The Lord vs the Goddess

Re-Imagining           March 8, 2017
First, I invite readers to learn about the Re-Imagining movement. 

On February 26, I was re-imagining at Mass while listening to the first reading—Isaiah 49: 15:
Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!
In the past, when I heard passages like this I thought,
Lovely, God described in feminine terms!
As I listened this time, I thought about the Greek myth I wrote about in the previous post. The myth has the Goddess Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, so that a male god usurps an exclusively feminine faculty. On the basis of this myth, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus justifies matricide (Scroll down to previous post for the story).

With this in mind, I thought to myself about the Isaiah passage: 
It’s lovely, except that the Lord is speaking. No one imagines a female lord.
The Judaeo/Christian Lord robs females of their power as Zeus does by his faux birthing of Athena because the Lord never is referred to as “She.” Pronouns tell us what’s wrong with this and many such scriptural passages. When He claims feminine powers, He utterly negates female worth. 

As the Mass progressed, I also thought of a recent interview by Krista Tippett, host of “On Being.” She was speaking to a mathematician and science writer.
Margaret Wertheim: My mother’s Catholicism has been one of the greatest and deepest influences on everything I do.
Tippett: But you also are atheist, is that correct?
Wertheim: [I do not] believe in the existence of God in the Catholic sense. [But] I want to say very publicly I’m not an atheist. . . .
I’m very, very saddened by the fact that militant atheism has become [sic] so to the fore of our society. I think it’s destructive and unhelpful. And I don’t think it does science any service. 
I agree and know atheists who agree. 
The word “militant” stood out during the interview and came to me in church. I thought,
The Bible contains militant patriarchy.
Wertheim used “militant” to describe atheists belligerently attacking a belief system—quite different from the Isaiah reading about a mother’s love. But the Zeus-birthed-Athena myth and the-Lord-mothers-better-than-a-mother myth both insidiously undermined the belief system in pre-historic times when God was imagined to be female.

Knowing history enlightens the present. Mater Magna, the Great Mother in pre-history embodied feminine powers. If Christianity is to stop being a patriarchal oppressor, we need to pray to Her as well as to Him.


The Lord v. the Goddess           October 31, 2014

Whenever I hear of people reading the Bible, I wonder if they read Old Testament texts portraying the Lord in competition with the Goddess and punishing those who worship Her. It’s hard not to despise  this Lord as a petty, vindictive, unlikeable guy.

Much is made of monotheism in our religious tradition. It is said to show the superiority of our religion over the polytheism of others, but it is based on a misunderstanding. Just as the male image of the Holy One possesses many names, the female one has a variety of names. 

In the Bible She is named El Shaddai, Asherah, Ashtoreth, Astarte, and Anath. Various names for what we call “God” can lead to greater understanding that images of “God” are merely images and not the reality itself.  

In the following passages, the Lord looks more like a tribal god or mascot than “God” (quotations from the NAB):
Judges 2: 13. The Israelites abandoned worship of the Lord and served Ashtoreth and Baal. Then “the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel, and he delivered them over to plunderers who despoiled them.”

Judges 3: 7. Because the Israelites offended the Lord by serving Baal and Asherah, “the anger of the Lord flared up against them and he allowed them to fall into the power of [their enemies].
In First Samuel 7: 4, a similar tale is told, and the pattern appears in numerous other books.

In First Kings 15: 11-14, we read that a king of Judah “pleased the Lord” by destroying sacred objects devoted to Asherah. This also is a common refrain in the historical books of the Bible. Fortunately, our morality has evolved beyond the Lord’s jealous code. No matter how foolish the religious objects of others seem to us, we respect them.

Second Kings 23 details the destruction of all traces of Goddess-worship in the temple and the countryside by a king in favor with the Lord. Yet, “the Lord did not desist from his fiercely burning anger against Judah” (2 Kgs 23: 26). What follows is the fall of Jerusalem to the king of Babylon and deportations of Judeans to Babylon—the Babylonean Exile.

Raphael Patai found 40 references to Asherah in the historical books of the Bible, most of them referring to Asherim, which scholars think were carved wooden poles in shrines to the Goddess. They were everywhere, on every hill, inciting the vengeance of the Lord. In these stories “Evil in the sight of the Lord” really means competition for Him.

