God’s gender

Is God male or female? It troubles both rationalists and those of immense faith. Since God is formless and absolute in nature, followers don...

Is God male or female? It troubles both rationalists and those of immense faith. Since God is formless and absolute in nature, followers don’t bother about gender identity. But pluralists reserve the right to worship a chosen form.

History is full of phases when God was worshipped as a female deity. Mat and Hathor in ancient Egypt, Leda, Danae and Io in ancient Greece, Lokamaate, Vejamate and others in ancient Latvia, Anahita in ancient Persia, Tara in Buddhism, Chandika in Jainism and a good number of Hindu mother goddesses are a few illustrious examples. Obviously many of these religions are no longer practiced today. Therefore, although modern practising pluralists have still such workable solution, the monists, who comprise of a very large population, cannot provide any clearcut answers on God’s gender, though they oppose the pluralists.

Generally, while rejecting pluralists, they have very categorical answers that there is no need of any type of personalised definition of God because God is absolute and hence above any personification. At first this is very strong in logic and has very wide appeal too. But when the matter comes to the point of addressing God in prayer, they conveniently switch over to personalised terminology and God is always referred to as ‘He’ and not ‘She’. ‘God’ may sound neutral, but as soon as they need a pronoun, they switch to a male option.

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Let us think over the two main virtues associated with God. The first one is that God is the absolute truth and above anything and everything. The second one is that He is the creator and protector of humanity and therefore the father of humanity. But reproduction is the joint effort of the male and female, in which the female’s share is much greater. Moreover, the soul enters into a human when he or she is still in the womb. In ancient days, the ceremony of putting life into an idol in a temple was supposed to be one of the highest creative jobs of a priest. Even if someone does not believe in this practice today one cannot deny that the highest form of creation happens in the womb of the mother.

Coming to the first virtue, God is an absolute being and sum total of all matters and souls. ‘All the souls’ enter the body through their mother’s womb. If we look at various religious accounts, nowhere is it mentioned that souls are divided into male and/or female. It will be injustice to God to limit gender to masculinity, since the most important job of transporting the souls and multiplying the human race is being done by the female.