How quickly time flies when one is immersed in reading a subject… just spent an hour reading the last chapter in William Dever’s Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel, and another hour skimming a couple of essays in Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays on Ancient Israel in Honor of William G. Dever, all part of my long promised Page (now Pages, in rough draft) about “myths and men”, which itself started out as a digression on tackling the topic of Did Jesus Exist? …. please pardon the multiple levels of digression here…

Anyway, something Dever wrote in Did God Have a Wife? struck me as being particularly relevant to the election, Mitt Romney, and President Obama.

Summarizing here: the androcentric religion that became the white (European) male dominant structure, which was indeed imposed (by force) onto many other parts of the world, fails ( in a perspective like that of Dever, now a non-traditional monotheist) at addressing the needs of the larger world. To Dever these needs of course are religious in nature, but I would expand and generalize that to any human need.

Mitt Romney, partly due to his Mormonism but even more so to his elite status as a controlling member of America Inc., is the representative of Androcentric Religion, the power of the male (white) to run mankind. Barack Obama represents, not just because of his Kenyan father but also because of his academic training and sympathies toward feminist worldviews, the anti-Androcentric Religion.

Because we often mention fundamentalists here, and their outlets like WND and the AFA, we often do analyze current social dynamics with religious tincture, but much of our main stream media, as it is called, tries hard to ignore the religious conflicts that are going on in our society.

Just as patristic religious leaders in late antiquity eviscerated official Jewish religion from its more feministic (and polytheistic) roots, and thus (in Dever’s eyes) stripping away essential characteristics of the monotheistic God, so to our society, should it revert to the androcentric national-religion (typified perfectly in Mormon doctrine) will strip American society of essential characteristics of our composite populace.

Anyway… just a random thought on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.