Of course, the texts do not represent “God”; they were written by Israelite priests intent on suppressing worship different from their own prescriptions. Their image of a jealous lord violates our image of what we call “God” today—a loving, non-judgmental force guiding all peoples toward goodness.

The Israelite priests largely failed in their campaign. Raphael Patai concludes that, for almost two-thirds of the 370 years during which Solomon's Temple stood in Jerusalem, the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple and she was worshiped by the king, the court and the priesthood.

In Jeremiah 44:16-19, women tell us why She gave good competition to Him:
We will not listen to what you say in the name of the Lord. Rather will we continue doing what we had proposed; we will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and pour out libations to Her, as we and our fathers, our kings and princes have done in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem.

Then we had enough food to eat and we were well off; we suffered no misfortune. But since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out libations to Her, we are in need of everything and are being destroyed by the sword and by hunger.
First Kings 11 tells what happened because King Solomon had 700 wives of royal rank and 300 concubines. These foreign women turned Solomon’s heart away from the Lord and toward Astarte, and Solomon built sacred shrines honoring the Goddess. The Lord punished him—for serving Astarte, not for polygamy—by taking away most of Solomon’s kingdom and raising up an adversary to him.
Earlier Solomon’s father, David, had massacred all the men of this adversary. 

Genocide stalks the Bible—my subject next time. 



November 21, 2014             Genocide in the Bible

Jews, Christians, and Muslims do not talk about genocide in the Bible, although educated religious are well aware of it. I think we should stop keeping it a secret known only to a few. My religious friends who already know this don’t like to be reminded, but I think it’s important to put the issue forward to check Christian arrogance and apathy.

The biggest scandal in biblical genocide is that “the Lord” commands the genocide. He does not fit our idea of God, but he still inhabits scripture readings in our churches.
The Lord said to Moses: “. . . I have given him into your hand, with all his people and his land. So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of his land.
Numbers 21: 34-35 (RSV translation)
This kind of slaughter becomes a habit. In another passage, the Israelites report that they followed instructions given to Moses by the god called “the Lord”:
. . . we utterly destroyed [the kingdom of Og], as we had done to King Sihon of Heshbon, in each city utterly destroying men, women, and children.
Deuteronomy 3:6
Biblical atrocities do not stop with killing people, as this next passage shows. “The Lord” spoke to Moses:
When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you; destroy all their figured stones, destroy all their cast images, and demolish all their high places.
Numbers 33: 50-52
To appreciate this we have to imagine an enemy destroying all our churches, all our statues and other holy objects. The god called “The Lord” makes sure they carry out his orders:
. . . if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling.
And I will do to you as I thought to do to them. (Numbers 33: 55)
Joshua, who succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites, presided over more butchering.
The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all the people of Ai.
Joshua 8:24

More genocide commanded by the lord occurs in Deuteronomy chapters 7, 12, 20 (“you must not let anything that breathes remain alive”), Joshua 6, 10 (“. . . utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded”), and 11. 
I quit searching for passages showing the god commanding genocide but ran into many exposing his perverted sexual morality. See especially Numbers 31. 
Check out these verses, which introduce a sexist horror commanded by “the Lord”:
Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Numbers 31: 7-8,17-18
The terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria could take lessons from this lord. Another outrageous passage occurs in Dt 22:
If . . . evidence of the young woman’s virginity was not found, . . . the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act . . .
We know the likely story. The young woman who lost her virginity likely was raped. From news of tribal practices in the Middle East today, we know many women are victims punished for the acts of their assailants. 

Come to think of it, to a lesser extent, this happens to college students today. They are sexually molested, but their assailants go free and the legal system blames and shames the victims. 
Come to think further, Catholic bishops did the same thing.  This occurred to me after I had finished posting. I write this now in an edit.

We are told that certain people in history read and studied the Bible, even memorized large swaths of it. That statement is not followed by dismay over some of its contents. I don’t understand it.

Here I have pointed to only a tiny portion of the loathsome passages. I present them to challenge my fellow Christians who think our religion is superior to other religions, as our childhood faith trained us to think. It is not. Jesus of Nazareth left us a treasure of spiritual counsel. It does not insult him to tell the truth about our religion.

