What Gender is God? Is God he or she?

The Abrahamic (Semitic) God is referred to as father and the personal pronoun for father is He.

Hebrew Bible portrays through grammar and imagery God as male.

Christian traditions, God is referred to as “the Father”, “the Son” and “the Holy Spirit” – all three of them implicitly invoke masculine sex, hence male. Jesus tells us that God is like a father and he spoke of God in the masculine gender.

In the Quran, God is most often referred to with the pronouns that are commonly translated as “Him”. Allah who calls Himself He: “He is Allah, other than whom there is no deity, Knower of the unseen and the witnessed. He is the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful.”

The reason is simple – the society was highly patriarchal when the Semitic beliefs of gods were established.

However, in today’s context, to surpass gender based discrimination and uphold equality, few interpreters claim that Abrahamic Gods don’t have a gender. They substantiate the claim pointing out the differences in languages, dialects, grammar and translation. But on ground reality believers follow a male God. Probably true. But I do not know if followers of Yahweh, Jehovah and Allah would accept it. Even if they can give credence to the God as gender-less “IT”, the “She” God won’t be acceptable for most of the people who follow Semitic religions.

Church of Sweden is encouraging its clergy to use the gender-neutral term “God” instead of referring to the deity as “he” or “the Lord”. In many places, instead of the traditional “Father, son and Holy Ghost” Priests open their services by referring to the gender-neutral phrase “in the name of God and the Holy Trinity”.

Few thousand years ago before creating beliefs of Semitic God, ancient Vedas introduced an abstract concept of God.
In Vedic Sanskrit (Veda bhasha which is not the classic Sanskrit), the pronouns used to address God are “YASYA” and “TASYA” which are third person neutral pronouns – genderless! Thus, the Vedas refrain themselves from characterizing God as a Masculine or Feminine entity. …

Continue reading at
The GOD ILLUSION
by Udaylal Pai (Author)

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