Subject: God and Gender A subject that I find intriguing is the whole question of a gender

From:    Jim Mork
Subject: God and Gender

A subject that I find intriguing is the whole question of a
gender for God. Science, as we have known it since the
Renaissance, has discovered that gender is a particular
strategy for reproducing life that is not even employed at all
levels of biological complexity.  Very simple life forms use
fission or conjugation instead.  Some plants do it for
themselves, being "both sexes".  Or rather, if they *are* both
sexes, then aren't they really neither.  If you are a plant
that join some of your cells with others to reproduce, do you
really *have* a gender?

Yet, in spite of all this, Christians, Jews, Moslems, and
perhaps some other religions want to believe in God the
Father. And some misguided feminist rebels want to believe in
God the Mother (two lies make a truth, right?)

Some of the great contributions of the last 20 years when the
feminist movement has impacted our society has been the
growing realization that even our own gender is mostly a
cultural artifact.  Consider the discovery that all humans
begin as "females" and only become "males" when the DNA issues
an instruction in early fetal development. Or the fact that we
all have both estrogen and testosterone. And that it isnt just
a curious residue of the fetal stage but vital to our sex
drives. And some have extrapolated from that to believe that
if our male gender model permitted it, we would all have a
"maternal instinct".  The language limits us and without those
limiations, wouldnt it make sense, in the end, to stop talking
"male and female" for most functions other than intercourse?

If a tree can live without gender...and if there IS a God, why
cannot this God, whom we assume created the tree, live without
gender.  Is this some sort of human arrogance to inject our
problems into the divine realm?  Is it more evidence that God
is a figment of our imagination?  That whatever God exists is
not at all like what we imagine?

Why does this image hold onto us so powerfully in an age when
we so clearly know it makes no sense? Not that there aren't
dissenting voices.  I think most modern theology has tended to
drag us away from such regressive thinking.  But thinkers like
Schaef have said our kind of society survives on illusions and
denials, absorbing even foreign matter as food from movements
that are born to overthrow it.  Is there some point where
neurosis is simply stronger than knowledge?