At its beginning, our tradition beat its rivals, the religions around it. It won the power to tell its side of the story as the normative one. Because its symbols saturated the Western world, they provided primary access to the Inner Realm. Ours is a fine religion. It does what all religions are good at—providing images for humans to think about inner truths. When it and any religion insists that its way is the only good way, that’s when it’s dangerous.  We see how dangerous in these stories about genocide in the Bible.
************************
Two comments propel me to add this note:

Both noted that all genocide examples are from the Old Testament, and isn’t the New Testament more gentle and civil?   

Correct. The New Testament IS gentler, more humanist. Most humanist and loving of all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the Divine Reign within each human person. One of the responses, however, also mentioned the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of witches and heretics. 

As expressed above, institutional religion’s ideas cannot be trusted as coming from what we call God.

COMMENT.
Anonymous said...
Ms. Clancy, I think you would agree that your statement "Most humanist and loving of all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the Divine Reign within each human person" might more accurately be worded as "Most humanist and loving of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are those that focus on the Divine Reign within each person." Those, of course, are only part of the teachings attributed to Jesus of the New Testament. He is also presented as believing that the way to heaven is narrow, that few will make it, and that the majority of humans will suffer eternally in Hell.
An Old Testament god who orders the death or enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people is an awful character, but doesn't threaten hell; far worse is a god (or god/man) presented as approving--even arranging--the eternal torture of most of humanity. That's the N.T.'s Jesus, unless you have a convincing argument that such beliefs were falsely attributed to him in Gospel writings (which I would read with interest).

 November 15, 2014  Tony Flannery

Thank you to Larry Schug for sending this poem written in New Mexico, thinking it could go with my post, “The Lord vs the Goddess.”  I agree.
            Encounter with a Collared Lizard
             
A collared lizard,
hardly larger than a dragonfly,
crosses our path, stops to sun itself
on a limestone rock in a dry stream bed,
a meeting of species
that seems serendipitous, if not predestined,
even in the vast desert of space and time,
as if my human life is no accident,
but some sort of blessing,
not from the God who lives in churches,
demanding worship and sacrifice,
but from the goddess of small places and little lives,
the goddess who can’t wipe the smile from her face.
Redemptorist Fr. Tony Flannery, founder of the Association of Catholic Priests has been a popular writer and speaker in Ireland and has publicly questioned official church teaching on celibacy for priests, contraception, homosexuality and women's ordination.

He is touring our country and met with 30 fellow dissidents in St. Cloud two weeks ago. The discussion was exhilarating, as indignant views were aired. Few persons there remained silent the whole while.  Malcolm Nazareth nailed the whole set of problems in Catholicism under patriarchy—assigning all power to an exclusive group of white males. 
Referring to texts edited by Paula S. Rothenberg, Malcolm writes,
US culture and civilization is summed up in the term "Whiteness" or ‘historical, systematic, structural race-based superiority.’ The roots of racism, sexism, as well as homophobia are in the cult of masculinity.

By praying exclusively to male lords, Christianity and Islam have damaged the spiritual imagination of most people on the planet. If we would pray to God our Mother as well as Father, we would break this pattern in our consciousness that encourages people to demean women. It leads to sexism, racism, clericalism, colonialism, and homophobia—all oppressive systems.

There is a clear line from worship of male gods to all forms of gender violence. The simple elimination of the word “Lord” in our prayers would break this training and transform the dominant, perverted image of God in our Western religions. I beg priests to lead with courage.

As Tony Flannery was about to leave he said we were even more radical than he. I hope we radicalized him beyond talking about Catholic sexual teachings, the future of ministry, and the problem with infallibility. I gave him a copy of my God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky.

Change of topic:
I had never seen the movie or read The lost Child of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who spent 50 years searching for long-lost son. Her journey ends in the exposure of cruelty in a monastery trained in perverted Catholic sexual doctrine. Having now seen the superb movie, I speculate that it’s one of those rare movies that measure up to the book.
It happens that an article in the latest NCR echoes the theme in Philomena: babies inChile were stolen and sold to well-off families.

I asked Malcolm to write a post for this blog, and I haven’t forgotten my promise to write about genocide in the Bible. 

