If human beings are made in God's image & likeness, why do humans have gendered souls?

[abucs]

LOL! Tell you what – why don’t you watch this video? In particular, watch at about the 7 minute mark, when the interviewer asks the researcher whether the notion in pop science about “men’s and women’s brains being different” is true. She rolls her eyes and tells him that no, it’s not true. And then, the next researcher, at the university, is asked the same question. And he responds, “no; that’s an old-fashioned idea… most of that research has been refuted.”

But hey, it’s always fun when my interlocutor helps prove my point.

I think right here you demonstrate both the weakness and superficiality of your way of thinking. This may be difficult to accept but a roll of the eyes and a quote from an academic does not actually PROVE anything.

A good documentary presents both sides of an issue. This is what the presenter did. He presented the dogmatic position you hold as expressed by the Norwegian academics and then went to gender research departments in the U.S. and England and saw results which suggest otherwise. He then presented this research back to your Norwegian academics who had no answer except to admit their position was based on ideology.

The presenter asked them after viewing the research on what scientific basis they held their opinions and there was deafening silence. The weakness and superficiality of their position was there for all to see. The fact that you refer only to the start of the documentary where opinions were stated unchallenged tells me that you, for the moment cannot intelligently discuss this topic because you are filtering out what you cannot answer.

Somehow a roll of the eyes carries more weight than several presented scientific studies.

There’s a distinct difference there, though. People are born with their skin color; they learn gender roles through observation and personal experience, though.

Part of the documentary that went to air but was not included in the 38 minute youtube showed another researcher who investigated cases of children who were born of an ambiguous sex. That is, their genitalia was somewhere between male and female. The documentary showed that in such cases the doctors have to make a decision one way or the other in operating on the baby to remove or adjust the genitalia. Usually the decision went in favour of keeping female genitalia because it was easier to fashion surgically speaking.

The researcher followed these children’s development and in later life there was a very large incidence of what is called gender identity crises. Many of these children, grown to adults, identified with the other gender and many used surgery to switch.

As far as social sciences can go, this is rock hard PROOF that gender is more than physical genitalia and conditioning.

These children were brought up as a certain gender. There ‘social conditioning’ was of a certain gender. These children and sometimes parents had no idea that there was any ambiguity at birth and yet there was a very high incidence of the child ‘knowing’ they were not the gender that the physical attributes and social conditioning suggested.

There was obviously something else other than physicality and social conditioning.

OK, I make the decision to stop corresponding with people when I believe they are ceasing to make sense, ceasing to actually respond to what I am saying; and purposely being close minded about evidence presented.

I have reached that point with yourself.

 

[Gorgias]

A good documentary presents both sides of an issue. This is what the presenter did. He presented the dogmatic position you hold as expressed by the Norwegian academics and then went to gender research departments in the U.S. and England and saw results which suggest otherwise. He then presented this research back to your Norwegian academics who had no answer except to admit their position was based on ideology.

Oh - my mistake! I didn’t realize that it was a “let me capture the reactions of the researchers with whom I disagree now, so that I can demonize them later” kind of study! And so, I lost interest in it.

So, may I summarize? It seems that the answer that this comedian (oops, sorry, ‘documentarian’) reaches is “it’s a combination of biology and culture.” Fair enough. For the sake of argument, I’ll grant you this assertion.

Now… your appeal to this video was in support of your position that God is gendered, correct? Let’s see what this video does to support your position, then. The researchers in this video assert that:

• Humans learn gender roles through interactions in human society and in human cultures
• Humans are ‘selected’, in an evolutionary way, for character traits by gender that help them fulfill reproductive roles.
• Humans are affected by testosterone in utero in a way that builds up predispositions that are perceived of in gender-related ways.

Does this help your thesis that God is gendered? Hmm… let’s see: God did not “learn through human society and culture”; God is not a product of evolution; God does not have a body, is not affected by testosterone, and never existed “in utero”.

All of the answers in the video you present, in fact, demonstrate that gender is determined by evolution, physical development, and societal interaction. None of these are features of God. How is it, then, that you suggest that God is gendered, if none of these determinative features are ones that God experiences?

“Is everything that others do ‘weak studies’?” Oddly enough, each of the researchers he interviewed seem to say “yes.”

The presenter asked them after viewing the research on what scientific basis they held their opinions and there was deafening silence.

Actually, there wasn’t deafening silence. (Are you simply filtering out what you cannot answer? ) What there was, however, was interesting: at 34:50, the social scientist says “it’s sociological, not biological”… but, at 31:40, the evolutionary scientist’s answer is “it’s evolution.” The dynamic here is that each researcher sees the answer in terms of his own discipline. “Is everything that others do, ‘weak studies’?” the documentarian asks. It seems that the answer is “yes,” as given by each of the scientists he interviews. Yet, the documentarian castigates the sociologists while praising the biologists, although each has the same low opinion of the work in the other disciplines. Hmm…

The fact that you refer only to the start of the documentary where opinions were stated unchallenged tells me that you, for the moment cannot intelligently discuss this topic because you are filtering out what you cannot answer.

No, actually, the fact that I referred only to the start of the documentary should tell you that the prospect of watching a 40 minute video in Norwegian with English subtitles, when the first fifth showed no sign of supporting your assertions, led me to hit the ‘pause’ button. Thanks for encouraging me to watch it all the way through. It helped solidify the case for gender as something that God does not share.

OK, I make the decision to stop corresponding with people when I believe they are ceasing to make sense, ceasing to actually respond to what I am saying; and purposely being close minded about evidence presented.

I think I’ve responded to the evidence you presented, in a fair way. Tell me – do you think that the research demonstrates that there’s any reason whatsoever to conclude that God might be gendered? If so, might you point me to the location in the video that leads you to that conclusion?