Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

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Philo Sofee
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Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

I can't find the thread where someone recommended this book to me, and I have it and am reading it now. It is quite good, frankly, better than I expected. It will help me make some good podcasts on my new series on the weird and wonderful Mormon understanding of God(s).

I just wanted whoever it was to know I am reading it. I've gotten to page 77, so not too far along. Her interpretations of God's feet was actually very enjoyable! Count me impressed. I love how she is showing the ancient Near Eastern context (sorry to use the European bias label, she prefers ancient south-west Asia. I can't blame her in a way.

One thing surprising I had not actually caught, is the GIGANTIC size of the gods, including the biblical God. The mythologization back then of hugeness is probably in parallel to the mythologization in our day of tying God to infinity - which I am doing podcasts on, and showing the truly fatal problem with it all. Joseph Smith really blew it at D & C 20:17 saying God is infinite, but then again, in his day, the cosmos was the steady state cosmos, infinite for all they knew in 1820's. It wasn't until later the Big Bang evidences came out showing the universe is finite and expanding, which is fundamentally fatal to Mormonism's God as I will explain in my new series of podcasts once I lay the background down concerning infinity and the problem of applying it to any deity whatsoever.
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

Requiring what I had snippets on n the other thread.
God’s first sexual encounter occurs long before the birth of the Nephilim. In the Garden of Eden, food from the sacred tree might have been off the menu, but sating sexual appetites was divinely ordained. God’s pairing of Adam and Eve seemingly comes to fruition when Eve bears Cain–the first human child. But her emphatic declaration at the birth of her son credits God, not Adam, with paternity: ‘I have procreated a man with Yahweh!’[ 10]

This more literal translation of the Hebrew is rarely seen. Most renderings of this verse default to a theologically fudged interpretation, so that Eve is merely presented as claiming that Yahweh has ‘helped’ her to ‘acquire a man’, as any good fertility god might. But the very language of this Hebrew text signals a bodily dynamic well beyond this, for the woman’s words are pointedly precise: she is claiming that Yahweh has fathered her first child. There is nothing virginal about this birth. Eve’s boast is indicative of a female sexual agency wholly unlike the sanitized passivity of her later biblical antitype, the ‘Virgin’ Mary. Her words reveal she is God’s collaborative partner in the creation of new human life. But this proactive role also points to a long-lost mythic backstory to Eve’s character. Although in her biblical form she is a human woman, her choice of vocabulary is the language of goddesses: in asserting that she has ‘procreated’ a man, she uses a specialized, technical term for divine reproduction also used of goddesses in the myths from Ugarit.[ 11]

Indeed, like the Ugaritic goddess Athirat, Eve is called ‘Mother of all Living’, and even her name (hawwah in Hebrew) likely means ‘life giver’ or ‘living one’, evoking an epithet of Athirat in her glorious title ‘the Lady, the Living One, the Goddess’.[ 12] These features of Eve’s characterization in Genesis suggest that, before her biblical career, she was more akin to a life-bearing goddess appropriately located in the heavenly Garden of Eden–and hence a most suitable sexual partner for a male deity. In the Bible, however, God’s most significant and sexualized relationship is not with a goddess or a goddess-like figure, but with his other wife, Israel. The personification of a city, territory, nation or social group as a woman is well attested in (often masculinist, patriarchal) cultures across the globe, but in the biblical texts, the female personification of Israel plays a sustained and crucial role in articulating the intense and exclusive relationship between God and his worshippers. It is a relationship so intimate that his love for them is frequently expressed in the language of sexual desire. And yet, in some books of the Hebrew Bible, the erotic tone of this imagery not only moves from the emotional to the physical, but takes on a much darker hue, casting God as a powerful sexual predator, and Israel as a coquettish young girl. The book of Hosea offers a vivid example. Here, Israel is a capricious teenager whose sexual allure so intoxicates God, he falls to scheming obsessively and possessively to make her his wife. ‘I will now seduce her’, he says of Israel; ‘I will take her walking into the wilderness and speak to her heart… and there she will cry out’.[ 13] These words betray more than the romantic fantasy of a love-struck deity. God’s language here marks a shift from passion to threat: in claiming he will ‘seduce’ her, he uses a Hebrew expression more usually employed in the Bible to describe the rape of captive women.

