Why does the Abrahamic god have a gender?

[Rhea]

Or any god that is not reproducing sexually.

But for the moment, Yahweh/Allah

Why do they need a gender? How does anyone tell it’s a gender? Does it have a body with XY DNA? Does it have a penis (why?). What makes it gendered and why is that needed?

Biology would suggest that an uber-being should be female, not male.

 

[Politesse]

Because the Bible was written by misogynists.

 

[Angry Floof]

Or any god that is not reproducing sexually.

But for the moment, Yahweh/Allah

Why do they need a gender? How does anyone tell it’s a gender? Does it have a body with XY DNA? Does it have a penis (why?). What makes it gendered and why is that needed?

Biology would suggest that an uber-being should be female, not male.

The usual male animal brain urge to dominate. Same thing that gives us manspreading and other comical posturings.

 

[bigfield]

Yahweh is absurd because he developed organically from the evolution of Stone Age religion. He wasn't invented through some careful process of philosophical enquiry; he's a composite of other ideas, which themselves were improvised by people just telling stories about the world as they imagined it.

There is archaeological evidence that people used to worship fertility goddesses, but I'm not terribly surprised that some desert nomads ended up with a despotic sky lord instead of an Earth mother, or that he became popular amongst the Romans.

 

[ideologyhunter]

All of the above. It's ridiculous. It makes the believers look insipid. Your god has a gender!!! (And they don't seem to think that's weird.) I think that's one of the weirdest things about "God", and one of the most obvious signs that "He" is imaginary. The Holy Ghost is male, too, because "He" had nonconsensual sex with a teenage poetess from the hill country to create yet another male (hybrid) deity.

 

[Treedbear]

...

There is archaeological evidence that people used to worship fertility goddesses, but I'm not terribly surprised that some desert nomads ended up with a despotic sky lord instead of an Earth mother, or that he became popular amongst the Romans.

Back when I was in my 20's and transitioning away from Catholicism I'd take a detour on the way to church and sit on a rock in the woods where I'd read a partial translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls called The Essene Gospel of Peace, as translated by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely in 1937. In it Jesus is said to have taught both the Lord's Prayer (pretty much the standard version), as well as the following:

"And after this manner pray to your Earthly Mother: Our Mother which art upon earth, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, and thy will be done in us, as it is in thee. As thou sendest every day thine angels, send them to us also. Forgive us our sins, as we atone all our sins against thee. And lead us not into sickness, but deliver us from all evil, for thine is the earth, the body, and the health. Amen."

Back in the day when the environmental movement was in full swing I took this to heart and even removed myself out into the wilderness for a week of fasting as the teachings describe. To my mind there's much more value in seeking to live in harmony with a nurturing earth mother than a disciplinary heavenly father. Shintoism or Native Americanism holds some attraction. But even those have masculine representations. I guess it's just hard to conceive of one without the other.

So it seems there were possibly peripheral groups around the major establishment religions that still allowed for the need to worship a feminine godhead, rather than rape her. But that idea was largely abandoned. The best they could come up with was a virginal idealization.

 

[Bomb#20]

What makes it gendered and why is that needed?

Biology would suggest that an uber-being should be female, not male.

The prima facie explanation is that prescientific people look for explanations in metaphors and analogies. When hunter gatherers settled and adopted farming, the cycle of rain and crop growth became the central determinant of their survival; and the analogy between weather and sex must have been staring them in the face. A man puts fluid in a woman and new life comes out of the woman; the sky puts fluid in the earth and new life comes out of the earth. So they personified the sky as "Ju-piter": literally Sky-Father; and they personified the earth as "De-meter", which meant something like Earth-Mother or Grain-Mother.

As for why early monotheistic cultures dropped Demeter instead of Jupiter, the simplest explanation would be that some cultures dropped one and other cultures dropped the other. Which culture ended up dominating the world and which ones died out could be pure chance.

 

[abaddon]

But if you follow the metaphor through, it's not pure chance that it's the cultures who emphasized male-ness as the stronger half of the dualism and marginalized the female are the ones that were more violently expansive and "ended up dominating the world".

