Athina: The Dark Side Of Victory WHY SHOULD WOMEN AND GIRLS WORSHIP A MALE GOD?

Athina: The Dark Side Of Victory
WHY SHOULD WOMEN AND GIRLS WORSHIP A MALE GOD?

The book took its present form in some interesting settings.

I spent nights on the beach in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where a vast, voyeuristic, luminescent moon suspended itself on an eerily calm and imposing Atlantic ocean. As I sat on the edge of the earth, with my feet in the warm, caressing water, the waves kept a constrained distance, certainly in an effort to minimize the twin impacts of my phobias - my fear of water and of open space (hydrophobia and agoraphobia).

In San Francisco, I also found the right writing environment on another beach, Ocean Beach, when the ironically noisy Pacific Ocean was at its most discordant.

Most of my writing sessions took place on the edge of a twin bed (with a tiny console for a table) in a San Francisco hotel where the incessant chants of a Buddhist kept reminding me of the diversity of revelations.

Like the young stars of Athina: The Dark Side of Victory, whose teachers range in age from between 18 and 112, I came up acquiring knowledge in a multi-generational setting, with my great-grandmother, who believed strongly in a transcendent female God and in her rulership to come, as the fountain of that knowledge.

After obtaining two graduate degrees and entering into college/university teaching, I spent years in the publish-or-perish tradition, on which academic promotions depended. Later, other demands of my professional life kept me tethered to my own academic writing and supervision of student writing projects for years while ideas for books such as this one kept piling up in files and boxes. So now, we have one down and others should not be far behind.

Who knows, maybe one day, after I will have completed the series, of which Athina: The Dark Side of Victory is the first, I may even write about my favorite pet of all time, the black mutt I had when I was a few months old. As soon as I could walk, he became my companion every time I sneaked into the small courthouse where my father clerked for a friendly old Judge. Several years later, my mother was more than shocked to hear me recite, in excruciating detail, my excursions with my beloved mutt. That dog loved to eat! As for me, I have never been a fan of foods. The one food that used to get my attention (pepperoni and mushroom pizza), I haven't had in quite a while because they don't seem make it like they used to.

Years ago, when I was about the same age as Athina, the youngest of the warrior students in my book, Athina: The Dark Side of Victory, I had a life-changing experience that served as the catalyst for The Athina Project.

As a young student in a Catholic school, I learned from an intellectually open and bold nun about a transcendent, powerful, fair, attentive, protective, merciful, magisterial female God whose reign would "dawn" at the appointed time.

The revelations of the essence of the female God were contained in a worn manuscript she carried with her and shared with her favorite pupils when she came down to the library.

The roles of girls and women in the new age of this God were very clear to us, but when we would ask how we were expected to understand or believe some of the mysteries surrounding Her and Her coming, she would say, "The same way you believe the godhood of Jesus, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, transubstantiation, the assumption into heaven of various mortals...." Then she would ask, "What does the catechism say about these other mysteries?" We would answer, "The catechism says we cannot understand, but we believe."

As to some difficult and vast vocabularies involved in the revelations, she would say, "You're intelligent and resourceful girls! What are the dictionaries and the encyclopedias for?"

When she suddenly left, we didn't have to wonder why.

My interests in the gender of God and the transcendent female God in particular were rekindled many times in the course of my education and career. This book is the first publication to emerge from my compilation of files of material on the subject.

In October 2008, I again researched the topic, "The gender of God" and "The gender of Allah" to examine the status of this timelessly intriguing issue. The following represent summaries, questions, and comments related to my findings:

• Yahweh (God) was an amalgam of Middle Eastern pagan gods and goddesses, including El, the father-god, so God possesses male and female characteristics.
• God has no body parts; therefore, God has no genitalia, male or female.
• God did not self-reveal as male. Revelation was transcribed from the male perspectives of the writers, who considered women inferior, deserving of no respect.
• Allah has no gender. The masculine pronoun, "He," is used only as a sign of respect.
• Although Allah has no gender, He is described as Prophet Mohamed described Him.
• The neuter pronoun, "it" did not exist in Hebrew. Though the pronoun "she" existed, the writers of the Old Testament deferred to the use of "he," "by default," in reference to God.
• The use of masculine pronouns in the Hebrew Scriptures does not mean that God is male; however, representing God as female is a false representation.
• Using a de-masculinized language to describe God as a way of appeasing feminist rabbis is heretical.
• God's maleness cannot be changed at the whim of humans.
• Worshiping a female God is like worshiping an idol.
• The acceptance of the assumption that God is male has continued to be used to create and justify the domination, subjugation, and oppression of girls and women in all spheres of life, including in the family, in politics, religion, economics, the workplace, marital relations, procreation, and so on.
• If God created men and women in God's image, why is God imaged, affirmed, projected, acknowledged as father and not mother?
• For Jews, God as a parent is better represented by a father than a mother.
• Would a female God have instigated the slaughter of Her children in the World Wars (in the Holocaust, especially) and other world conflicts? (Where soldiers have been hailed as "doing God's work").
• Would the revealed female God be complacent in the rampant violence against girls and women?
• The continuing feminization of Jewish liturgies is a reckless act, harmful to the unity of world Jewry.
• If the God of the Bible is the God of male Jews and the God of the Quran (Koran) is the God of male Arabs, then this God is neither the God of women, non-Jewish Europeans (including the Germans), non-Jewish Americans, Africans, Asians, and other non-Jews and non-Arabs in the world.
• Men created the conflicts and violence that have continued to devastate the world; women should realize that it will take a male God to destroy evil and arrogant men.
• The current cosmetic modification of god-language by some Jewish and Christian denominations to distract women from exploring revelations about the transcendent female God is wasted effort and doomed to fail.
• The metaphors used to describe the male God-wisdom, intelligence, toughness-are not male attributes.
• There is no need to prove the existence of the female God by searching for fetishes in the forms of fertility goddesses with enormous breasts or the avenger goddess, wearing testicles as trophies (neither of these represents the Bona Dea or the Great Goddess of Athina: The Dark Side of Victory or the Goddess mentioned in Olympia Dukakis' Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress).


Athina: The Dark Side of Victory is set at the intersection between the old polytheistic world of Zeus, Hera, and the others, the father-god/son-god/new son-god/messenger of god area, and the search for the transcendent female God.

The choice of the Olympics as the grand backdrop is pivotal. It relates to the important theme of usurpation of female power by men and what the smart, inventive, diligent, intrepid, pragmatic, strong-willed, future-oriented girls and women (aged between 12 and 112) decided to do about it. The women and girls disputed the notion that Zeus founded the greatest games in the universe. Based on evidence from the scholarly Hera nuns, especially Sister Herodota, the head of the Chroniclers, Hera was the founder. With their instigation of the earth-shattering conflicts in the book, the Hera nuns may have opened a Pandora's box.

To my son and daughter, for whom I live.

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