God, Women, Church.

"God is a misogynist. When you really spend time and look at things God said, if you have a brain on you, you've got to raise an eyebrow and say this God is a macho pig. I mean, if Sylvester Stallone said this stuff we'd be giving him a very hard time and he has said some of this stuff and we have given him a hard time -- he deserved it. But the point is the Christian god hasn't honored women. Sorry, the cat's out of the bag and it's just not cool so it's something we have to address..."

-Tori Amos

Painting - Willem De Kooning -Woman l

I have a heap of friends that have left church citing similar reasons. And It's hard to know what to say. I know God isn't a macho Pig. But sometimes I feel uneasy bordering on embarrassed about the way women are portrayed/spoken of in The Bible. Perhaps I feel even more embarrassed about how they are treated in the church today. I don't think of Jesus as a particularly macho sports loving, rugby jersey wearing man- though he was a carpenter so he may well have been on the macho side (in my mind John the Baptist was the macho one) . I don't often think of his maleness, neither do I think of God as male. Yet it just feels weird and somehow sacrilegious to say 'She' instead of 'He'. But if the trinity is gendered that does alienate me somewhat.

In another quote of Tori Amos that I have not included she states that she is frustrated that Jesus never married and that to her it seems that if he married he would have no longer been perfect, in her words "he would have been tarnished by a woman". Yet Jesus made it clear that women were/are important to his ministry.