The seventh stupid way to think about God is

GOD THE MACHO MAN.

Boy, is this one of the stupidest ways to think about God ever! And one of the most common. He’s spread throughout Judeo-Christian thinking like an epidemic. All you have to do is to look at the popular picture of God and you’ll see the Macho Man’s mystique. God is strong, silent, distant, prone to anger, demanding, obstinate, and, of course, controlling! He controls religious dogma, rituals and practice. He controls prayer books and biblical myths. He   controls the ministry, the priesthood and the rabbinate. Not to mention the conscience of people of both sexes.

God is Our King, not our Queen! He is our Father, not our Mother. Yet, despite his pervasiveness, despite the overwhelming institutionalization and entrenchment of this idea, God the Macho Man is a fraud – a dangerous fraud. He has been used to perpetrate the myth of male superiority for millennia. He has bolstered the influence and spheres of power of some of the most brutal males in history. He has contaminated theology with sexist ideology, reflecting societal bias, not mature thought. For God the Macho Man is fictitious, an invention on “manmade” standards. Therefore, he is also one of the most idolatrous creations there is. God the Macho Man is made in the image and likeness of man.

But it is not just women who are oppressed by a god like this. Everyone is. Because God the Macho Man may be big and impressive and strong, but he is not a true God. A Macho God does not nurture. He does not heal. He is not caring or tender. He bestows his love more in the form of discipline than concern.

Let’s face it, even for men, God the Macho Man is hardly a good role model. He is not a real man at all, but an unrealistic, polarized caricature of maleness, devoid of all sensitivities. As oppressive to men as to women.

There is real danger in allowing society’s standards to determine the personality of God. Standards that can be undermined and manipulated by any power elite to subordinate whole segments of a population.

Where is the God created “Adam” – Hebrew for “mankind?” The God of men and women. Where is our real God hiding?

We’ll never find Him until we take God the Machno Man and change Him to not be in mankind’s image and likeness but rather in His own image and likeness. Of course in order to do this we must give up our ideas of who we want God to be and, rather, seek to find the God Who IS.

It would seem that the God that we have created was created by men. I wonder what God would be like if He was the creation of women?