a bonobo humanity?

Can’t kill me, nya nya

A few years back I was trying to be more sociable by attending meet-ups, using the meet-up app, but it didn’t seem to work for me, given me. One perhaps promising meet-up was organised by an elderly intellectual, on philosophical topics. He would choose the topic, then send us a screed of viewpoints and questions related to it, which I found more or less apropos. So I went to a couple of these meet-ups, which were interesting enough, except that, as often in these situations, a minority hogged the limelight, and I’ve never been much of a limelight-hogger – though actually I found that one of my great pleasures of becoming a teacher, somewhat late in my working life, was that it was more or less set up for the teacher as limelight-hogger, which I have to say I found most satisfying. I’d had very little experience before then of actually being listened to, and I found it quite a treat.

Anyway, getting back to the elderly intellectual, he was generally good at sharing that wonderful limelight thing, and encouraging diversity of opinion, so it struck me as interesting that at one point he became firm, and, apropos of nothing, said that he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of religion. It had become clear to me that he wasn’t a religious person, and I later learned that he had a PhD in physics, which wasn’t at all surprising given the tendency of his conversation. So why this remark? The new atheism movement, with its ‘four horsemen’, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, had run its course by this time, not without having an influence on myself. I had never been religious, but the movement reawakened me to the baleful influence of one religion, Christianity, upon Europe and its global empires – the ‘civilised world’ that Darwin had in mind when he wrote his Voyage of the Beagle.

But more recently, the Abrahamic religions, as they’re called, have bugged me mostly because of their patriarchy, because of its clear conviction that the One God, never seen, never manifest, but ever-present, must be male. Which of  course emerged from an ultra-patriarchal society, and helps to maintain that patriarchy to this day. I’ve gone on about the Catholic Church, known simply as The Church, which more or less controlled the whole of Europe for 1300 years, with its six-tiered hierarchy of maleness:

1. the Father-Son godly duo
2. the Papas, or Popes
3. The Cardinals
4. the Archbishops
5. the Bishops
6. the Priests

And even beyond them, the various all-male Catholic orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits and no doubt others I happily know nothing about. Of course there were Nuns, and some feisty ones, for better or worse,  but they were generally imbued with the pride of their own celibacy and would often be more furiously puritanical than their cock-bothered brethren, as history has shown.

It seems to me that this patriarchal nature of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, all of a piece, is a weak spot that the four horsemen of new atheism didn’t exploit sufficiently. Where were the horsewomen? Where are they now?

I’d argue that the maleness of the so-called Abrahamic god should be the real target. To me, it’s painfully obvious why this ever-invisible, omniscient, omnipotent god was as male as male can be. It’s because he was constructed some 2600 years ago from two male gods then popular in the region of ancient Canaan (Yahweh and El/Elohim) – I’ve written about this in a two-part blog piece referenced below – by a society as ultra-patriarchal as it’s possible to be, IMHO. A society which sold females into marriage, in exchange for a dowry – from the age of ten, and even younger, without their having any say-so whatsoever. And once that deal was sealed, and the youngster handed over to her often much older husband, she was titled a ‘woman’, which adds extra horror to the story in John 7:53 – 8:11 (apparently a later interpellation, but that’s irrelevant) of the ‘woman taken in adultery’. Jesus supposedly saved her from being stoned to death, but how many others suffered that fate? And how many innocent girls, more or less raped by their unchosen husbands, suffered or died in childbirth?

The number of insults to women presented par inadvertence in the Bible is impossible to enumerate. It starts, of course, with the creation of the first woman as the male’s help-mate out of a supernumerary rib, a woman who promptly becomes the reason for the poor innocent man’s fall from the Macho God’s grace. But I won’t go on with the many proofs of the god’s maleness – because what is more interesting, and disturbing about the belief in ‘our Father, who art in heaven’, is how oblivious many believers seem to be about this fact.

Example – in glancing back at my two blog pieces on the origin of the god called God, I reread a very long comment to Part 1, by ‘Anonymous’, the only comment I received. It was a generally reasonable comment about not taking the Bible literally, that it was full of stories that one might reflect on and learn from and so forth. Fine. As ‘Anonymous’ says, you can take what you want from it and leave the rest. Fine. And ‘Anonymous’ inserts one brief line, which perhaps I overlooked at the time:

If you see G-d as very male that’s what you see.

I respectfully disagree. I see this god as very male because the Bible uses the male pronoun to refer to him almost 7000 times, and never once refers to him using the female pronoun. And of course because I know that the stories about him were written by people who lived within an ultra-patriarchal framework. And these things matter, and they have consequences to this day, as we know from anti-feminist remarks still being made by Bible Belt Old Testament literalists and Young-Earth Creationists and the like.

‘Anonymous’ doesn’t refer to his or her own gender, but I think I can guess.

I’ve added to my references a hilarious-horrific essay on Godly masculinity, just for fun.

References

On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god

on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god

The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity