The Most Serious And All Pervasive Human Rights Abuse on Earth

And if I were a politician I’d be pretty nervous about challenging organized religion, too. People can be very fervent about defending their beliefs. (Not that I’d be a typical politician either.)

Hmm, I’m suspicious about the wife-deity thing, because in the original Hebrew, God is referred to in very gender-bending ways. Words that are translated simply as “Almighty” in the English frequently have poetic and very feminine connotations, whereas the word translated as “God” is the gender neutral pleural of “gods”, used to signal that all the divinity of the universe rests in this one figure. It’s not that God used to have a wife, it’s that God isn’t just male. The fact that this is studiously ignored by most followers of Christianity, and even most followers of Judaism who are obliged to learn the Hebrew (The Quran doesn’t have the gender-bending means of referring to God, he is explicitly masculine therein) says a lot about the interplay of secularly derived tradition and religion. (not that there isn’t plenty of gender awful in the biblical text, too)

This is why I’m always very suspicious of people who claim to read a religious text “literally” in a modern language. I’ve spent enough time translating to know that even with the best intentions in the world, a perfect translation is impossible. Add in translators with biases, agendas and different cultural views, and who knows what you’re getting relative to the original text.

Judaism today holds that God doesn’t have a physical gender, but in more ancient times, before it became strictly heno-or monotheistic, it’s theorised that Asherah was worshipped as Yahweh’s wife (that being why she gets more bad press in the Old Testament than Canaan’s other deities). But yeah, it wasn’t femininity that was written out of the divine in Judaism so much as humaniformity.

(I read once that even the words for man and woman in the Eden story were of somewhat confused gender, but I don’t know the specifics of that, or which parts of the story it would make ambiguous if it’s true).

There’s also the fact that she was, along with Baal the primary deity of the Canaanites, and she’s the Canaanite form of Innana, the Semitic queen of heaven.

There is one part where it says that man and woman were created simultaneously, and another with Eve coming from the first man’s rib (or just as easily side, in other words, the proto human was split in two to make Adam and Eve) which some medieval rabbis decided meant there was a woman before Eve, and thus the tale of Lillith was born.

It gets even more fun with the symbolic wordplay. The word Adama mean’s earth, whereas the masculine version is Adam, who is made of earth. Then Eve, Chava, life, comes from Adam, the earth.

I love it when people who know more than me talk about things I’m greatly interested in! This whole thread is incredibly awesome!

I was just trying to add that the church has their book to back them up, unfortunately, which probably has a big hand in the “what they’re telling me” part of your mother’s stance.

And yeah, your second paragraph, 100%.

I’ve started reading about the meaning of the original Hebrew of the Bible (though I have to use secondary sources, because I don’t know Biblical Hebrew) and it’s fascinating to read about all of the nuances and symbolism within different words and phrases (it reminds me of why I love languages so much). I used to assume that the translation was divinely inspired, too (not any one in particular, it was more of a subconscious assumption), until I really thought about it, and then I was like “wait a minute…” Now, I have to look a the original language and context (both historical and literary) of a particular text to even begin to feel like I understand it.

“it’s always bizarre to hear people making Old Testament arguments that are based on inaccurate translations.”

I notice this a lot. What’s even more head-scratching is when the correct translation is already well-known and understood.

The documentary hypothesis (Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis) has some interesting ideas about the two conflicting accounts there – basically, that several books of the Pentateuch, including Genesis, were edited together from different documents.

I’m not well-versed in the subject (read one book about it in my Pentateuch class in college), but it seems like a pretty sound hypothesis.

Gets back to my theory that the major reason for their opposition to same-sex marriage is that it CAN’T conform to their “the one who has the penis is in charge” rule. And if society sees such marriages as normal, it may start to question how that rule can be applied to mixed-sex marriages.

So basically, I think the anti-equality movement’s claim that same-sex marriage threatens their existing mixed-sexed marriage tradition is true. As if I needed more reasons to support marriage equality than that “equality” part.

It’s a very good theory, and almost certainly right, though they can’t prove it unless the ancestral documents are by some miracle found. And of course those documents were woven together from many different versions of a common folk myth, and thus carries many of the flaws that such weavings naturally create. This makes life very difficult for people who think it’s the perfect word of God, and a whole lot of fun for myth and language geeks like me. It’s why some of the stories are repetitive, why some make no sense (where did Cain, Able, and Seth’s wives come from, for example) and why some parts are narrative and some are chronicle, etc.

Or was that a rhetorical question, and you know differently, and I am wrong about the Orthodox view?