Is God A "He"...?

[PainefulTruth]

Maybe "he" is not correct but it sounds a lot better than "it" or "he or she".

Which is more important, sounding better or the Truth. "It" is it, i.e. the Truth.

 

[Wry Catcher]

myself, I can't bring myself to believe that God has anything so base as a gender...

I suppose those who believe in God have the right to see him or her as they please. I believe God has many manifestations, for example when a deer hunter dies God materializes as Bambi.

 

[Flopper]

Maybe "he" is not correct but it sounds a lot better than "it" or "he or she".

Which is more important, sounding better or the Truth. "It" is it, i.e. the Truth.

Throughout history we have always used the masculine gender when gender was uncertain which continues to this day, a policeman, fireman, or congressman. So if the scribes that wrote the Old Testament, didn't know gender, they might have just wrote God. However, I think it's more likely they never considered the gender of God an thus assumed a masculine gender.

When it comes to religious matters, truth is truly in the eye of the beholder. Some people take the bible literally, other allegorically, and other just consider it nonsense.

 

[Vox]

I'm not basing science on linguistics Vox, just offering a more Biblical explanation for wisdom other than Miss Wisdom married God one day and.........

of course YOU are not. I did not mean you, just was referring to the "scientists" in the OP.

 

[PainefulTruth]

Throughout history we have always used the masculine gender when gender was uncertain which continues to this day, a policeman, fireman, or congressman.

As do I use the masculine default when referring to people. But we are divided into 2 sexes for the purpose of reproduction. That isn't necessary for one God which could be both

, or more likely neither.

So if the scribes that wrote the Old Testament, didn't know gender, they might have just wrote God. However, I think it's more likely they never considered the gender of God an thus assumed a masculine gender.

If they never considered it, then how or why did they assume it? The point is we tend to anthropomorphize God and give It a gender because we are divided by our sex. Does God have sex? With who/what? De-anthropomorphizing God goes a long way toward understanding what It's nature might be like, and what our spiritual nature truly is.

When it comes to religious matters, truth is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Absolutely not. That would result in total chaos, with with each of us creating all our individual god(s) or no god as well, all existing/not existing at the same time. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not God--though I'm sure God, if It exists, would be beautiful in the eyes of us all.

Some people take the bible literally, other allegorically, and other just consider it nonsense.

What people believe to be true, doesn't determine objective Truth. Some parts of the Bible are indeed, literal, allegorical, nonsense or outright evil. But the characteristics of a passage is determined by the Truth, or lack of it, behind the passage, not the bias of its reader. Objective Truth and subjective Truth do both exist, but only in their own realms. There is no subjective natural law, or objective beauty.

When the Bible claims that natural law in our universe was suspended, it lies. No such case has anything to "support" it but hear-say evidence. The greatest hear-say of all is that God wrote/dictated the Bible.

 

[deltex1]

The mod god must be asleep...this OP belongs in the flame zone...

 

[Mertex]

Ya, how else de he get Mary pregnant?

Ha,ha, remember, God can do anything. I'm not saying that God is not a He, just saying that it doesn't really matter, if he can make the Universe, getting Mary pregnant by any means would be a piece of cake.

 

[Mertex]

He made adam in "our" image, is what I thought it said in Genesis? Not a bible expert, so no clue. And I try not to think of Gods lower parts.

I think I am done with this thread. Interesting question though.

"done with this thread"...?

never figured you to be chickenshit on uncomfortable questions, Gracie...

btw... the English translation (NKJV, Genesis 1:26) says "Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness..."

and in Genesis 1:27 (NKJV), "So God created man in His own image; In the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."


these passages have always caused me to ask certain questions...

about God's gender, as I've mentioned before...

but also about why God uses a plural pronoun to refer to him/her/it/their self...

When God said "in our own image" He was talking about being able to talk, think, etc...had nothing to do with gender because he was creating both men and women.

As to why he used the plural pronoun is because God/Jesus/Holy Spirit were from the very beginning.....there were always three, still are.

 

[Cecilie1200]

So wait, there is a race of gods? Not a singular god, but multiple gods that procreate the way we do?

Why not?

The only reason why not would be that it is not, as far as I understand, a belief of any form of Christianity, and I am pretty sure Avatar is a Christian.

So am I, but "God has told us EVERYTHING, and anything He hasn't already mentioned is therefore impossible" is also not an actual tenet of Christianity, although I understand there are many Christians who, through ignorance or intellectual laziness, would LIKE to reduce the sum total of our knowledge to only what's explicitly mentioned in the Bible.

I don't think Avatar is one of those people, though.

 

[Cecilie1200]

myself, I can't bring myself to believe that God has anything so base as a gender...

Since God is the invisible Creator, it is non-gender.

Since we are speaking English, it is either illiteracy to refer to a sentient being as "it", or an intentional attempt at offending people by a crass boor.

Which one describes you? Unable to use English correctly, or trash?

 

[Pogo]

I always had the image in my head that He is a He.

I have a hard time imagining that God has need of a pecker...

jes' sayin'...

