QotD [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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"A lot of male clergy want to affirm justice for women while keeping church patriarchy intact.

"Few preachers accurately translate the Hebrew word for 'spirit' as female, but many piously insist on using male pronouns for for the word 'God.' They hypocritically translate the same Greek word as 'minister' for men, and 'deaconess' for women.

"It seems to me there is no more sexist statement possible for a human being to make than when the church says the sacred mystery of the cosmos is male. It tells every little girl that her brother looks more like God than she does.

"And if little girls are taught that they have been designed as helpers for the males, and, if they are taught to be submissive to their future husbands no matter how abusive, is that not a form of child abuse?"

-- Jim Rigby, 2018-11-29 (Facebook)

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There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

At a meeting of the gay student organization when I was an undergrad, I heard a lesbian put it very succinctly: "I cannot worship a He."

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This is --

my whole childhood --

I have to actually coherently say something, but, I mean, I thought this was basic fundamentalist Christianity that all the holiness was linked to the Male. God is Male, Jesus is Male, Mary was just a conduit. Catholics, whom I always privately gave points to for basically deifying Mary, were considered by Protestants to not be 'really' Christian for precisely that 'idolatry'. I remember pointing out to my mother a museum display of 'cave people' having a religious ceremony and saying it would be interesting if the woman was leading it instead of the man, and my mother said, "God said that men lead in church" .

One of the many reasons I left was the strict unbreakable division between women and anything sacred. I saw churches full of women being told every Sunday, prayer meeting, and Saturday symposium that MEN, not us, were in God's image.

I -- I am wowed that Jim Rigby said this, that he was allowed, that such thought can even exist.

This one is going to stick with me.

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