avevale_intelligencer (
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2016-05-24 08:01 am
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Never philosophise while knackered
So the other night, quite late, I was in a discussion on FB with
pbristow on the possible genders of the various aspects of God. All right, he was under the affluence of incohol whereas my consciousness has been unaltered by anything save exhaustion for what feels like bloody centuries, so it was that kind of discussion, and the conclusion to which we both stumbled was this: that the hypothetical truth about whether that which we call God has gender or not and if so which, how many and what do they do on Sundays, being unknown, is less important than the fact that our ideas and beliefs about the gender of deity condition the way we treat our own differently gendered fellow human beings on this planet, so we should start believing something different in order to change our own behaviour.
Yes, I know. Walked straight into it. What can I say? I was tired.
This is completely bitupon-sackwards, of course. Our beliefs about the gender of god (for those of us who have them) derive from our feelings about the genders of humanity, not the other way around. Those who believe that maleness is both the original blueprint and the perfected form of humankind see god as male. Those who have thought about it a little more decide that god is probably gender-neutral, while those who are consciously trying to redress the imbalance that patriarchal religions have reinforced over the centuries construct images of deity that are female. As of course do those who don't believe in any deity but simply want to shock those who do.
As for the writers of scripture, we can only speculate. Perhaps they were trying to establish, or shore up, a politico-economic system in which women, and their scary and incomprehensible reproductive capabilities, could be owned and controlled by men, in order to keep the records of property ownership neat and tidy. I like to think that those who originated the stories of polytheistic deities and their antics knew the truth that we have lost, that in practice (and leaving politico-economics out of it) neither gender can or should own or control the other gender, because "men" and "women" are illusory concepts. In real life, individuals can and should be free to work out their own relationships for better or worse. Of course, it's also possible that they viewed female deities the same way they viewed female characters in the theatre, as gods in drag. We don't know.
The point is, though, that making what, in any established religion, can only be cosmetic changes to the perceived image of deity won't, for the majority of religious, make any difference. There will be those few who will uncritically accept whatever their church tells them (I've never denied that such people exist, merely that they form any kind of majority), who will presumably change their ideas about gender, and there will be those, rather more, whose ideas about gender are already nicely independent of their religious beliefs, who will carry on as before. Those, however, who use their religious beliefs to justify their ideas about gender, will simply decide, as some IRA groups did when the main body began participating in the peace process, that they have been betrayed, their leaders have been turned by the enemy, and it's up to them to carry on the struggle. Not, you understand, to defend any ideas they may have about the nature of god, but simply to defend their perceived right to hold on to their property and status, which they see as threatened.
And meanwhile, the actual truth about the gender of any actual deity will remain, not "unimportant" as I said to Paul (the truth is never unimportant), but irrelevant in this context. Gender has nothing to do with most of what I do, yet I still have one; not the one I'd prefer, but it's mine and I'm stuck with it. God may be male, female, neuter, futanari, fleep, snurgle, binnaum or none of the above, or perm any x of y. We won't know till we find them.
Coming up next, why I believe the Iliad and the Odyssey were satires on male behaviour composed by a group of women while doing the laundry. Or maybe something completely different. But now it's breakfast time, and I must go cook.
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Yes, I know. Walked straight into it. What can I say? I was tired.
This is completely bitupon-sackwards, of course. Our beliefs about the gender of god (for those of us who have them) derive from our feelings about the genders of humanity, not the other way around. Those who believe that maleness is both the original blueprint and the perfected form of humankind see god as male. Those who have thought about it a little more decide that god is probably gender-neutral, while those who are consciously trying to redress the imbalance that patriarchal religions have reinforced over the centuries construct images of deity that are female. As of course do those who don't believe in any deity but simply want to shock those who do.
As for the writers of scripture, we can only speculate. Perhaps they were trying to establish, or shore up, a politico-economic system in which women, and their scary and incomprehensible reproductive capabilities, could be owned and controlled by men, in order to keep the records of property ownership neat and tidy. I like to think that those who originated the stories of polytheistic deities and their antics knew the truth that we have lost, that in practice (and leaving politico-economics out of it) neither gender can or should own or control the other gender, because "men" and "women" are illusory concepts. In real life, individuals can and should be free to work out their own relationships for better or worse. Of course, it's also possible that they viewed female deities the same way they viewed female characters in the theatre, as gods in drag. We don't know.
The point is, though, that making what, in any established religion, can only be cosmetic changes to the perceived image of deity won't, for the majority of religious, make any difference. There will be those few who will uncritically accept whatever their church tells them (I've never denied that such people exist, merely that they form any kind of majority), who will presumably change their ideas about gender, and there will be those, rather more, whose ideas about gender are already nicely independent of their religious beliefs, who will carry on as before. Those, however, who use their religious beliefs to justify their ideas about gender, will simply decide, as some IRA groups did when the main body began participating in the peace process, that they have been betrayed, their leaders have been turned by the enemy, and it's up to them to carry on the struggle. Not, you understand, to defend any ideas they may have about the nature of god, but simply to defend their perceived right to hold on to their property and status, which they see as threatened.
