Thank you for a timely article.  I, too, have struggled with and explored this issue.  As an old feminist who turned against the religion I was raised with because God as I understood God to be in my early 20s seemed to me like a "male chauvinist pig" who hated women, thought they were good for one purpose only, and that is to bear male children.  God seemed to punish Eve a lot more harshly than he did Adam, and even though they both took wrong advice to be disobedient, Eve from the Serpant and Adam through Eve, somehow it was always womankind held out to be the one who must be controlled lest she lead man astray.

In my early 30s I found I did need God in my life, and even though I had looked into eastern religions and admired many aspects of them and about Native American beliefs as well, I turned back to the God/Jesus/Holy Spirit version of spirituality I had grown up with.  It was Jesus I liked the most about Christianity, and right at first little else.  But I read the Bible for the first time in my life, and I read leaning on my own understanding (a no-no, I suppose), not the interpretation of a pastor or teacher.  What I found was that often verses that were hurled at me to shame or control me were taken out of context and had nothing at all to do with the way they were used.  I also found that Jesus never said any of the things that seemed so harsh, strict and unfair, that he was all fairness and love, and that he urged us to be likewise.

In reading Genesis, I came to the conclusion that God didn't necessarily have a penis, and if he did, then he would also have to have a vagina, as scripture clearly says "male and female he created them in his image."  God has also used self-descriptive comparisons such as "like a mother hen, I will gather my chicks under my wings." 

Then there was Jesus' attitude towards women; he treated females with equality every time one was in his presence.  He said Mary had chosen wisely to sit and listen to him speak instead of laboring in the kitchen like Martha so busy with "women's work" at a time when learning was a male privilege only. He often chided his disciples for not doing as well as women.  When a woman with an "issue of blood" touched his hem, he told this "unclean woman" whom no one was to touch that her "faith had saved her" and she was cured.  He stopped the stoning of the adulteress, and he treated the Samaritan woman with a "shady past" to go and spread the word, after asking her, this most despised, creature to pour him water.  When asked about a woman who had continued to marry brothers as each one died and the next brother in line married her until she had been married seven times who would be her husband in heaven, Jesus said there is no marriage in heaven, no male or female.

So my conclusion based on these passages and others as well, is that God/Goddess is a spirit.  The Bible was written in a time and culture where male dominance and the subjection of the female was the norm and to give the Almighty the reverence and respect they should, of course they would chose the male nouns; the female would have been out of the question.  People often say God doesn't change, that God is the same yesterday and today, and that may be true, but our culture has certainly changed over the centuries and so have our attitudes.  When Paul began his arduous task of getting the First Church formally established, polygamy was the norm, and even though he suggested that a man in a leadership position should have only one wife, he didn't say that men with several should divorce all but one.  He also told men to treat their wives and their slaves kindly.  This is because the culture saw those situations as the norm, and if he had said divorce all your wives and let your slaves go, these people would most likely have been without support and have nowhere to turn.   Paul also said it was better to live like he did, totally devoted to spiritual issues, but it was better to marry than to burn, which suggests to me that marriage wasn't ideal but better than those burning hormones distracting you to the point of non-control.  So when people say our values do not change, they are actually very incorrect.  Our values and perceptions have changed a great deal since the preachings of the First Church, and I imagine they will continue to change as our understanding and scientific knowledge change.  Jesus left us with three basic commands-- To love God with all our hearts, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and to love one another as he loved us.  If we are doing that, really doing it, instead of saying things like "love the sinner, hate the sin" but truly loving, I believe that these burning questions would no longer be so important and we would come to that loving and harmonious understanding of the humane people Jesus urged us to be.