Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!usc!henry.jpl.nasa.gov!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!rshapiro@BBN.COM From: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Feminism in the Craft Message-ID: <48186@bbn.COM> Date: 14 Nov 89 16:18:24 GMT References: <61131@aerospace.AERO.ORG> Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Reply-To: Richard Shapiro Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 25 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Status: R In article <61131@aerospace.AERO.ORG> jan@orc.olivetti.com writes: >If you think you are advanced past the point where this would affect you, I >can only say I thought so too, but there is a big difference between holding >an intellectual opinion that God is genderless or that the ways you use to >refer to God are unimportant versus actually experimenting with vocalization >and visualization. I certainly agree with you that there's little meaning to a personal but genderless god. The conclusion would then seem to be that belief in such a god (male or female) is intrinsically antithetical to the variety of feminism which wants to call into question the whole notion of eternal and "natural" gender. How can a god be a god and still participate in some particular, human social organization? Insisting that gods have gender is like insisting that they speak 20th century American English. We can give up the language requirement -- the gods can be mute, or they can speak Deitese, which no human will understand. But can we give up the gender requirement? Certainly calling the god female doesn't accomplish this -- that's like saying she speaks Russian instead of English. And I'm not sure any of us can really imagine a truly genderless, but still personal, being (the point made by Jan, above). My conclusion is that feminism has taught us the impossibility of believing in a personal god, male or female. Or rather that such a belief is at odds with feminism. Gender is a human issue, exclusively.