Absolutely right. The only reason for sex is genetic selection, and it requires a female counterpart. Ergo if God is a he, then by definition there's at least one Goddess somewhere. What happened to Her? Confined to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?

On the other hand, only females are capable of giving birth, and given parthenogenesis, don't necessarily need male fertilization.

Therefore, if God has a gender, as we define it She can only be a she.

Class dismissed.

 

[Chuckt]

I always had the image in my head that He is a He.

I have a hard time imagining that God has need of a pecker...

jes' sayin'...

Absolutely right. The only reason for sex is genetic selection, and it requires a female counterpart. Ergo if God is a he, then by definition there's at least one Goddess somewhere. What happened to Her? Confined to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?

On the other hand, only females are capable of giving birth, and given parthenogenesis, don't necessarily need male fertilization.

Therefore, if God has a gender, as we define it She can only be a she.

Class dismissed.

God made man with the dust of the ground and blowing life into Him. This act shows His omnipotence which means He can do anything and it has nothing to do with sex.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2 (Blue Letter Bible: KJV - King James Version)

 

[Pogo]

French assigns gender to nouns. So does Hebrew assign gender to words. Wisdom, in Hebrew is a feminine "word".
No where in the Bible does it say the word wisdom married God.

Most languages have noun gender. It doesn't mean any of them have masculine or feminine characteristics. It has more to do with vowel harmony and the patterns of the language's lexicography.

"Girl" for example, is "das Mädchen" in German. That's neuter gender. So this is a non point.

 

[Pogo]

I have a hard time imagining that God has need of a pecker...

jes' sayin'...

Absolutely right. The only reason for sex is genetic selection, and it requires a female counterpart. Ergo if God is a he, then by definition there's at least one Goddess somewhere. What happened to Her? Confined to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?

On the other hand, only females are capable of giving birth, and given parthenogenesis, don't necessarily need male fertilization.

Therefore, if God has a gender, as we define it She can only be a she.

Class dismissed.

God made man with the dust of the ground and blowing life into Him. This act shows His omnipotence which means He can do anything and it has nothing to do with sex.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2 (Blue Letter Bible: KJV - King James Version)

I was just about to get to you. What you have here is circular reasoning. "God exists because the bible says so, and God wrote the bible". Doesn't work.

 

[Pogo]

I think the male gender pronoun is connected to the patriarchal structure of the human society and as such it gives the males more authority. It's not sexual matter but rather strength matter, so to say. but that is just my feeling on the issue

It might also have something to do with the fact that God Himself kept explaining His relationship to mankind in paternalistic terms, undoubtedly because that was the easiest way for us to comprehend it rather than because of any literal correlation.

If you want to use human reasoning, there is more of a 50% chance that He is Father.
The fact that he revealed himself as Father plus flipping a coin with 50% being male and 50% being female then there is more than 51% chance that He is Father.

If He was a "She" then don't you think women would have been in charge and had headship throughout the ages instead of being treated like cattle?

Indeed there is much evidence that that is exactly how we used to roll. Think bees or ants. Or lions. There is much in Nature that offers analogy.

This theory suggests that the rise of monotheism with Judaism, and then Christianity and Islam, was the overthrow of matriarchy in terms of the entirety of human history. It's worth a thought. To this day Islam retains an echo of the pre-patriarchy in its symbol of the star and crescent. As does Christianism in its Marianity dance.

 

[Mertex]

Absolutely right. The only reason for sex is genetic selection, and it requires a female counterpart. Ergo if God is a he, then by definition there's at least one Goddess somewhere. What happened to Her? Confined to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?

On the other hand, only females are capable of giving birth, and given parthenogenesis, don't necessarily need male fertilization.

Therefore, if God has a gender, as we define it She can only be a she.

Class dismissed.

God made man with the dust of the ground and blowing life into Him. This act shows His omnipotence which means He can do anything and it has nothing to do with sex.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2 (Blue Letter Bible: KJV - King James Version)

I was just about to get to you. What you have here is circular reasoning. "God exists because the bible says so, and God wrote the bible". Doesn't work.

But then that wouldn't make sense for any autobiographer.....if they say they are something, and they wrote their autobiography, then it can't be believed?

God inspired the writers of the Bible, that's why there is the human contradictions that everyone likes to point out, but if he didn't inspire them what to write about Him, how else would we have known Him?

There is a tale of a married couple. She was a Christian, he was not, and she kept inviting him to go to church with her. One Christmas morning, as she dressed and got ready to go to church, she once again begged him to go with her....he refused.

After she left, he was sitting in his warm cozy den, fire in the fireplace, drinking his coffee, reading his paper when he heard a large thud on the glass sliding door. When he went to check it out he realized that it was a bird who could see the fire in the fireplace and in trying to come near it kept hitting the door. He felt sorry for the bird and how cold it must be. He then realized that though they couldn't come into his house, he had a large barn, and it would be warmer in there then outside....so he proceeded to go outside and try to lure the birds into the barn. He spread corn and kept waving his arms, but alas, they didn't understand what he was trying to do or say to them.

