God Is Not 3 Guys

( continuing “Goddess Mary” series ) Jesuit sociologist Walter Ong argues in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness that God is male. As can be expected, he conflates his God-image—the male “Father”—with Transcendent Reality and unwittingly argues against himself. We are distanced from God as from a father. We have never been physically and physiologically attached to God. . . . In this sense, God is male. He is not nature. Nature is feminine, Mother Nature. Out of her we grow. We do not grow out of God. . . . [God is always] other, different, separated as a father physically is . . . Without intending to, Ong shows plainly that the deformed relationship of Christians with Transcendence stems from their male god—the sole image of divinity permitted to them—out there, over us, detached from us. From this grew the image of a stern and relentless judge-god and sin-centered theology. The demands of the exacting god prompted Teresa of Avila to, thinking of how I ha...

When Goddess reigned, August 11 ( continuing “Goddess Mary” series ) As there are various names for God, there were, in times when Goddess reigned, many names for Her. I repeat: God and Goddess are simply two different ways to imagine and personify the mysterious Power within all experienced by all in human history. In remote antiquity the Great Goddess was supreme, with many names and various titles given Her in diverse places. In Babylon She was known as Ishtar. Among the Hebrews, ancestors of the Jews, She was Asherah (see my Goddess in the Bible ). In Egypt the Goddess Isis reigned supreme, more important than her brother/husband God Osiris. In Sumer, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, She was Inanna, and Her women priests determined who would be kings. An eminent Sumeriologist quoted by Merlin Stone tells us, The kings of Sumer are known as the “beloved husbands” of Inanna throughout the Sumerian documents. In a comparable practice but with a twist, Catholic religi...