In reading several posts about religions, I notice
people tend to use He (or he) in speaking about
God? Why? God is a spirit and definitely not male.
Also, some groups use men in their tracts. When
I ask them about it, the answer is “The Bible
uses “men” to mean men and women.” Excuse me?
Back then, men meant men and women were considered
lesser.
These two ideas have been used against women for
centuries. Aren’t they basically wrong?
It’s a matter of conventional usage–in Judeo/Christian terms, God has always been presented as male. I’ll leave it to you to decide why that would be–I myself go with the “it was based on the human leaders of the era and trumped up” explanation, but I don’t insist you do so.
Conventional usage becomes kind of set in stone after a period of time–the people you talk to may very well mean “men and women” where the Bible only meant men. For that matter, I myself use “God” and “He” (note the capitals)…and I’m an agnostic who doesn’t believe in the deity under discussion anyway. But I bow to the conventional usage.
Judaism has always seen Yahweh Elohim as a masculine deity, although it is quite explicit that He is not to be compared with His creation. Christianity started by borrowing this, coupled with the Virgin Birth concept where the First Person of the Trinity was quite literally the Father of the Second Person (AKA J.C.). (Although the Holy Spirit, whose designation is feminine-gender in Greek and Hebrew, is the actual agent of engenderment according to Matthew and Luke.)
However, the church is slowly waking up to the fact that by focusing on the masculine imagery, they are missing a dimension of God that might be worth mentioning. And they are finding scriptural warrant for it in such passages as Jesus speaking of Jerusalem: “…how I have wanted to comfort thee as a mother hen gathers her chickens under her wings.”
The creeds and the theologians are quite clear on God having no sex (“without body, parts or passions”). Although Jesus happened to be male, and therefore at least one Person of the Trinity does have human sex identity through the Incarnation. But don’t take that focus too far. If God understands us better than we do ourselves, as the church would have us understand, then he presumably knows better than any particular woman what it is like to be a woman, just as he knows what it is like to be a man better than any particular man.
I try to refer to God either as God or It. Referring to God as It is rather jarring (not just to other people, but to myself; I am still trying rid myself of the preconceptions of my culture), mostly because the neuter pronoun is unually used only for non-human entities. But seeing as God is said to not be human, “It” does seem appropiate. In fact, I use the word “It” not just to point out God’s absence of gender, but to emphasize how non-human God is. People are always anthropomorphisizing God, assigning It human characteristics that I believe are meaningless. Also, people seem to think that if there is a higher power, it must be basically human, which seem strange to me.
An incident that I found interesting was that someone once quoted one of my statements that referred to God as It, and changed “It” to “He”. Strange that people feel the need to “correct” other people’s usages. (And in case you’re wondering, the fact that I have opinions regarding Go’s gender does not mean that I believe It exists. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but that doesn’t mean I am not quite certain about his gender.)
As Polycarp noted; it goes back to to Hebrew. (Well I suppose it might go back farther, but at least that far)
Hebrew contains masculine, feminine and neutral pronouns. They used exclusively masculine ones for God.
Well, no, the Hebrew word shekhinah is a feminine word meaning the essense of the divine. The Kotel (Western Wall) is said to be imbued with the shekhinah. You wouldn’t call god the shekhinah, but it is certainly a part of him. Gender isn’t really important, but we are limited by the imperfection of language.
Additonally: I don’t know much about Greek, but Hebrew is a gendered - and sexist - language. As a result, the words for people, anashim, or b’nei-adam are both masculine. Heck, the word for ‘women’ is masculine as well (this is an irregular). But women can be included in them, in the same way that in Spanish, niñas must be only girls, but niños can be all boys, or boys and girls.
I stand corrected; I had forgotten about shekinah–I think there might be other ones too. Nonetheless, the point remains that they used masculine terms overwhelmingly.
CMKeller where are you?
Or maybe some people tend to refer to God as “He” because they believe that he’s male. Is that infeasible?
Some religions believe that, yes, God does have a wife, with whom he had created all us holy little souls. Not all religions, no… not even the most notable religions, not that I know of. Just wanted to point out the blatant generalizations. 
And “The Ryan”… some religions (Mormonism, for example) believe that God was once as we were… that is, mortal beings, that rose to become a God, whereupon he created his own universe (our happy little home). While I certainly don’t follow this (hail the Invisible Pink Unicorn!), I bring this up to point out that, with regards to deities, we mere mortals are surely not meant to know all that transpires. God himself, in the Ten Commandments, no less, refers to himself in the masculine sense. From a Judeo-Christian standpoint, that should be all the reason necessary.
My apologies: I mistakenly claimed that God referred to himself in the masculine sense while delivering the Ten Commandments to Moses. My apologies… it being 3:26 AM, my addled brain conjured up images of paraphrased Ten Commandment entries in old Religion Class textbooks. So just ignore all that, and shame on me! (hangs his head in shame).
furt:
Right here, but after a long hiatus. Let’s just say my life’s been a bit hectic recently…
Wrong. There is no neuter in the Hebrew language. Even inanimate objects are referred to as “he” or “she” (although from the context, it’s clearly an “it”).
And therein lies the reason for G-d being called a “he…” G-d would more properly be considered an “it” since a being’s sex is a physical concept and G-d (in Judaic belief) has no physical existence, but there is no “it” in the Hebrew language. Gramatically, G-d is a male noun, so is referred to using the male pronoun, which, when translated into English, “he” rather than “it”…which most people, even knowing the proper gender, would probably reject as too impersonal a reference to a living being.