This argument, aside from being irrelevant to me personally (since I am not Roman Catholic) is also logically fallacious and entirely invalid.
The two logical fallacies you are engaging in are the equivocation fallacy (which is where one makes an argument based on a word meaning two different things; since Ishtar was a sex and fertility goddess and the Blessed Virgin Mary very obviously is not, the argument accusing Catholics of Ishtar worship fails for the same logical reason that it would be illogical to criticize an airline pilot for his lack of knowledge of harbor conditions (or indeed to criticize a pilot in one body of water for a lack of knowledge of pilotage such as the location of reefs, tidal conditions et cetera in another body of water). For that matter I suppose we could get on the case of NASA space shuttle pilots since very frequently the actual landing was performed by the Commander with the pilot acting in a monitoring role rather than vice versa. In all cases we would be engaging in the equivalence fallacy.
The more severe fallacy is called “the genetic fallacy” and has nothing to do with the human genome or genetics, but rather refers to the older meaning of the word, in the sense of origins - it is the fallacy that because a word originally meant X, people using that word must still mean what it originally meant. To which I would note this would create rather an awkward problem for many Adventists who refer to the Sabbath for clarity of communications as Saturday since Saturday is of course the Pagan name for that day (which Rome suppressed in the Latin language but was unable to do so in the English language); obviously no one would accuse Christians who use the word “Saturday” of engaging in Saturn-worship.
The idea that Roman Catholics are engaing in Ishtar worship is quite literally absurd, and astonishingly offensive. But let’s not take my word for it, I propose we ask them -
@Xeno.of.athens @Michie @chevyontheriver @Valletta - would I be correct in assuming you regard the attempted insinuation that the use of the title “Queen of Heaven” in the beautiful Gregorian chant “Ave Regina Caelorum” (“Hail heavenly Queen”) has anything to do with Ishtar? Because I find it offensive, as I have sung that hymn with my Roman Catholic friends in veneration of Our Glorious Lady Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
Also the Adventist argument ignores a very elegant bit of Roman Catholic theology, which I found out about through use of Google’s AI (in conformity with the site rules I am declaring the following text came from Google Gemini):
“The Biblical Context of the Catholic Title
Roman Catholics do not pull the title out of ancient paganism; rather, they derive it from biblical theology regarding the
Davidic Monarchy.
In the ancient Kingdom of Israel, the queen was not the king's
wife (since kings had many wives), but rather the king's
mother. This office was known as the
Gebirah (the "Great Lady" or Queen Mother). As seen with King Solomon and his mother Bathsheba in 1 Kings 2:19-20, the Queen Mother held a throne at the king's right hand and acted as a powerful advocate for the people.
Because Christians believe Jesus is the ultimate King of the Line of David, his mother, Mary, naturally fulfills the prophetic role of the
Gebirah. Since Jesus' kingdom is the Kingdom of Heaven, His mother is honored as the Queen Mother of Heaven. Furthermore, Catholics point to
Revelation 12:1, which describes "a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars," giving birth to the Messiah, as a scriptural image of this heavenly queenship.”
Assuming that Gemini is correct, which I regard as a safe assumption, this is theologically elegant and appropriate to the person of our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Unfortunately I suspect that no matter how emphatically we declare this we will still be falsely accused of engaging in pagan worship by some, despite the fact that we in no respect, either Orthodox or Catholic, or Protestants who venerate the Theotokos such as Martin Luther, had any interest or intent to worship anyone other than God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and in particular no interest in worshipping a pagan fertility goddess, and the criticism is therefore not only logically fallacious and historically inaccurate but grossly offensive. Thus while we Eastern Orthodox do not refer to the Theotokos as the Queen of Heaven in our hymns, this is not for dogmatic reasons, and I see no dogmatic issue with referring to her such, so I will continue to sing “Hail Heavenly Queen” in solidarity with my Roman Catholic friends.
I should add we might use that hymn in Western Rite Orthodoxy, I don’t know, to be clear, but I do know several other Western hymns such as Agnus Dei and Gloria In Excelsis Deo are used in the Western Rite (I particularly like that our Western Rite uses the hymn Agnus Dei, which was included in the mass in defiance of the Byzantine Church during a low period in our history, in the aftermath of the Quinisext Council, where some Patriarchs of Constantinople tried to impose that council on the Church of Rome and tried to argue that its prohibition against iconographical depictions of Christ as a lamb precluded the use of language which is absolutely scriptural and found in the Apocalypse, thus Agnus Dei was properly added to the Roman Mass as a means of telling us off, and with justification. This was around the same time the future Pope St. Gregory the Great, who is venerated with great importance by the Eastern Orthodox was disputing one of our Patriarchs who was making the embarassingly Docetic claim that in His resurrection Christ’s body lacked physicality, which is so wrong it makes me want to cry - fortunately St. Gregory won the argument and teaching was precluded among the Orthodox. He then composed the Presanctified Liturgy you use on Good Friday and that we use on weekdays in Lent and Holy Week and introduced the Gregorian system of chant among other elegant liturgical reforms, and also saved the people of Rome from starving after the civil government collapsed, and also sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England to evangelize the Angles, a Nordic tribe from the region of Denmark known as Anglia, who had conquered Brittania (and would be followed by the Jutes from Jutland, also in Denmark, and the Saxons, hence the phrase Anglo-Saxon, then the actual Danes from Copenhagen, Zeeland and adjacent islands, who founded Jarvik, now known as York, which I have been blessed to visit (actually I visited York and Canterbury on the same day in 2002).