At that time the church bells rang, and it dawned on him - God couldn't convey to us salvation, we didn't understand his language, so he sent Jesus, who took our form and was able to talk to us in "human" terms that we could understand.

Still, some will not believe.

 

[Pogo]

God made man with the dust of the ground and blowing life into Him. This act shows His omnipotence which means He can do anything and it has nothing to do with sex.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2 (Blue Letter Bible: KJV - King James Version)

I was just about to get to you. What you have here is circular reasoning. "God exists because the bible says so, and God wrote the bible". Doesn't work.

But then that wouldn't make sense for any autobiographer.....if they say they are something, and they wrote their autobiography, then it can't be believed?

The flaw is here:
If Paramhansa Yogananda writes an autobiography, he's a real person you can track down. He can be interviewed and speak on his experiences. Other people have interacted with him.

If I write an unauthorized biography of Joe Schwartz, and I can't prove Joe exists or produce him and neither can anyone else, then all I have is a fiction.

Or as your post aptly renders it, "There is a tale...".

 

[Chuckt]

I was just about to get to you. What you have here is circular reasoning. "God exists because the bible says so, and God wrote the bible". Doesn't work.

But then that wouldn't make sense for any autobiographer.....if they say they are something, and they wrote their autobiography, then it can't be believed?

The flaw is here:
If Paramhansa Yogananda writes an autobiography, he's a real person you can track down. He can be interviewed and speak on his experiences. Other people have interacted with him.

If I write an unauthorized biography of Joe Schwartz, and I can't prove Joe exists or produce him and neither can anyone else, then all I have is a fiction.

Or as your post aptly renders it, "There is a tale...".

Except that the average American lies 200 times a day on average. If you did track him down, you couldn't believe anything.

So basically if you are going to have a relationship with other human beings, you have to listen to everything or you have to listen to nothing. If you thought that everyone was going to lie to you and Americans do tell 200 lies a day, you couldn't listen to anybody with that approach.

Can you listen to anybody or have a relationship with anybody if you took the approach they were lying to you? In that case, I couldn't listen to anybody.

What point is there in talking to anybody?

 

[Pogo]

But then that wouldn't make sense for any autobiographer.....if they say they are something, and they wrote their autobiography, then it can't be believed?

The flaw is here:
If Paramhansa Yogananda writes an autobiography, he's a real person you can track down. He can be interviewed and speak on his experiences. Other people have interacted with him.

If I write an unauthorized biography of Joe Schwartz, and I can't prove Joe exists or produce him and neither can anyone else, then all I have is a fiction.

Or as your post aptly renders it, "There is a tale...".

Except that the average American lies 200 times a day on average. If you did track him down, you couldn't believe anything.

So basically if you are going to have a relationship with other human beings, you have to listen to everything or you have to listen to nothing. If you thought that everyone was going to lie to you and Americans do tell 200 lies a day, you couldn't listen to anybody with that approach.

Can you listen to anybody or have a relationship with anybody if you took the approach they were lying to you? In that case, I couldn't listen to anybody.

What point is there in talking to anybody?

Strange post.

Your "200 times" figure is wildly suspect, but it doesn't matter; nobody brought up the topic of lying. The point was circular reasoning, which means a claim using itself as a basis -- which means having no basis.

Lying, by contrast, is a deliberate misrepresentation. The two are in no way related.

 

[Montrovant]

God made man with the dust of the ground and blowing life into Him. This act shows His omnipotence which means He can do anything and it has nothing to do with sex.

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2 (Blue Letter Bible: KJV - King James Version)

I was just about to get to you. What you have here is circular reasoning. "God exists because the bible says so, and God wrote the bible". Doesn't work.

But then that wouldn't make sense for any autobiographer.....if they say they are something, and they wrote their autobiography, then it can't be believed?

God inspired the writers of the Bible, that's why there is the human contradictions that everyone likes to point out, but if he didn't inspire them what to write about Him, how else would we have known Him?

There is a tale of a married couple. She was a Christian, he was not, and she kept inviting him to go to church with her. One Christmas morning, as she dressed and got ready to go to church, she once again begged him to go with her....he refused.

After she left, he was sitting in his warm cozy den, fire in the fireplace, drinking his coffee, reading his paper when he heard a large thud on the glass sliding door. When he went to check it out he realized that it was a bird who could see the fire in the fireplace and in trying to come near it kept hitting the door. He felt sorry for the bird and how cold it must be. He then realized that though they couldn't come into his house, he had a large barn, and it would be warmer in there then outside....so he proceeded to go outside and try to lure the birds into the barn. He spread corn and kept waving his arms, but alas, they didn't understand what he was trying to do or say to them.

At that time the church bells rang, and it dawned on him - God couldn't convey to us salvation, we didn't understand his language, so he sent Jesus, who took our form and was able to talk to us in "human" terms that we could understand.

Still, some will not believe.

That becomes a case of having many different people write conflicting autobiographies. Every religious text probably claims to have been inspired by the god(s) it proclaims exists.