Current mood:	silly
Entry tags:	religion

For snowy_kathryn
snowy_kathryn has been having a hell of a time marking badly-written religious studies papers. I thought I'd write something similar, painfully similar, to what she's been reading. And you just might enjoy it, too. I know I'm going to get a kick out of reading it. And to keep with the spirit of things, I will not read this over before handing it in. Few of the students appear to have proofread, so who am I to buck a tradition?

Enjoy!

By the way, one sentence and one phrase really comes from one of the papers. See if you can find which ones, and you'll win a virtual prize.

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What the Divine Feminine Tells Us About Religion and Gender

God is usually not portrayed as a femail, except when she is. This paper will prove that female representations of deities are important for showing women the better way to live. By using the examples of goddesses in monotheistic male religion, like Artemis and Lilith, mother of demons.

When God died on the cross, he brang the Virgin Mary's prupose into light. Her vigrinal life culminated in the death of Jesus Christ (the Messiah), something we can all aspire to in our own lives.

But let's get back to the beginning. In the beginning, Eve was the original woman, except when it was Lilith, the first wife of Adam in Eden. Eve made a mistake by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and for that we are all doomed. But Mary had faith and got pregnant by God instead of sex, so when she gave birth to Jesus Christ (the Messiah), her hyphen was intact. This made it possibly for Jesus Christ (the Messiah) to die for our sins, giving us the opportunity to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the lord.

So without Mary, there could have been no Jesus. Virgins who got pregnant without having sex were very rare in the ancient world, and Mary was no exception. Women in the Bible were often portrayed negatively, because they had sex with the wrong people (like Potiphar's wife and Dinah), but Mary fixed that by remaining intact and holy. There is no direct way to prove that Mary was a virgin since that would entail us to travel through time and see if the hymen was still intact but this is impossible in every sense. But the Bible says she was a virgin, so this is true, in every sense of the word.

You can see the influence this has made on today's society by investigating abstinence programs. These programs are often put in place by evangelical Christian groups, and evangelical Christian groups like Mary. So that shows the female God's impact on reality. Girls and women who go on to adopt a chaste lifestyle become successful at maintaining their gender purity, and have a better understanding of the divine than girls who have never heard of Mary and have sex too much and indiscriminately. It also helps them learn to marry better and avoid a marriage which placed a female beneath her husband.

Artemis was often a virgin, too, except when she was not, but she always was. She tried her best to maintain gender purity in her nymph camps. In fact, she had Actaeon turned into a stag and devoured by his dogs when he had the nerve to infiltrate her camp and see her in a state of undress. Artemis was the ultimate feminine goddess, because she had many breasts. This is likely why Actaeon had to die.

Mary did not have many breasts, but it did not make her any less unworthy. Many portrayals of Mary (the mother of Jesus Christ) show her in a state of lactation, which makes sense since she is represented as a mother. Milk is a fluid, just like blood, and wine was used to represent the blood of Christ. So it makes sense that the milk of Mary would be included in pictorial representations of the Messiah's mother.

So by reading about Mary, Artemis, and Lilith, we can see that Christianity has a profound and deep impact on the lives of Christian women everywhere. The female can be just as divine as the male, and sometimes even more. This helps women everywhere.