By Fay Voshell
A great prophet once asked the question, “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots?” Later, Jesus Christ asked, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”
The prophet’s questions were meant to cause the listener to think about the nature of reality and human inability to change certain realities by fiat or wishful thinking. Declaring one’s self to be other than what one is created is an assault on material and human reality — an exercise in magical thinking that is bound to run up against the reality of the created order, including the reality of humankind created as male and female.
Yet a recent article in the Daily Beast contains a complete glossary of gender options. The glossary is currently comprised of 51 genders, among them an option to be “gender fluid,” that is, having the ability to flit from one gender to another according to what the individual would like to be. The idea is that though biologically one may be born with male or female parts, gender is a choice, not a fixed category. Instead, gender is determined by how an individual feels about his or her self.
According to the latest gender-bending theology, apparently each of us is able by mere wishful thinking about to transform ourselves from man to woman and from woman to man. It’s a bit like Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland: “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.”
The quote from Alice in Wonderland encapsulates via satirical means the theology of gender promoted by the increasingly radical left. And, yes, “genderism” is theology, as it deals with the intrinsic nature of human identity, humans’ place in the universe and humans’ concept of God.
The fact is that the Left’s struggle against the clear-cut distinctions between the sexes is not about civil rights. It is not about equality. The struggle amounts to a religious war between the Jewish/Christian view of humanity and the pagan view of mankind.
The belief that magical transformation of material reality, including the material reality of the human being can be accomplished by magical thinking of gods and goddesses is characteristic of the pagan worldview, a world the West left behind centuries ago, but to which it is rapidly returning. To believe the material world, including the human being, is infinitely malleable and capable of instantaneous transformation belongs more to the thought of ancient Greek and Roman mythology than it does to the Western concept of reality as defined by the Judeo/Christian tradition and modern science. The left’s current belief in human’s ability to achieve metamorphosis at will owes more to Ovid’s Metamorphosis than it does to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Paganism believes in metamorphosis by an act of will, human or divine. Transformation from one form to another is a constant theme in Greek mythology. The gods could become whatever or whomever they wished, often because they wished to have sex with humans who were unaware they were about to be raped by a god who had chosen the disguise of an animal. Zeus became a bull in order to seduce Europa. Once she was captured, Zeus returned to human form and raped her. The gods could also transform humans into flowers and trees. Ovid wrote that Apollo changed the nymph Daphne, with whom he wanted to have sex, into a laurel tree. Hyacinth suffered a similar fate. He was turned into a flower by the god Apollo, who fell in love with the youth’s beauty. The enchanting Leda was seduced by Zeus, who took the form of a swan.
In brief, pagan mythology is characterized by the extreme malleability of material reality, including the malleability of human beings and animals. It is anti-Christian and anti-science. The pagan viewpoint is the current mythology of the Left and is the dead end of the sexual revolution begun in the sixties and now culminating in the abolition of man and woman. The chief difference is that today’s gods and goddesses are human beings who abrogate to themselves the ability to metamorphose into whatever form (sex) they choose. The mantra “You can be whatever you want to be” has expanded to include transforming one’s self into a man or woman by proclamation of the divine, autonomous self. Self-will is as effectual as the will of the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology.
Add to the pagan myths of metamorphosis by an act of the will of gods the religion of gnosticism, which ran alongside of Greek/Roman mythology. Gnosticism proclaimed material reality is lower than spiritual reality, and that humans are trapped in a lower form. Thus the person who says he’s trapped in a male body by mistake and wants to change into a woman sees himself as ascending to a purer and wholly spiritual reality. Each of us can, at will, shake off this mortal coil of sex for a better state of being, becoming as gods.
What about us mere mortals who accept the reality of their God-given sex? What about the vast majority of us human beings who not only accept the reality of male and female, but actually rejoice in the fixed distinctions between the sexes as a blessing from the Almighty?
As it turns out, we are the ones who are regarded by the Left as delusional, hate-filled people. Though we align ourselves with the scientific knowledge that the human race is divided into male and female, though we believe that “gender” is not infinitely malleable; though we align ourselves with the knowledge every civilization past and present is built on, the Left regards us as delusional and lovers of myth. We are children who don’t realize the emperor really is clothed, not naked; that he is an android, not a man at all.
Like all mythical delusions and fantasies the Left embraces, force is required in order to get the common sense populace who believe in material reality to knuckle under to nonsensical myth. Political fantasies about reality always lead to tyranny.