It's there in the 18th century enlightenment thinkers, where they talk about nature as a woman and discuss raping her of her secrets. This is the culture that was more enthusiastic than any before about science and technology and the conquest of all earth.

This is why myth matters - it's not a thing ignorant people did in the past. Rationalism doesn't obviate it, it just enacts our stories more efficiently. We need to recognize the stories that our culture inherited and stop pretending it's only the less scientific cultures that has stories that tell them what the world's like and how to relate (or fail to relate) with "it". It's not possible to be story-less; even if we declare the world's a genderless "it" counts as a story.

 

[rousseau]

But if you follow the metaphor through, it's not pure chance that it's the cultures who emphasized males as the stronger half of the dualism and marginalized the female are the ones that were more violently expansive and "ended up dominating the world".

It's there in the 18th century enlightenment thinkers, where they talk about nature as a woman and discuss raping her of her secrets. This is the culture that was more enthusiastic than any before about science and technology and the conquest of all earth.

This is why myth matters - it's not a thing ignorant people did in the past. Rationalism doesn't obviate it, it just enacts our stories more efficiently. We need to recognize the stories that our culture inherited from old myths and stop pretending it's only the less scientific cultures that has stories that tell them what to do. It's not possible to be story-less.

Well, in a way it is chance. Monotheism is a more complex form of theology - in it's time really philosophy - that would tend to arise in prosperous societies - like Rome. Rome would also be an advanced agrarian society with clearly demarcated gender roles - men outside home, women inside home. So it's not a surprise that men took a prominent position in it's theology.

And then Europe took off economically and technically, mainly because of a unique combination of geography and climate, which allowed for the propagation of Christianity. I'm not seeing religion as cause, just an artefact of a particular region.

If I understand Asian history correctly, that region was just as interested in conquest.

 

[southernhybrid]

Why wouldn't the god of a patriarchal religion be a male? Just look at his behavior.

 

[Rhea]

Why wouldn't the god of a patriarchal religion be a male? Just look at his behavior.

But is “maleness” behavior? Especially for those people? They keep telling us that “maleness” is just about penises.


Corollary questions then arise (pun intended)
1. Does Yahweh have a penis?
2. Why? What does “he” do with it?

 

[skepticalbip]

Corollary questions then arise (pun intended)
1. Does Yahweh have a penis?

Certainly.

2. Why?

So he can write his name in the snow.

What does “he” do with it?

Obviously, he uses it to write his name in the snow.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yahweh is absurd because he developed organically from the evolution of Stone Age religion. He wasn't invented through some careful process of philosophical enquiry; he's a composite of other ideas, which themselves were improvised by people just telling stories about the world as they imagined it.

There is archaeological evidence that people used to worship fertility goddesses, but I'm not terribly surprised that some desert nomads ended up with a despotic sky lord instead of an Earth mother, or that he became popular amongst the Romans.

So, one thing about it that I will hold up as useful is as a stepping stone to the wide acceptance that there may be objective truths of ethics and objectively good applications of law.

Now, it was gotten to by fallacy and mythology, and no work was shown. It doesn't mean that several large aspects of the religion are wrong - think Incel cult, where there is a grain of truth at the front of a deep well of crazy.

But the fact is, I think just like there were truths to see about the implications of evolution by means of natural selection, there are some truths to see about evolution and survival by informational transfer, test, and selective duplication, and I suspect these boil down much the same to ethics, with strong hints from morality.

So there's that provenance.

But that's more religious history and pre-philosophy.

Then, other philosophers were prior to many biblical texts and said much the same things about the idea that all the world operates by singular principles including the rightness of the law, such as Plato.

A despotic sky lord he was. If he wasn't such a murderous bastard, I may never have see the lie of the book. That too has some value. And so too in filtering and identifying those who support a murderous bastard such as skydaddy.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Besides patriarchy, the other common explanation for male deities (and especially the top deities in pantheons) is that ancient cultures imagined gods in the pattern of the earthly rulers they could actually see (or at least hear about.) If your emperor or warlord was capricious, arrogant, violent, and demanding, and your life was in his hands, then your god would be all that, on steroids. This would also explain how parochial a god was -- propping up one tribe and giving extermination orders for 'others'.