MB Civic

Where does the word come from?
What do you mean by “The Divine Mystery?”

We use “Yo” to refer to the Divine Mystery, the awe and wonder we experience when we contemplate the infinite universe or the paradoxes of human experience. When used in this way, as a placeholder representing the infinite mystery, we capitalize the word, Yo.
yo, The Gender-Free Pronoun

All forms of human liberation and dignity are sacred in Yoism. So, we originally chose the syllable “yo” after searching for a word to use in place of “he” and “she,” with their occasionally problematic gender bias. Sexism, as we know, has been rampant, at times extreme, and too frequently, very destructive.
In the Sixth Century, in Lyon, France, there was a debate among 43 bishops and the agents sent to represent another 20 bishops at the Council of Macon. The issue was whether women were human (i.e., like men having souls), or were without souls (like the lower animals). Eventually, a vote was taken. The result? Women are human; women do have souls. But the learned agents were actually almost perfectly evenly split; it was only by a vote of 32 to 31 that the Church concluded that women were human!

Marion Gordon (aka “Pat”) Robertson

On Feminism
“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” (Pat Robertson, fund-raising letter, 1992)
“I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” (Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 1/8/92)
And let’s not forget the late, looney Jerry Falwell.

As the quotations show, even in the United States, this is obviously not just ancient history. The fact is that there are people alive today who remember when women were fighting for the right to vote in modern day America. Clearly, many people still promulgate the idea that women are either innately inferior to men or are ordained by God to have an inferior, subservient position. And as we know, in large parts of the rest of the world, violently repressive, sexist attitudes still prevail. So, in order to hasten human movement into a more enlightened set of attitudes that are more fully consistent with the “dictates of Yo,” it seemed sensible to change vestigial, sexist language that was developed in a time when only males were unequivocally considered fully human.

In contrast, Yoism is built, in-part, on Yoni “Worship” (so to speak), as women comprise half of all sacred human divinity.

When we struggle to understand Reality (i.e., the “dictates of Yo”) without the biases introduced by sexist socio-religious ideologies, what we see is that people are people: Despite any differences that
may exist between the sexes (or other groupings of humanity), the deepest core truth of Yo is that each of us is a divine human being. From this central belief comes the first of the 10 Sacred Principles of Yo: That all humans are sacred beings that come into the world with equal unalienable Rights.