There’s nothing wrong with the stories. Those were the stories. But now we have updated information.
I’m Olivia S. Benson. And if you’ve been here before, you know that I always use the S, because if you’re googling me, if you don’t put the S, you’ll find Mariska Hargitay from Law & Order SVU. But in any event, I am the original, the real Olivia Benson. I speak about healing from growing up without a father. That’s what I talk about most often. And my book on that topic is this book. It’s titled For the Love of My Father, and it’s available on Amazon.
But this month, we are talking about Chapter 7 of this, my other book, Answers from Within. And the title of Chapter 7 is Recasting the Relationship Between Men and Women. Of course, this one is available on Amazon as well.
So this is Part 2 of the series. And by the way, there’s a contest going on. So when you comment to any of the social media postings, then you enter for a chance to win a book, a signed copy of the book, a mug, and a tea gift set. So please — aside from the fact that it’s a very timely and interesting and exciting topic, because we’re dealing with the issues relating to the relationship between men and women as it is evolving — aside from that, you can enter the contest.
This Girl Has Experience with What It Means to Be Churchified
Now, let me say a couple words. If you’ve read the books, you know I am a church girl. I mean, I was baptized in a Catholic church, went to a Catholic school. My mother became a Jehovah’s Witness when I was about, I would say before I was eight, she became a Jehovah’s Witness. So I was in the Kingdom Hall at all times. And I also went to a, in quotations, Christian — if you read the books, you’ll hear my experience with that as well — a Christian school here in Florida. So this girl has experience with what it means to be, and I use the word, churchified. I’ve done a lot and been involved in a lot.
But I want to put out a number of questions today. I’m just going to lay them out there and let you guys work through it. And so, one of the examples I use often when I talk about the fact that I’m also a Bible girl. I love the Bible, because that’s what I grew up on. And there’s much in it that is good and helpful. We all know the shenanigans that happened, the translations, the misuse and misinterpretations. That is without a question true, but there’s still good in it.
That Concept Is Not Going to Sell
But I want to give you an example of how problematic it is when we don’t update. One of the things that’s happening right now is that we sort of lose the children to the traditional church. And the reason we lose them, I’m going to illustrate to you an example.
You cannot tell a child who has an iPad, an iPhone, an iMac, what other i — and it doesn’t have to be all i, it can be Android, but the point is that they have all this technology at hand. And not only do they have it at hand, but they literally can have the answer to practically every question at hand. And you present to them an image of a God with a beard, an old man sitting — and the fact that he’s presented as old doesn’t matter, but the image is an old gray-haired man sitting on a throne, and there are always scrolls associated with it. I can tell you without any doubt that that concept is not going to sell.
How can the creator of the universe not have advanced when we have advanced the image? And the problem is that there’s nothing wrong with what it was before, what we believed before, what the story was before. But now we know some other things about how this works.
Is That Even Possible?
Another example that I really would like you to think about is, as I grew up, I was told that in the account of the creation story, that Adam went and told God, so to speak, that he was lonely. So the question I want you to consider is, is it even possible that but for the fact that Adam told God that he was lonely, that Eve would not have been created? Is that even a possibility? Think about it. Adam had to let God know, supposedly, that he was lonely.
The other part of the question that I want you to seriously consider, this is more serious. God created Adam, a man with all the parts of a man, and then when Adam said that he was lonely, God retrofitted Eve to fit the parts that were already made for Adam, that Adam already had. Does that make sense? But for Adam’s saying, I’m lonely, I need a companion, God didn’t know — and then when he realized it, he had to back up into the parts that he, God, because we think of it in the story as a man, had already given to Adam. Think about that. Is that even possible?
So now, it’s not that the stories are wrong or bad. It was the best that we could understand at that particular time. And now we come into a bigger, broader understanding. That wasn’t a detailed account. It was the account of those ancient people. And by the way, I can’t even tell you how many creation stories there are in the world. Every group has a creation story. All the different groups in Africa had a creation story. All the indigenous groups had a creation story. So we, as Christians coming out of the Jewish tradition, we have that creation story. And we now know, by all accounts, that it’s not intended as a direct and absolute account of how the universe came into being.
The Paradigm Has to Shift
So that being the background, now we go into what this means for women. Now we understand that we have a divine creator who created us all. We are all divine creations of a divine creator. And once we remember that it is not a man that’s doing the creating, right? It’s a gender-neutral energy, force, spirit.
