How “Natural” is God?
Just when I think the Pope is going to advocate for the environment in his Christmas message, he uses it instead to deliver a shot at gay people as unnatural:
The Pontiff stated that while the Church needs to “defend the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us [… ], it must also protect the human being from his own “destruction.”
“It is necessary that there be something such as an ecology of man, understood in the proper manner,” he said.
“It is not outmoded metaphysics,” Benedict XVI affirmed, “when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected.””The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less,” he said.
“What is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender,’ is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator,” Benedict warned.
“Gender” as used in the pope’s address is broad enough to encompass anyone who doesn’t completely conform with their assigned sexual roles; including homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender and others.
Benedict XVI explained that great theologians have “qualified marriage, that is to say, the link for life between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator.”
Both Michael Bayly in his post, “And a Merry Christmas to You, Too, Papa“; and Rose Marie Berger in her post, “Pope Goes Green and Straight for Christmas,” covered Benedict’s address and subsequent hullabaloo very well and I have nothing to add to their excellent commentary.
But after reading the pope’s remarks, this quirky little thought hatched in my brain: How “natural” is God? 
Did you notice that our “Creator”–always referred to by a male pronoun–doesn’t have a wife? Is that unnatural–compared to Zeus, Odin, Vishnu and other male god kings, all of whom had wives or female consorts?
Can you think of any figure outside of the Hebrew God that doesn’t have a mate, or engage in sex with one or both sexes as opportunities present themselves? I can’t. God has a wife, except for our God.
Other oddities:
St. Joseph, honored as the patron saint of fathers, husbands and children, didn’t “know” (i.e. have carnal knowlege) of his wife, the Virgin Mary, until she gave birth. Jesus’ “father” wasn’t his biological father at all, but is held up as the icon of fatherhood.
Can you think of one person in real life–especially in Italy–who gladly sticks with his wife when she’s pregnant by someone else?
Could the virgin birth of Jesus been the result of parthenogenesis? Virgin births have been confirmed in nature in sharks, insects, and certain types of fish.
Finally, the pope’s remarks raise other questions. How natural is enforced celibacy? If God impregnanted Mary without the use of a penis, how is the miracle of artificial insemination any different?
Finally, if human beings are made in the image of God, our deity is both male and female. How does that reckon with the strict gender definitions promoted by the Vatican?
December 29th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Good questions. This is why I like the word “queer”, once so offensive.
Once we were ‘homosexual’, then ‘gay’ – but some women felt not properly included, so we started to speak of ‘gay and lesbian’ then LGBT to include bisexual and transgendered. LGBTQ includes some straight sexual minorities, later we added ‘intersex’, to get to LGBTQI. No doubt other acronyms lie in wait.
Within the Catholic Church, there are even more (heterosexual) minorities. The divorced and remarried, cohabiting couples, sexually active adolescents, adulterers and monogamous married couples practicing birth control are all ‘unacceptable’ to the authorities, and so must be classed as minorities. But collectively, especially when added to the LGBTQI’s, they must surely outnumber the doctrinally pure: so the latter, too, are a ‘minority’, even if only statistically.
But the oddest minority of all are surely the voluntarily celibate clergy – especially those who adhere scruplously to their vows: by the nature of their choice, they can have no conception of the real experience of sexuality shared by the rest of us.
So, in terms of sexuality, we are all of us, without exception, a ‘minority’ group.
On a different note, my own promised blog/website is now up, but still very much in draft. Take a look if you like, but bear in mind that I am fully aware how much work it still needs, especially in terms of appearance, and points of detail. But it should give an idea of the shape of things to come. Feeddback will be welcome – no matter how rude.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:31 am
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July 11th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I find it interesting and extremely disgusting how the church looks down at those who are gay and yet… how MALE priests play with little buys? A bunch of hypocrites. Nasty dirty misled hypocrites.
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