COMMENT:

Chris said...
Hi Jeanette,

Let me first say with absolute sincerity that I am not posting here for the purpose of trolling. Whenever I visit your blog, I find myself totally perplexed. It seems to me that your engaging in a kind of idolatry- an idolatry of, well, unconsciousness. What your unconscious of is that your subjectivist/relativist ideology precedes your faith and apparently everything else .

Moreover, most of the causes that you so fervently pursue are, themselves, ideals that have their source in that very religion/civilization that you so strenuously object to. What spiritual universe, other than the West, do we even find the recognition of things like racism and sexism in the first place?

To my knowledge, none. Why is that?

Comments

Malcolm N said…
Absolutely. These actions of the god of the Hebrew Bible make it clear that this mascot god (your appropriate image of him) and his shenanigans are utterly risible. The mascot is not even an adult male. It's an immature and spoiled teenaged male. It's a masculine figure that finds its true identity in repudiating anything and everything that bears resemblance to woman. The mascot-god embodies many of the forms of masculinity that have become part and parcel of the Christian beliefs and practices of the first two millennia. Not surprisingly, respect for the Goddess was all but destroyed. (In some cases, Marian devotion came in by the back door to compensate for the missing Goddess.) Those who finalized the NT canon early in the 5th century CE also accepted the Hebrew Bible and its problematic legacy of the cult of masculinity as a prime source of the legitimate antecedents of their faith. Hence this intolerant, cruel, petty, narcissistic mascot-god is what the "churchianity" of the first millenium also ingested as part of its belief system. In the process, the female principle of divinity was crushed, demolished, repudiated, and done away with in the thinking and practices of churches most everywhere. In our day, feminist theology, womanist theology, the mujieristas and similar theological movements from other regions of the world have been laboring hard to revive our long lost historical memory of what the Jesus movement and the followers of the historical Jesus would have been and could have become had they kept the Goddess firmly in place. Thank you for challenging us to rethink the "Lording" of Christian theology and some of its distorted, abominable forms which have led us via this cult of masculinity to so much violence, war, rapaciousness, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the rest of the isms that plague the western world. These abominations and distortions make explicit what is rotten in the heart and mind of Christian churches and also in those western cultures and civilizations which came under the influence of Jewish and Christian patriarchy. Through globalization processes, what hit the fan centuries and millennia ago in the west has been spread to the farthest corners of the earth.
Malcolm N said…
Absolutely. These actions of the god of the Hebrew Bible make it clear that this "mascot god" (your appropriate image of him) and his shenanigans are utterly risible. The mascot is not even an adult male. It's an immature and spoiled teenaged male. It's a masculine figure that finds its true(!) identity in repudiating anything and everything that bears resemblance to woman. The mascot-god embodies many of the forms of masculinity that have become part and parcel of the Christian beliefs and practices of the first two millennia. Not surprisingly, in the process, respect for the Goddess was all but destroyed. (In some cases, Marian devotion came in by the back door to compensate for the missing Goddess.) Those who finalized the NT canon early in the 5th century CE also accepted the Hebrew Bible and its problematic legacy of the cult of masculinity as a prime source of the legitimate antecedents of their faith. Hence this intolerant, cruel, petty, narcissistic mascot-god is what the "churchianity" of the first millenium also ingested as part of its belief system. In the process, the female principle of divinity was crushed, demolished, repudiated, and done away with in the thinking and practices of churches most everywhere. In our day, feminist theology, womanist theology, the mujieristas and similar theological movements from other regions of the world have been laboring hard to revive our long lost historical memory of what the Jesus movement and the followers of the historical Jesus would have been and could have become had they kept the Goddess firmly in place. Thank you for challenging us to rethink the "Lording" of Christian theology and some of its distorted, abominable forms which have led us via this cult of masculinity to so much violence, war, rapaciousness, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the rest of the isms that plague the western world. These abominations and distortions make explicit what is rotten in the heart and mind of Christian churches and also in those western cultures and civilizations which came under the influence of Jewish and Christian patriarchy. Through globalization processes, what hit the fan centuries and millennia ago in the west has been spread to the farthest corners of the earth in the name of Jesus Christ. Not surprising at all today that many thinking people today worldwide have rejecting Jesus Christ and his churches and finding the divine in spiritualities that are closer to nature and to the inclusive feminine principle.

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