Reason and Patriarchy, Modernity and the Feminine

[_Meadowchik]

As my beliefs have changed, I have worked to separate the ideas of what God actually is from what humans say about God. You could say I am agnostic on what people say about God, meaning that I am open to listening to peoples' experiences and valuing the meaning they find as it enriches them personally, and possibly as it might contribute to my own life. And I'm an atheist about any claims of divine authority, meaning when someone says that God put them in charge of someone else's relationship to the divine, I reject it completely.

That said, the ways God is spoken of by people has had incalculable impact on human relationships. I see religion as the first science, the first government, and the first art all rolled up together. One could say they were rolled up so thick they formed a very sturdy stick that could be forcefully used for progress and for harm. And although the Divine Feminine has been around throughout history, patriarchy has thus far prevailed and patriarchy has collected inertia in the forms of government, scientific thinking, and artistic expression.

The powerful ways human beings have thought have been adopted and woven into this patriarchy. Cartesian, logical thinking in my opinion is very much like language, because it makes a whole universe of thinking techniques possible by virtue of breaking ideas into pieces. Language breaks up ideas in to words, then the words become usable for the exchange of much more complex ideas. Logic breaks down ideas into axioms, premises, for example, and then allows them to build up into hypotheses and theories. One could say that language carried human beings into history (as opposed to pre-history) and then Cartesian thinking helped bring us into modernity as human societies functioned largely through patriarchal structures.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Cartesian thinking itself is inherently male. But because of the way human civilization has developed, male power structures were in place when humanity’s progression received this transcendental boost from Reason. In that meantime, religion also prevailed as patriarchy’s partner. How many ways, beyond obvious violence, are sticks used? To eat, to paint, to write, and to enforce, collectivized power through religion means it is ubiquitous in our human stories. It is so ubiquitous, that perhaps the only way people managed to see the need to separate religion from government was because of the existence of other religions.

This separation between church and state is rather miraculous in some respects! But it is derived out of that attachment of man to religion and need to keep their religion in civilization by virtue of mutual truce. We agreed to separate religion from government so that we could have religion without having to kill each other incessantly. The current populist waves in America and Europe has me wondering if there is some buyer’s remorse for that separation.

Anyway, survival has seen us to modernity and globalization. The trends of human beings are vastly undergoing changes. The ability to produce so much food has resulted in massive population levels but eventually turns into the ability of individual women to become educated and make more choices about their reproduction, meaning their lives are virtually revolutionized. The planet reached peak child in the year 2000 and population levels are headed to plateau. More women are becoming more able to be involved in the power structures.

And now the modern world has become super-saturated with words, arguments, and information, and corporations and individuals alike are seeing diminishing returns with the increase of information. We’re learning that we need to learn to manage abundance better. And that’s where systems analysis comes in. Maybe it is not a coincidence that the everyday empowered female is experiencing a rise at the time when mankind is struggling with over-abundance. When you’ve added as many components as you can but keep experiencing decreasing benefit, you start to look at re-arranging the pieces.

And if you’re a person who still finds it beneficial to speak in religious and spiritual terms, perhaps that’s where the divine She comes in. Or, one might use capital-F Feminine as a philosophical catch-all for what comes after Cartesian thinking. For me, these uses of the Masculine and Feminine more about the nature of how humans have gotten here, not the way they permanently are.

As far as progress goes for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I think it gave us the idea of Heavenly Mother as a way to legitimize its polygamy structure. Control always comes at a cost, and although we were given the aspiritual crumbs of the tiniest references to a Heavenly Mother, this is where in my opinion the church has chosen a slow death, by not giving Her more space in the Gospel. These men are faced with the dilemma of maintaining the guise of authority with an untenable narrative. They do seem to be moving in as many directions of acceptance as they possibly can without undermining their own authority. Yet women in authority would encroach on theirs, thus women will never have comparable status in the leadership. And so the church will continue to shrink and become less adaptible.

[_Gadianton]

That's probably as good as any of an argument to the standard objection of, why should we support equality of gender in the perpetration of a scam?

[_Meadowchik]

That's probably as good as any of an argument to the standard objection of, why should we support equality of gender in the perpetration of a scam?

1. What's the worst scam in modernity, religion or misogyny?

2. Either answer to #1, one cannot force deconversion, it requires certain variables and takes time. So why not improve religion in the meantime?

https://sistersquorum.com/2018/10/10/a- ... ur-mother/

Furthermore, the divine masculine is ubiquitous in the secular world, even as myth only the divine feminine could prove a beneficial mitigator.