The paradigm has to shift, because the way that they wrote, they wrote as though it was a man, a physical man. And now we realize that it’s not. It’s an energy. So the paradigm has to change. There were old beliefs about everything related to that man and how that man would have the universe, or the planet really, function. But now, with the updated understanding that God is not a person and God is not a man, we have to update the paradigm.
Generally speaking, the divine creator of the universe created male and female. And by the way, everything in between. And if you don’t understand what I mean, please go read chapter 8 of Answers from Within.
Now, the way that it’s done is that the males and females are complementary expressions of that divine energy. It didn’t make one better than the other. It didn’t make one superior than the other. We just made that up. Better, worse, superior, inferior. We just make it up. And we don’t just do it with regards to women. We do it with a number of different things.
They Weren’t Witches
And then there’s something very specific that happens. And there’s a lot written about this in scholarly books and things along those lines. There comes a time where some men realize, okay, we are physically stronger. And that was important for survival. Physical strength was important. But they didn’t like that women have had, or seem to have, what they considered to be some special powers that they could not control. So they figured out how to control women by demonizing them, and essentially making any woman who exhibited any kind of those powers, those what seemed to them to be superior powers, they made them a witch.
But guess what? That is not the divine plan. All the things that were said about women to keep them in place, and have been kept, and sort of have them be perceived as dangerous, have now been disproved. They weren’t witches. We know that all the people that were burned on the stakes and on the crosses, they weren’t witches. It was the men that were scared about their power.
But what we have to understand is that when God, energy, force, spirit creates, it creates with a plan and an idea. And so the plan and the idea that we’re working with today is that there’s a female expression and there’s a male expression. And like I said, everything in between. Everybody gets everything that God gives. There’s no person, God, sitting up somewhere saying, you know what, I will give guys this capacity, but I will not give those capacities to women.
The bottom line for God is that they’re complementary energies, and men who fear that female energy really have nothing to fear, because when God, energy, force, spirit creates, it creates with everybody having abilities. Well, some men have certain kinds of abilities as well. But if you want to look at women the way that we looked at them in the ancient times, and you say something that maybe nobody else understands, or you have what they call extrasensory perception, or you have intuition — you look at that, and that’s important, because for most mature men in this day and age with a mate, they know, listen, I need to listen to what she has to say, because she can see something or sense something or feel something that I can’t or don’t. Not that you couldn’t, but you don’t. So there’s a balance.
A Woman Cannot Love a Man More Than When He Allows Her to Be Fully Herself
And one of the things that’s in this book — I wrote about this particular feeling in the book. A woman cannot love a man more than when he allows her to be fully herself. That is an amazing thing. We are here to work together. We are all spiritual beings.
It’s a new day. God didn’t create men to be better than women, and God didn’t create women to be better than men. God is genius. Not a genius — God is genius itself. And the plan makes sense. But we humans always get in the way. We make stupid stuff up for stupid reasons, and then we end up in these situations fighting about things that there’s no reason to fight about. Ultimately, we are here to work together.
You Have Nothing to Fear
And this is where we are. This is in the transition. This is where we have trouble at the border, getting to the new place. But the most important thing for the guys that are listening is that you have nothing to fear.
I think that, in my relationships, a guy that is not afraid of me doing what I want to do, and a guy that doesn’t think that if I am free, I’m going to do something that he might not want me to do — that is a real man. And we’re here to support each other. Men are here to support the woman, and the woman is here to support the man. The time has passed where it was like, you stay home and you do this, or you’re supposed to do this or that. Those days are way over. And they existed because we lived in survival mode. But that day is over. And we can do better.
And think about those stories, the basis for how women ended up in the position of being demonized and being told that they were less than, or were supposed to be subjected. God created equally male and female and everything in between, and every race and every other category that you want to make up. One creator, one divine creation, giving it of itself to every single human being.
It’s time for us to wake up. There’s nothing wrong with the stories. Those were the stories. But now we have updated information, and we know more about the divine plan.
I’m Olivia Benson, and you can find me all over the internet. And I hope you really think about those two examples. Think about trying to tell a kid about an ancient god while they have all the technology at their fingers, and that that god would be using ancient artifacts instead of the technology that we have or better. Think about the fact that god had to be told that Adam was lonely, and only then did he retrofit Eve to match the body of Adam that was already created.
It’s a lot to think about. Think about it. And then once you realize that, your paradigm can shift. Because then you realize divine creator, creator of divine beings equally. And then you can start to work on how we work together. Think about those questions. Comment for the contest.
You can check out my website. It’s OliviaSBenson.com. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. I’m on X and I am TikTok.