And in describing Israel’s vocal response, he uses a term that can convey both the noise of sexual gratification and religious joy. God’s dangerous sense of sexual entitlement skews his planned attack on the girl into the distorted conviction that she will enjoy her rape–and scream in orgasmic ecstasy.[ 14] This image of sexual violation is unsettling enough. But nowhere in the Bible is the portrayal of God’s sex life more disturbing than in two stories in the book of Ezekiel. Like other biblical narrators, Ezekiel reasons that the military defeat and imperial subjugation that befell Yahweh’s people in the sixth century BCE was a divine punishment for worshipping other gods. Here, too, Israel is cast as God’s wife, but her whoring after foreign deities provokes her husband’s fury and punishment. According to Ezekiel, her wanton behaviour in marriage is the culmination of a long history of social and sexual deviancy. Their relationship begins in the wilderness, where God finds an abandoned baby girl, her umbilical cord still attached, deliberately cast away from the rest of humanity: ‘You were abhorred on the day of your birth’, scorns God, as he reminds her that she had been neither washed of birth blood, nor rubbed with a protective salt scrub and swaddled.[ 15] And yet God acknowledges her, commanding her to live and grow. Only when she has obediently matured to puberty does he notice her again. Reminiscing lasciviously about this subsequent encounter, God comments: ‘... your breasts were formed, your [pubic] hair had grown; you were naked and bare! I passed by you and looked at you: you were at the age for lovemaking. I spread the corner of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness; I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you… You became mine.’[ 16]

The voyeuristic tone to his words is not lost in this English translation, which barely manages to soften the graphic sexual nature of his actions: God’s gaze is upon the girl’s exposed sexual organs, moving him to cover her genitals (‘ nakedness’) with his own–his spreading cloak politely functioning here as an image of his mounting her, much as in the book of Ruth, in which the eponymous heroine urges a sleepy Boaz to have sex with her by spreading the corner of his cloak over her.[ 17] The sexual euphemisms continue, for it is by penetrating the girl’s body that God ‘enters into’ a binding covenant with her–an unequal power relationship in which the forging of the deity’s exclusive and proprietary claim to Israel is presented as the sexual consummation of a man’s possession of a bride: ‘you became mine’.[ 18] Jewish and Christian interpreters have tended to soften and sanitize this encounter–either by reductive means, so that the episode is ‘merely’ a metaphor or allegory depicting intense religious intimacy, or by fantasizing that romantic notions of a committed, heteronormative love find their archetype in God, so that he is the paradigmatic devoted husband. But this is wishful thinking–and it will not do. Ezekiel’s story is reflective of a patriarchal, masculinist culture, in which girls and women tended to be valued and defined in terms of their bodily configurations with men: as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, or sex-workers.

The biblical God cannot and should not be let off the hook. Here, he is a predatory alpha male, whose sexual entitlement entirely shapes the identity and fate of this displaced and vulnerable young girl. Indeed, it is only after sex that God formally rehabilitates his young bride by means of actions reminiscent of the rituals denied her at birth: he bathes her, washing away the dried blood of birth and the wet blood of puberty, and then rubs her not with salt, but with sacred oil. Her objectification continues as he dresses her in rich fabrics and puts soft leather sandals on her feet; he decorates her with earrings, a nose ring, bangles, a necklace and crown, so that she looks like a statue of a goddess in a temple. He gives her the ritual foods commonly offered to deities–choice flour, honey and fragrant oil–and transfers her from the wilderness to civilization, where she is rapturously celebrated for the beauty God has bestowed upon her. And here she is fixed: an unspeaking, passive ornament of her husband’s hegemonic, sexualized masculinity.
I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying it. It only gets better. I hope to get back and provide some other pieces and thoughts. I’m excited though. Glad it is already working to inspire you.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

Oh yes, I apologize I couldn't remember it was you! Oh yes, this book will generate MANY podcasts from me through time. She writes wonderful and witty doesn't she? So glad you recommended her to me amigo!
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by DrStakhanovite »

The Master Reviewer beat you to it:
A Guy Who Totally Read The Book and Didn't Skim It wrote:God: An Anatomy is a massive tome that, including endnotes, extends to very nearly 600 pages. But its length is only one reason, and not the major one, why I can’t simply recommend it for all Latter-day Saint readers. It is most emphatically not a Latter-day Saint book.
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Moksha »

At least Joseph never turned himself into a swan just so he could get jiggy with almost 15-years-old Leda!!!
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dastardly stem
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 5:11 am
The Master Reviewer beat you to it:
A Guy Who Totally Read The Book and Didn't Skim It wrote:God: An Anatomy is a massive tome that, including endnotes, extends to very nearly 600 pages. But its length is only one reason, and not the major one, why I can’t simply recommend it for all Latter-day Saint readers. It is most emphatically not a Latter-day Saint book.
So cool DCP reviewed this on his blog. I could have anticipated the excitement from a delightful apologist like DCP. It does appear he caught at least a few reviews before skimming then typing up his own ode to God’s body.

