their languages - which in most cases happened to be 'masculine', even though 'feminine' imagery was used whenever deemed appropriate, as well - seems overwrought to me.
God is genderless in essence: the divine being does not 'beget' as men do in fathering children (save by analogy, as in the Christian theological 'image' of God the Father and Jesus the Son, which is not meant to be literally understood in a biological fashion) and this truism is strictly doctrinal, not only in Catholicism but in all forms of Abrahamic theism. Thus the Qur'an informs us, most succinctly and poetically, in Surah Al-Ikhlas: "Say, He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent."
This Qur'anic declaration of divine unicity and transcendence neatly summarises what I'm intent on addressing in the rest of my post: it makes clear that God does not 'beget'; which is the fundamental character of a human biological male, referring as it does to his generative desire and capacity to reproduce by 'fathering' offspring through fertilization of a human female.
Both the Lateran Council and Qur'anic statements - binding upon Catholics and Muslims respectively - affirm as an unimpeachable truth of faith that this kind of 'male physiognomy' or sexual identity has no applicability to the Supreme Being. In essence and being, 'He' - and I use that here purely as a personal pronoun without natural gender imputation - is utterly beyond any male - female reproductive sex characteristics, as the 'Creator' who fashions the universe and conscious life ex nihilo (from nothing).
Yet in stressing this article of faith, the Qur'anic verse also - yes - refers to Allah using the masculine pronoun huwa, because the word “Allah” is grammatically masculine in Arabic, not because Allah is naturally masculine (something which is expressly denied as heretical in that very passage).
As others before me have already noted, therefore, we are faced with two basic issues here:
(a) many theistic religions emerged in patriarchal societies, which accordingy tended to use masculine gender pronouns to refer to 'persons' (as continued, actually, in Western discourse right up to the 1980s - who can forget Neil Armstrong saying that his moon walk was "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" to refer to humanity as a whole) and
(b) this is not a case of "assignment of male sexual identity" to a divine being but rather that of a patriarchal culture employing the normative personal pronoun and grammatical construction available to members of that culture, in reference to their worship of a 'personal God' whose reality in principle is utterly inexpressible beyond any affirmations the human mind or speech could rightly conceive.
That God is a personal Creator, actually in substantive relationship with creation, is foundational to all forms of theism (thus distinguishing our belief systems from 'Deism', where God is thought of as a being detached from the created universe after the act of creating it). We therefore need some kind of personable 'language' to talk about God in personal terms - and so each culture 'does' that in whatever way it can, using the imperfect categories available to it. Otherwise, we'd just have to say 'nothing' - because nothing we say or affirm can ever hope to approximate what God is.
It should be recalled, therefore, that from any strict 'traditional theistic' point-of-view - all our statements about God are necessarily imperfect affirmations: unsatisfactory and ultimately analogical in nature, because God as Is can neither be conceived nor expressed with absolute accuracy in any categories available to human thought or language construction.
If I might refer to ancient Christian patristic theologians on this, to illustrate that both the radical insufficiency and inevitability of male gender pronouns in reference to God was understood even in that ancient context, consider the following words of St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 - c. 215): "For the Divine Being cannot be declared as It exists: but as we who are fettered in the flesh were able to listen, so the prophets spake to us; the Lord savingly accommodating Himself to the weakness of men"
In the above quotation, St. Clement first refers to God as 'It'. In the Greek tongue he was writing that in, just as with our modern English pronouns, this is not a very satisfactory way of expressing the personality of God. 'It' could quite easily lend 'itself' to the logical implication that God is an impersonal reality like the Chinese philosophical concept of Tao or the 'Force' from Star Wars.
Cognizant of this, in the second half of his statement after the semi-colon, St. Clement goes on to describe the process and dogma of 'divine condescension', whereby the Divine Being accomodates the supreme mystery of 'Itself' to human understanding in a specific historical time and in a given cultural context, through the mediation of human 'prophets' tasked with expressing the inexpressible in language intelligible to humans. And here, the church father purposefully refers to God using male gendered personal language, "Himself", to stress the personal nature of the Creator God.
This same dogma was reiterated by all the ancient church fathers. Origen (c.185 - 254), for example, writes in rebuttal of the pagan critic Celsus:
"But as, in what follows, Celsus, not understanding that the language of Scripture regarding God is adapted to an anthropopathic point of view, ridicules those passages...
And, generally, with regard to such a style of speaking about God, we find in the book of Deuteronomy the following: “The Lord thy God bare with your manners, as a man would bear with the manners of his son.”
It is, as it were, assuming the manners of a man in order to secure the advantage of men that the Scripture makes use of such expressions; for it would not have been suitable to the condition of the multitude, that what God had to say to them should be spoken by Him in a manner more befitting the majesty of His own person"
And, generally, with regard to such a style of speaking about God, we find in the book of Deuteronomy the following: “The Lord thy God bare with your manners, as a man would bear with the manners of his son.”
It is, as it were, assuming the manners of a man in order to secure the advantage of men that the Scripture makes use of such expressions; for it would not have been suitable to the condition of the multitude, that what God had to say to them should be spoken by Him in a manner more befitting the majesty of His own person"
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oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Oh..... drat!
I wanted to answer but I'm not a Lady.
I'm not even a gentleman............
Gargovic Malkav
Well-Known Member
Oh..... drat!
I wanted to answer but I'm not a Lady.
I'm not even a gentleman............
Lol, this does make me wonder why I answered the question... I can't remember whether I read it too fast and overlooked that it was directed at women, or that I just didn't care because the impulse to reply was too great...
I am certainly nothing like a lady!Oh..... drat!
I wanted to answer but I'm not a Lady.
I'm not even a gentleman............
Gargovic Malkav
Well-Known Member
No, you're a husky.