| SAMPLE QUESTIONS AUTHOR MIGHT BE ASKED IN AN INTERVIEW |
| What do you mean by “Switching” to Goddess? Abandoning our faith in God? In all gods? | By ‘switching to goddess’ I mean moving from an emphasis on father, sky and warrior gods, to an emphasis on mother, earth and peace goddesses. We need peace, not war archetypes as our major guiding metasymbols. We need to move beyond warrior gods like Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh, Ares and Mars, and on to the Mother Goddesses many if not most of us worshipped before the birth of the state (and with it the birth of institutionalized warfare), around 4000 BC. |
| But look at all the ugly, mean, terrifying and warlike goddesses there are. How can you say goddess is any better than god? |
This is a good question, and one I get asked a lot. The answer is simple, though: most of the goddesses we know about today are merely PR makeovers of the real goddesses who came before them. For the past 6000 years, the war/sky/father god cultures have waged a PR campaign to smear any goddess they came across. This happened in the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe, in China, and all over the globe. So Athena, for example, was made into a cold war goddess and Aphrodite into a simpy sex doll. Hera was made into a nagging wife, and so on. On the other hand, some goddesses have managed to hang on to their healthy old characteristics. The Greek goddess Gaia, for example, and the German Mother Holle, are still fairly true to their pre-Iron-Age healthy selves. And then there are a whole host of Native American Great Mother Goddesses, like Thinking Woman and White Buffalo Woman. In my book I list goddesses from around the globe who seem to be versions of ancient Great Mother Goddesses who could be prototypes for the kind of deity we desperately need to return to. Some Goddess scholars, however, are quick to point out that Goddess is not all sun and light. She represents the whole life cycle – not just life but death too. After all, unless we move over for death, there won’t be any room for new life. |
When you say goddesses are our “ticket” into the future, what exactly do you mean? If we don’t exchange gods for goddesses the human species will come to an end? If so, aren’t you being a bit extreme? |
| Are you saying that the Christian God is a war god? What’s your evidence for that? |
| No male gods!? Isn’t that unfair? Isn’t that bad for men? | I’m definitely not saying we should drop all male deity. There are many good male gods. In the Western tradition alone there’s Dionysus, who – before the father/war/sky gods transformed him into a perpetually inebriated party animal – used to be a really nifty god. Apollo too is one of the better male gods – but as scholars note, before the sky/war/father gods got to him, he was probably fabulous. |
| In the book you say war began when humanity switched from goddesses to gods, back around 4000 BC. This is a fairly radical and extreme statement. If it’s true, why hasn’t anyone called it to the world’s attention before now? And what’s your evidence for it? |
| And you’re saying simply switching from gods back to goddesses will put an end to war? |
What do you mean by “starvation culture”? | Starvation culture is a way of life that dominates modern industrialized nations and that produces the institutionalized warfare, multivalent institutionalized violence, and the institutionalized lack of compassion that characterizes the industrialized nations today. Starvation culture began roughly 6000 years ago, when a large portion of the earth turned to desert, and hundreds of thousands of the world's first farmers starved to death. The few who survived did so through the rise of a brand new culture – one based on the psychotic behavior that characterizes long-starving social groups. Behaviors typical of starving people include an inability to sense the needs or pain of others; men going off and leaving their families to fend for themselves; packs of young people stealing from those younger, older, sicker and weaker; a lack of interest in anything but the feeding of the self; and a lack of interest in pleasures other than eating. Although the mother-child bond lasts longest, in the end, even mothers lose all sanity and begin to cannibalize their own children. Six thousand years ago, in a handful of seed groups, the above mix of behaviors lead to a fixed way of life based on insensitivity to others, abandonment, theft, hoarding, institutionalized violence, and institutionalized warfare. This way of life, or culture, explains why men today feel an urge to go off to war (just as their starving forefathers abandoned their families in order to roam the desert in swarms of psychotic males). Today, most of the world has been born into one or another starvation culture. Why? Because down through the millennia, SC peoples have beaten almost all the world's sane societies to bloody pulps. SC cultures, in other words, are about the only cultures left to be born into. Interestingly, although Christian pastors won’t clue you in on the fact, the Bible contains a shocking number of descriptions of mothers, or “parents,” cannibalizing their own children. For starters, check out Deuteronomy 28.53, Deuteronomy 28.55, 2 Kings 6.28-29, Jeremiah 19.9, Ezekiel 5.10, Lamentations 2:20, and Lamentations 4.10. |
| It’s my understanding that the academic world has put to rest the notion that a Great Mother Goddess reigned supreme anywhere back in the Neolithic era. I thought that thinking had gone out of favor by the mid 20th century. |
| Do you think switching from God to a Goddess might lead to matriarchy – rule by women? |
| What, exactly, is your proof that people worshipped a Great Mother Goddess in the Neolithic? |
| Isn’t it better to be tolerant of all religions? | No, not if they’re killing you. In his 2004 bestseller The End of Faith, Sam Harris said that tolerating religions that harm us is as bad as tolerating beliefs in hygiene that harm us: “…we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene. There are still a number of cultures in which the germ theory … has yet to put in an appearance…. Do we ‘tolerate’ these beliefs? Not if they put our own health in jeopardy” (Harris 2004: 46) |
| Why is this book important? |
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