Still looking forward to the ideas forming in BYP’s head to contrast DCP’s Jones-ing over the perceived LDS vindication he announced in his review.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
dastardly stem
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

she organizes her treatment anatomically, from the ground up. It is comprised of five sections (Part I, “Feet and Legs”; Part II, “Genitals”; Part III, “Torso”; Part IV, “Arms and Hands”; Part V, “Head”) and an epilogue. In turn, each part is made up….
I won’t go into detail regarding the four chapters of Part II — can you see why I don’t recommend this book for all Latter-day Saints? — but I’ll cite the anonymous review of her book that appeared in The Economist: “This book is a great rebel shout… [A] rollicking journey through every aspect of Yahweh’s body, from top to bottom (yes, that too) and from inside out. … Ms. Stavrakopoulou has almost too much fun.”8
She mentions genitals? How did I miss that When I skimmed it? So offensive.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 5:11 am
The Master Reviewer beat you to it:
A Guy Who Totally Read The Book and Didn't Skim It wrote:God: An Anatomy is a massive tome that, including endnotes, extends to very nearly 600 pages. But its length is only one reason, and not the major one, why I can’t simply recommend it for all Latter-day Saint readers. It is most emphatically not a Latter-day Saint book.
His almost opening comment is the singular most revealing - "And yet, her very lack of belief also frees her from any obligation to grind theological axes and permits her to go with her data."
Amazing apologists cannot see the forest from the trees. Yet, I do understand his review all right. He's wrong having fallen for Joseph Smith's truly impossible "infinite God" of D & C 20:17, as I am noting the problems of infinity with God in my new series of podcasts. I think Shulem's analysis of the First Vision up in the Celestial is also going to get podcast attention, if not direct live video. He has also shown the problematic nature of Joseph Smith outright lying about always teaching separate Gods with bodies. That is just false, and Peterson I suspect does, in fact, know better, but tows the lame apologetic line...
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

dastardly stem wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 6:17 am
she organizes her treatment anatomically, from the ground up. It is comprised of five sections (Part I, “Feet and Legs”; Part II, “Genitals”; Part III, “Torso”; Part IV, “Arms and Hands”; Part V, “Head”) and an epilogue. In turn, each part is made up….
I won’t go into detail regarding the four chapters of Part II — can you see why I don’t recommend this book for all Latter-day Saints? — but I’ll cite the anonymous review of her book that appeared in The Economist: “This book is a great rebel shout… [A] rollicking journey through every aspect of Yahweh’s body, from top to bottom (yes, that too) and from inside out. … Ms. Stavrakopoulou has almost too much fun.”8
She mentions genitals? How did I miss that When I skimmed it? So offensive.
I did as well in my FAIR Apologetics paper back at the first FAIR conference in California in my paper The Archaeology of God. But her research displayed far more genital demonstrations in the Bible of Yahweh than I was aware of at that time. I just read it tonight up to page 116.
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

dastardly stem wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 6:11 am
DrStakhanovite wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 5:11 am
The Master Reviewer beat you to it:

So cool DCP reviewed this on his blog. I could have anticipated the excitement from a delightful apologist like DCP. It does appear he caught at least a few reviews before skimming then typing up his own ode to God’s body.

Still looking forward to the ideas forming in BYP’s head to contrast DCP’s Jones-ing over the perceived LDS vindication he announced in his review.
Knowing now that DCP has reviewed it, I will emphatically do my own review - perhaps on a live where I can show slides as well... it is a book that needs to be talked about from all sides. Not so amazingly DCP has entirely ignored the one book that destroys Joseph Smith's view of the Godhead, James Lindsay's very important and succinct book Dot, Dot, Dot... God Plus Infinity = Folly. I am using a lot of it in my new podcasts on God at Backyard Professor.org
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