The uppity person who notes the emperor has no clothes or that a man claiming to be a woman is in the ladies bathroom exposing himself is quashed as a bigot. How dare anyone question the made up reality of the Left’s gods or goddesses? That is not really a man you see. It is a woman. You, dear reader, are crazy, not the gods. You are no longer sane enough to be a member of the Planet called Fitness. Further, your pizzerias will be shut down if you don’t bow down to the gods of the Left. In the long run, you hate-filled people who don’t buy into the multitudinous fantasies of the gods — fantasies more than fifty-one and counting — must be destroyed entirely because you don’t agree with the Left’s religion. You are the problem because, as Carroll notes, you “don’t believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
In sum, we common sense religious types who believe Jewish and Christian theology actually matches reality — “male and female created He them” — are the ones who are guilty of magical thinking, not progressives. It’s the bitter clingers to religion who are certifiably insane, not the Left. It’s those who believe there are two created sexes and that marriage is between a man and a woman who are nut cases. We are the ones who are out of touch with reality. We should be as “logical” as the Left. We should be like Alice in Wonderland, who said:
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
“Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
Ultimately, the dead end of the sexual revolution is accession to the Devil’s lie to Adam and Eve when he urged them to eat the forbidden fruit and thus poison themselves with sin against the Reality of Good, Truth and Love: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
There can scarcely be a more deliberate attempt to separate ourselves from the God who created us than the attempt to reverse or annihilate the creation of humankind as man and woman. The hubris to claim we can by fiat reverse the image of God as man or woman by decree is insanity. We are not gods, even if we proclaim ourselves gods.
As theologian Paul Tillich wrote, we are inclined toward idolatry, including idolatry of self-worship — what Pastor David McGee and others call the unholy trinity of Me, Myself and I. Tillich writes that humans are inclined to worship anything but God, thinking we can “we ourselves can produce the presence of the divine Spirit.”
Or, to put it another way, the modern conceit is that we ourselves can be divine when we are actually mere mortals, male and female, in dire need of the divine intervention of redemption, wherein lies true freedom to be man and woman as God means us to be. Therein lies freedom and sanity. It does not lie in the insane idea that our identity as man and woman is completely fungible and can be created by the will of gods and goddesses.
The Left probably will not stop thinking like children who believe myths and fairy tales unless those with a grip on reality confront and demolish the mythology now mesmerizing the so-called “civil rights” movement.
As C.S. Lewis noted, even “A child can only indulge his imagination if he has the rock of stability to return to.” If the rock of reality of humanity as man and woman is destroyed, so is freedom to be human. There is no hope of freedom when magical thinking parades as logic and the natural order is repudiated in favor of myth.
Finally, the West cannot go the way of India without winding up with a sexual caste system comprised of multitudinous genders. India’s Supreme Court has created an official third sex for eunuchs and transgenders, saying, “It is the right of every human being to choose their gender.” There is absolutely no reason why the new gender caste, which is to be afforded special entitlements in government jobs and university placements, cannot expand into fifty-one or more privileged castes based on self-affirmed gender identity. All the new castes could be created out of thin air, with as many gender castes being created as there now are ethnicities — all clamoring for entitlements.
As the article states, “India’s transgenders include those who feel they were born into the wrong sex, men born with deformed genitals and effeminate boys disowned by their families and sent to live in eunuch colonies.”
While one can only feel compassion for those mutilated by their fellow men and those born with deformed genitals, the category to note is “those who feel they were born into the wrong sex.”
In the long run, the fabled ability to achieve self-metamorphosis provides opportunities as limitless as the stories in Greek mythology, but it may well lead to a new caste system similar to that so detested by the hated colonizers and Christian missionaries who repudiated reincarnation of the human race in favor of redemption of mankind through Christ. To divide society among variants of gender is to invite total disintegration of Western society because the variety of such categories is almost infinite, confined as they are only by imagination and not the reality of the created order.
The West must seek to return to and to vigorously defend the Christian view that the material world, including the human being, is designed by God; and that the created order of man as man and woman as woman cannot be changed without extreme spiritual and societal deformation.
It is one thing to wish to be like God.
It is quite another to wish to be a god.
Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Seminary, where she received a prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her articles have appeared in American Thinker, National Review, PJMedia, RealClearReligion and many other online publications. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
The Battle Cry 