The Washington Post disses our Goddess

On Faith: Wendy Doniger: Respect For Women Yes, Worship of Goddesses No

To which I replied:

I can't even call that flawed logic, because it's no logic at all. First, you cannot compare post-patriarchal cults to Goddess worship, even if their pantheons include Goddesses. They might provide for some feminine representation of the divine, but always in a subordinate or negative form. The great Goddesses were re-written to be servile or evil, always in service to or opposition of the male deity.

As a Dianic Witch, I see the Universe as a living, female entity that is all inclusive. Gaia is a microcosm of the larger body. A monotheast - one who believes in one Goddess - has a much broader view of deity than most people realize. There's a saying in the Craft that "all gods are Goddesses and all Goddesses are one Goddess." There is no conflict in that statement if you stop thinking in black and white, concrete terms. The Goddess will take any form you need Her to take, and some of those forms are male.

The Feminine Divine is not exclusive of the male, as if it were a reverse of monotheism. It's not "patriarchy in a skirt." In nature the first and favored gender is female. There are species in which females produce without males. There are none where males produce without females. The masculine is a derivative of, and included in, the feminine. The first couple was not a man and a woman, it was a female and her child. Note the pervasive obsession with Virgin Births in modern theology. This could very easily be an unconscious desire to return to the Goddess.

One of the worst things to happen to Pagan culture is the popularity of the yin/yang symbol. There is always a majority in favor of the female gender. Polarity is destructive - it creates either conflict or stagnation. It is the epitome of the black and white thinking that pervades this society. Life comes in many shades, and the Goddess encompasses all of them, not half of them.

There is one major misconception in the world today, and it is putting our survival at risk - the idea that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are different religions. They are variations of worship of the same, singular male deity, and that deity is violent, oppressive, and exclusive. The irony is that the three branches are trying to annihilate each other because they're part of the same poison tree, which values conquest and genocide.

It makes me sad that people cannot even envision a world of cooperation, peace, love of the Goddess and each other. We lived that way for hundreds of thousands of years, at least. Even if we get people to let go of their war god, it won't be enough. We need to create a culture where we see each other as parts of a whole, and people behave in their natural, cooperative way.

Violence is learned, not natural, and Goddess societies lived peacefully while developing agriculture, art and sciences that we're only now rediscovering. Christianity threw the Western world into a Dark Age during which we lost the knowledge of the ancient world - things like atomic theory and evolution, which were known in ancient Alexandria and only relearned in modern times. As patriarchy spread, its sickness of greed and hate became institutionalized in our laws and our scriptures, while remnants of the Old Ways were deliberately obscured, co-opted or destroyed. If we aren't careful, we'll have another wave of darkness - look at the influence of the Religious Right, which is challenging the doctrine of evolution and trying to re-write American histoy to fit their agenda. Are we going to let that happen again? It took several millenia for us to come back from the first wave.

Getting back in touch with the great Goddess is exactly what this planet needs. Sustainable societies are possible. Peace is possible. Patriarchy got us into this violent, polluted mess - Matriarchy could certainly get us out of it. Remember that a few people wield a lot of power, money and control by keeping people at war and in fear. Don't accept the lie that it's "just the way humans are." Get in touch with the power of Nature, then take your own power back from the church and the state and choose to be a part of the world instead of apart from it.

The Goddess is back and She's not going away again.