"'God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil"
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"God's plan" gets punctured here as a rhetorical device: a phrase that pretends to be humble while grabbing absolute authority. Mary Daly’s line works because it reverses the usual moral hierarchy. Instead of humans submitting to a divine script, she argues the script is frequently a ventriloquism act - men speaking through God to make their preferences sound inevitable, their power sound holy.
The intent is not to deny faith so much as to expose how theological language can launder accountability. "Plan" implies coherence, purpose, even benevolence. Daly drags in what the phrase often smuggles out: agency. If something is "God’s plan", no one has to admit they chose it, benefited from it, or failed to prevent it. That’s why her list escalates: inadequacy and ignorance are the softer excuses, the everyday incompetence that becomes untouchable once sanctified; "evil" is the hard edge, the willingness to use sacred cover for harm.
The subtext is feminist and insurgent: patriarchy doesn’t only control bodies and institutions; it colonizes the metaphors of meaning. Daly, emerging from and against mid-20th-century Catholic intellectual life, is writing in the wake of second-wave feminism and alongside liberation theologies that asked who gets to name God and whose suffering gets explained away as "mystery". Her cynicism is surgical. She’s not attacking consolation; she’s attacking the weaponization of consolation - the way a pious cliché can become a gag order, especially when spoken from the pulpit, the state, or the bedroom.
The intent is not to deny faith so much as to expose how theological language can launder accountability. "Plan" implies coherence, purpose, even benevolence. Daly drags in what the phrase often smuggles out: agency. If something is "God’s plan", no one has to admit they chose it, benefited from it, or failed to prevent it. That’s why her list escalates: inadequacy and ignorance are the softer excuses, the everyday incompetence that becomes untouchable once sanctified; "evil" is the hard edge, the willingness to use sacred cover for harm.
The subtext is feminist and insurgent: patriarchy doesn’t only control bodies and institutions; it colonizes the metaphors of meaning. Daly, emerging from and against mid-20th-century Catholic intellectual life, is writing in the wake of second-wave feminism and alongside liberation theologies that asked who gets to name God and whose suffering gets explained away as "mystery". Her cynicism is surgical. She’s not attacking consolation; she’s attacking the weaponization of consolation - the way a pious cliché can become a gag order, especially when spoken from the pulpit, the state, or the bedroom.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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