And meanwhile, the actual truth about the gender of any actual deity will remain, not "unimportant" as I said to Paul (the truth is never unimportant), but irrelevant in this context. Gender has nothing to do with most of what I do, yet I still have one; not the one I'd prefer, but it's mine and I'm stuck with it. God may be male, female, neuter, futanari, fleep, snurgle, binnaum or none of the above, or perm any x of y. We won't know till we find them.
Coming up next, why I believe the Iliad and the Odyssey were satires on male behaviour composed by a group of women while doing the laundry. Or maybe something completely different. But now it's breakfast time, and I must go cook.
no subject
In Hebrew, the language the deity was originally described in, nouns fall into two classes, lets call them class A and class B. Which class a noun falls into is a function of what the word looked like thousands of years ago, and may, or may not (I know no Hebrew) be reflected in some way in the form of the words now. The class affects (to some degree) how the noun changes to reflect things like case and number, how other words (typically adjectives) behave with it, and the choice of pronouns in some cases.
The word for deity happens to be class A.
Class A nouns include the vast majority of words like Father, Warrior, Sailor - words that in ancient Hebrew speaking society were thought to refer to male roles. Similarly, Class B words include the vast majority of words like Mother, Seamstress, Comforter - which that society thought as female roles.
So someone decided to call the class A nouns masculine, the class B nouns feminine, and the who thing gender. Not sure when this happened but it happened a long time ago. And so the deity, being class A, is masculine.
The same thing happened in Latin, with a third class being defined as neuter, and survives in languages like French, Spanish and Romanian. It also explains certain oddities one occasionally finds like the Latin word "nauta".
In Latin the vast majority of nouns referencing female humans end in -a in the basic form. So nouns ending in -a got defined as feminine. But, nauta, though ending in -a, means sailor, a job seen as specifically masculine. So Latin speakers changed the gender of the word nauta to masculine, with all the implications for the adjectives and whatnot. But words don't have a sex, only the things they represent do so. And not always then (see slug, rock and running). But we are stuck with the term gender, and all the paraphernalia in our thoughts it involves, for the time being, and probably for a long time to come.
Aren't you glad you speak (almost) gender-free English. :-)
no subject
Not to mention the fact that there are masculine and feminine words for deity, in Latin at least, and as far as I know we have no clue other than supposition as to which came first, or which was derived from the other. My own gut feeling is that the -a ending is slightly simpler and easier to articulate than -us or -um, so was probably the Ur-form, which means everything started out feminine and the masculine andd neuter endings were elaborated later. But I couldn't defend that in a plausibly academic manner, and in any case we'd have to go back probably to Indo-European to find the actual words from which all others are derived.
Also, if memory serves, the form of the word for deity used first in the Old Testament is plural, which in a monotheistic religion opens up a whole other can of whatnots. (Again, I have my own gut-based ideas on this, but this is perhaps not the time or place.)
no subject
Yes, Latin has masculine and feminine words for deity. The Romans also has masculine and feminine deities (Iuppiter and Martis as opposed to Minerva and Venus - this last a masculine form word) and , so there is no surprise there. But Latin is Indo-European, whilst Hebrew is most definitely not. So this peculiarity of Latin is not relevant to my point.
As far as I can make out, the current theory is that Primitive I-E had two genders (and three numbers and nine cases), Animate and Neuter, with the former later splitting into Masculine and Feminine. Later still, some languages merged Masculine and Feminine into a gender usually called Common (Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, maybe others too). "there is nothing new under the sun."
On your point at the end, the truth is that the early Hebrews were monolatrists, not monotheists - and my apologies to any of your readers that may find that point offensive. The early Hebrews worshiped the God of Abraham not because they were the only deity the Hebrews believed in, but because they were the only deity the Hebrews considered worthy of worship. The uniqueness of the deity they worshipped came later - which, I would argue, is the point when we can correctly speak of them as Jews, as opposed to Hebrews. (And yes, I know the word Jew comes from Judea, one of the successor states after the break-up of the Saul-David-Solomon kingdom, which probably is not when the transition to monotheism happened. And yes, I am sorry for the infelicitous phrasing in the second sentence of this paragraph.)
On a different note, I am very glad to see that you are living your life normally again, and hope this means that you have put your earlier difficulties beg=hind you for good.
Editted to correct a gross their/there misspelling. :-(
no subject
Having said that and carrying on regardless, you've said that you know no Hebrew, yet you seem very certain that it has not nor ever has had any feminine word for deity. (I remember something about someone in Hebraic theology whom the Greeks called Sophia, but it's very vague.) And if we have to go back past Indo-European to the unfathomable series of primal grunts which predated both Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic to find a point at which there might have been an Urwort for deity of either, both, or no gender, then I'm willing to speculate that far back or further. (Studying classics with Jan has revealed to me the ancient truth: "Go not to the ancient historians for counsel, for they will say both Presumably and We Don't Know.")
Oh, and Venus isn't a masculine form. It's an irregular third-declension feminine noun and declines Venus, Venerem, Veneris. As in venereal. http://latindictionary.wikidot.com/noun:venus