Traditional (elite male-centered, elite male-imagined) theology often engages in theodicy, or an attempt to find a reason for, or justify, the presence of evil in spite of a supposed omnipotent yet all-loving Divine. This I feel is a philosophical quandary that can only arise by splitting the Divine from nature. Evil is man-made; to my way of thinking it is doing something when one is fully aware of – even precisely because of – the suffering and harm it will cause. To be in this state one is as disconnected from Source, from Goddess, from Nature, as it is surely possible to be. It is precisely this disconnection, I believe, that ultimately leads to evil acts.
How can there ever be any justification for the death of a child or the rape of a woman? For the suffering meted out to other beings on a daily basis? To the destruction of the life-giving powers of the Earth? To even attempt to justify is to engage with a patriarchal and androcentric way of thinking about the Divine; to see things as ‘God’s Will’ or all part of some overarching divine plan, or to believe that suffering is punishment for ‘sins.’ Such things surely have no place in a Goddess-centered, creation affirming spirituality. Suffering that results from non man-made events, such as sickness and death, is perhaps harder to accept. In Goddess thealogy we can see this as part of the circle of life, death and regeneration, but that does not mean we do not weep or mourn or struggle not to seek reasons where there are none. Nevertheless I believe some of our fear of death has arisen due to the patriarchal world system we are now part of. Materialistic science tells us we are annihilated. Worse, that everything will be annihilated, with no hope of regeneration. The patriarchal religions tell us we will have a glorious afterlife – if we obey. If we are humble. If we suffer enough in this life. Millennia of this has led us to lose much of the reverence that our ancestors surely had for the Wheel of Life and its cycles. To my mind the question of omnipotence is as moot as that of justifying evil – it has no place in Goddess spirituality. If the Divine is omnipotent, that means the Divine could end the suffering of every small child, but chooses not to for its own ends; it doles out punishments and rewards seemingly in an arbitrary fashion; uses us as chess pieces in a game only it understands. That is anathema to me. An omnipotent Divine would be evil.Therefore Goddess is not omnipotent. She is all seeing; she engages with us; she calls us back to her over and over no matter how many times we stray; but our wills and actions are our own and are shaped by the many causes and conditions that have led us as a society further and further away from Her. I believe that when a child is murdered, a woman raped, Goddess, as us, as All, feels it. Our Goddess weeps. Our Goddess rages. In us and through us.
But not having omnipotence does not imply impotence. Goddess is All that Is. We are all subject to Her laws of nature, and what we do to others, we do to ourselves. Indeed Melissa Raphael (1996) suggests that we will not find any sense of redemption only by recognising our connection to nature and liberating ourselves and the Earth from the oppressive shackles of a destructive patriarchy, can we truly find redemption – not by confessing our personal sins and hoping for a transcendental deity to save us.
Raphael, Melissa Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality (1996) Sheffield Academic Press