From Austin Cline,
Your Guide to Agnosticism / Atheism.
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Is traditional religion inherently patriarchal and hence damaging to women? Is it possible to reconstruct a female-centered religious system? Would such a religion be free of superstition and damaging imagery, making it inherently better than a traditional religion centered on a male god?

Summary

Title: Restoring the Goddess: Equal Rites for Modern Women
Author: Barbara G. Walker
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1573927864

Pro:
•  Interesting critiques of patriarchal religion

Con:
•  Little support offered for central premises
•  Numerous stereotypes of men and women
•  Unjustified generalizations about religion and gods

Description:
•  Critique of traditional theistic religion
•  Argument for a new, goddess-centered religiosity
•  Examination of how goddess-centered beliefs can help women

 

Book Review

Barbara G. Walker thinks that religion needs to be freed from it connections to male gods and she is not alone. In her book, Walker combines of a critique of patriarchal religious beliefs with a proposal for a new “thealogy,” or study/knowledge of the “Goddess.” This is not, however, supposed to simply be a female version of traditional religious attitudes:

Just as social matriarchy was never patriarchy spelled with an m, thealogy is not theology spelled with an a. The modern concept of the Goddess is very different from merely a feminized god or an androgynous Father-Mother deity. Goddess is not simply the female face of God. Goddess is a different entity

altogether arising from different psychological and cultural roots, recognizing different truths of human nature, embodying a different philosophy of life and death.

According to Walker, misogyny is the creation of religion, and religion is thus the principle medium of the spiritual, social, political and economic enslavement of women. Walker believes that no other social institution could possibly be as responsible. Her proposed cure is thealogy, a religious mindset which is both new, because it should replace traditional beliefs, and old, because she thinks it was once the primary belief system of all humanity:

The world needs a new belief system that doesn’t demand that its adherents remain ignorant of the discoveries of earth sciences, biology, history, astronomy, physics, paleontology, or archaeology. The world needs a religion that can be believed without insult to human intelligence. It’s possible that thealogy will provide such a religion. ...Thealogians understand the psychobiological foundations of religion in a way that father-god followers can never comprehend. Thealogians know the Goddess to be humanity’s most spontaneous spiritual construct, whereas father gods tended to be artificially imitative. Like a gathering

storm, thealogy is building to a point where it may sweep away the patriarchy that has enslaved the world’s energies to unworthy exploitations and persecutions for nearly two thousand years.

These are dramatic claims, but little support is offered for them. The claim that human-constructed gods are inherently oppressive is based upon the model of the Western gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and to the degree that they are the topic of conversation, she has a strong case. However, she generalizes to all male gods and there does not appear to be any way to support the idea that absolutely all gods are nasty and all god-worship is oppressive while all goddesses are loving, caring and nurturing such that all goddess-worship is supportive, affirming and healthy.part of life), she never accords the same multi-dimensionality to gods.

Is there any reason to think that thealogy is more “scientific” than theology? No, and the example the book sets is not encouraging. Tired, old, unscientific stereotypes of both men and women are repeated numerous times. Walker claims that crimes of violence “run more than 90 percent male” and that when women become violent,

“more than half the time it is in retaliation against men who have abused them.” What is the source of these figures? Who knows — no citation was given. There is a general paucity of references throughout the book, one of its major weaknesses. The FBI’s statistics do show more men than women arrested for violent crimes, but not more than 90 percent. According to Patricia Pearson in her book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence:

Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killings of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults. The question is how do we come to perceive what girls and women do? ...The sole explanation offered up by criminologists is that it is involuntary, the rare result of provocation or mental illness, as if half the population of the globe consisted of saintly stoics who never succumbed to fury, frustration, or greed. ...It is one of the most abiding myths of our time.