The Abrahamic tradition
includes those who claim the
Biblical Abraham as their
tribal and spiritual Father, and the centrality
of the creation accounts in
Genesis as the primary source for understanding
intimacy, namely, how and why males and females were created.
This is the
faith tradition of Jews, Christians, Muslims and Mormons.
Curiously, the Abrahamic tradition has two
stories of origin. In chapter one
there is an upbeat, poetic, wonder-struck and positive
story about God creating the world and humans. “And God
saw that it was good.” In this story, “God
created man in his own image, in the image of God he
created him; male and female he created
them. God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful
and increase in number; fill the earth
and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea
and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on
the ground.”
This “good” story has nothing in it that
disturbs a seeker. It is not overly
profound—it does not account for evil, for example. It gives
dominion to the human over nature, but the presentation could
rightly, as it often is, be interpreted to mean benevolent
stewardship. The unexplored but simply inferred relationship between
males and females is that they were created together and so are equal
in worth.
Of significant note
is—although the tradition preaches
male monotheism—that there is an implied
polytheism in this account, the verse,
“Let us make man in our image, in our
likeness.”
This “us”
is a clear reference to the existence of gods, and,
since this is a creation account, of goddesses. There
are human males and females—parents, and divine males and females—a
goddess Mother and a Father god. Although humans are created, there
is no cause to question that
this creation issued forth from the coupling of a Mother
goddess with a Father god. As on Earth, so in the heavens, the existence
of a family—human and divine—is assumed.
Continue—Abrahamic
tradition
