In my first week at L’Abri, I became consumed with developing a model for human interaction with supernature. This was a result of being introduced to the transcendentals (truth, beauty, goodness), and my fascination has since not waned.
The model, as I last touched it, was as follows:
RATIONAL: Father – Truth – Faith – Mind
EMOTIONAL: Son – Goodness – Hope – Heart
SPIRITUAL: Spirit – Beauty – Love – Soul
supernaturenature
1) Truth: that which is worthy of faith.
2) Goodness: that which is worthy of hope.
3) Beauty: that which is worthy of love.
4) Faith: our mind’s attempt to interact with truth.
5) Hope: our heart’s attempt to interact with goodness.
6) Love: our soul’s attempt to interact with beauty.
7) Mind: our best tool for understanding truth.
8) Heart: our best tool for understanding goodness.
9) Soul: our best tool for understanding beauty.
To test the accuracy of this model, I also attempted to switch out the transcendentals and their corresponding verbs with their opposites.
Truth :: Falseness
Goodness :: Evil
Beauty :: Corruption
Faith :: Distrust
Hope :: Despair
Love :: Hate
Falseness – Distrust
Evil – Despair
Corruption – Hate
There are a few more dimensions to this model that I can’t do with text, so if I have any luck at resurrecting my skills of an artist, I’ll finish my explanation with that.
This is fairly off-topic, but I would be interested in seeing a study on how many people who leave the Christian faith or who become/remain atheists, switch to Wicca or paganism, etc, are women. Because so much of Christian metaphor and symbolism is father-son, and the most women join the family is mother-son. What about daughters? It gives this feeling like women have no part in the family, except as a medium between the men. Not very appealing. Whereas Wicca has the idea of the goddess, and of daughters, which I think is much more appealing for girl-types. And when I think about it, most stereotypes of Wiccans or pagans are girls. So, just wanted to put that out there, since I can rely on you to consider it seriously ^_^
Traditionally, Christian leaders haven’t made a habit of understanding or keeping track of the demographic of their audience, which is always a repulsing factor to everyone, including women. I do know that 80% of Islam’s converts in the West are women, and Islam is, by doctrine, a religion of firm patriarchy.
It’s generally agreed that God has no actual gender, and the Bible occasionally uses female and mothering metaphor to describe [his] actions. The feminists I’ve heard speak on the matter find Jesus appealing because of the way in which he treated women.
If anything, I’d say the biggest problem in this matter is Paul in 1 Corinthians, where he simultaneously wrote the definitive prose on love, and then managed to stick his foot in his mouth and tell women not to speak in church.
Unfortunately, I don’t know any real statistics. I’d like to know too. 🙁