In the spirit of silliness, the men can call God 'he' and the women can call God 'she'

Indeed, what`s in a name, especially for a myth.

Thank you, Peter, for a thought-provoking piece – there’s a lot to digest.

I would offer a couple of observations.

God is not male or female, but the preponderance of masculine imagery for God and for the typical believer in our scriptures, hymns and liturgy does rather give the opposite impression. I think feminist theologians have a point when they say that, intentionally or not, cumulatively this use of masculine language and imagery makes women feel excluded, or at least secondary. I’m not arguing that we should pray to “our mother in heaven”, but I’m happy that we’ve changed “brother, let me be your servant” to “brother, sister let me serve you” in our hymn lyrics, and now sing we/us for men/sons at Christmas in Hark the Herald Angels Sing (Born that men no more may die; Born to raise the sons of earth).

I also think that the inclusive Gospel that you describe, and which I’d heartily endorse, is not reflected in the way the church has often actually treated people over the centuries and the way many parts of the church still treat people today. Women still cannot be priests in the Roman Catholic church or minsters in some protestant denominations. We are still a long way from a comfortable and welcoming acceptance of LGBQTI+ folk, especially priests.

I like your idea that “the Church is the only institution that is equipped to resist this fragmentation of human identity because it has a view of God and humanity as fundamentally a whole, despite individual differences.” But I suspect it took the political movements that you describe in first and second wave anti-racism (I’d add first and second wave feminism) to help us better understand what that means. And of course Christians were active members of these political movements, motivated precisely by the types of theology you describe.

This was sort of OK (but not really) until he starting talking about the "church".
Not really because it just rehashes the now common right-wing trope about the dreaded "wokeness".

Never mind of course that sinners who are by self-definition and always dramatized action intrinsically God-less always sooner or later create hell on Earth.

Furthermore both the Christian and secular world-views share the same three separative (God-less) characteristics as described in this essay
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/three_great_myths_questioned.html

This essay describes the deadly politics created by the dreadfully sane separate ego-"I" in both its secular and so called "religious" forms. http://www.dabase.org/p5egoicsociety.htm

Every ego-"I" or self-possessed body-mind is always active as the opponent of all opponents, but there is no final victory - and every opposition is an irrational search for equanimity, peace, and love.

Therefore the Great Other whether in the form of the "creator"-God or Nature's God - is your Opponent, not your refuge or "savior".
The presumed other and the separate ego-"I" are mad relations, always together in the growling pit, bound by nature to do Nature's deeds to one another.

Thanks Peter Sellick for your article. Kudos

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Dear Peter,

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You wrote :

« The problem with this concern was that it attributed gender to God who has no gender because He does not "exist" as human beings exist »
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So the “person” represented in the New Testament as Jesus (God the son), never “existed” as human beings exist – he/she/it was just a simulacrum, a make-believe human being, some sort of mythopoeic or (in modern-day terms) science-fictional character.

As Mariella Scerri indicates in her article “Mythology in Science Fiction” :

« Both myth and science attempt to provide an overview of existence by bridging inner with outer reality. Myth attempts to project inner reality (conscious desires, archetypal patterns) in a metaphor for outer reality, while science aims to illuminate inner reality through the study of outer, empirical forms. Sutton and Sutton contend that a body of myth forms an autonomous universe which stands in metaphoric relation to the actual world. Scientific hypotheses also form a universe, a universe which is not identical to objective reality but representative of man’s understanding of it. Thus, the question of validation or disproof is irrelevant to myth since the relation of myth to reality is analogical, but it is paramount for science because the worth of a scientific hypothesis is entirely dependent on the accuracy of its relationship to objective reality (Sutton and Sutton 232).

Gilkey claims that before the advent of the scientific mode the only means by which man could relate to the universe was through the mythopoeic mode. His acceptance of the narratives of gods and heroes as the meaning of the world served as an affirmation of space, of time, of natural occurrence and of a historical event (Gilkey 286)…

Space-time lends science fiction an infinite, unknown extension which lends grandeur to whatever actions are undertaken in it. Unlike a scientific hypothesis, a science fiction story is not formulated primarily to advance technological knowledge, but rather operates on a visionary mythopoeic level. Thus, science fiction is a self-conscious form of myth in which man intentionally mythologizes scientific narrative »

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