His Characteristics and Why I’m Not Fond of Him
“The God of the Old Testament is
arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it:
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic
cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully.”
-
Richard Dawkins, from The God Delusion
One
day while living at Purdue University, I picked up Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I was browsing through
a campus bookstore while my wife searched for her semester textbooks, and the
bright metallic cover caught my eye. I’d heard about Dr. Dawkins and that he
was some sort of famous biologist. I’d also heard that he was an out and out
Atheist, something that I’d been taught as a child was akin to devil worship.
Intrigued, I bought it and took it back to our apartment. At once his wit and
style were clearly evident, and he made shameless attacks on religion seem
almost effortless. For the first time in my life, I began to think that maybe I
wasn’t the reason why Christianity didn’t work for me. After all, I had been
taught growing up that whenever bad things happened to me, it was either my
fault, or God was just testing me, or it might have been that God was working
“in mysterious ways”. But what if there’s another reason bad things happen to
us? What if we’re not at fault for all the problems in the world?
This
line of thinking continued to bother me for some time until I found another
intriguing book. The final nail in the coffin that held my thinly-veiled faith
was when I picked up the book God is Not
Great, by the late Christopher Hitchens. His work had come highly recommended
by other famous Atheists, so I thought that I should give his book a try. I was
totally unprepared for the vicious verbal whipping he gave to the Church, God,
and Christianity as a whole. For the first time in my life, someone presented
me with the idea that God is not really a God of Love – the common depiction of
the deity among mainstream Christianity. In fact, quite the opposite might be
true. God, at least the God of the Bible, could actually be a monster.
Hitchens’ visceral depictions of the grotesque monolith that modern religion
had turned into opened my eyes to a view from the outside looking in at the
faith that I held as a child. Able to see Christianity from a different
perspective, it allowed me to shine a light into every dark nook and cranny; it
was as if I was suddenly seeing my former faith in the harsh light of day for
the very first time. The following is an example of Christopher’s hard look at
religion:
“Religion is a totalitarian belief.
It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable,
unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime
while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the
clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and,
even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North
Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?
I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president; Kim Jong-Il is
only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That
office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a
thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the
reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute
and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can
f****g die and leave North Korea!”
-
Christopher Hitchens, from God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Reading
Dawkins’ book gave me the ability to think critically about religion and faith
in particular. Reading Hitchens’ book showed me how twisted religion now seems
in the more-civilized modern world. The latter of the two was a great
revelation to me, because I realized that the Christian conception of God is
literally terrifying to me in my older age. In the New Testament, Jesus tells his
followers to love one another, give aid to the poor and needy, abstain from
vice and evil actions, and live life with purpose. But his Heavenly Father
sends a much more foreboding message. According to the Bible, God is more than
willing to kill off all life on the planet, order the slaughter of whole
nation-states, sacrifice children (including his own) in horrific fashion, and
torture billions of people for eternity. Now don’t get me wrong, I think there
are many good messages in the Bible. The example of Jesus in the Bible was way
ahead of his time, almost like that of Mahatma Gandhi: another compassionate,
wise soul who led a peaceful revolution. But the picture of a Cupid-like God
that I had when I was still in the faith was completely shattered for me upon a
closer examination of the actual text.
The best way
I can think of to show you what I mean is through a good old-fashioned Bible
Study. There are many examples of God displaying his wrath and lack of sound
moral judgment in the Old Testament, but I believe that the most telling – and
horrifying – example is the Story of Lot. If you choose to do so, you may
follow along with the actual text; I will be commenting on the NIV version of
Genesis 18:16 through Genesis 19:38. Our story begins with the Lord speaking to
Abraham about his family line becoming a great and powerful nation. Then, in
verse 16 three men (these men are commonly translated as being angels who
appear as men) are sent by the Lord into the kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah,
because “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin is so
grievous.” (Gen 18:20). Nowadays, most people interpret Sodom and Gomorrah’s
sins to be linked to homosexuality, as described in Jude (1:7): “In a similar
way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual
immorality and perversion.” Although there are suggestions of many other crimes
committed in the two cities listed in the Jewish Talmud, Sodom and Gomorrah
became synonymous in antiquity with the crime of sodomy – then used to refer to
homosexual intercourse and rape.
In verses
23-33, God tells Abraham that he plans to destroy the cities, but Abraham
pleads with him not to do it if he can find 50 righteous people in the cities;
he eventually convinces God to stop even if he can find only 10. Once they
received their orders, the angels went down to Sodom and met with Lot. In
verses 2-3 (chapter 19 now), Lot convinces them to stay the night with him.
That same night, the citizens of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand to see
the angels: “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so
that we can have sex with them.” (Gen 19:5). Instead of handing over the angels
to the crowd, Lot offers his virgin daughters as a peace offering: “No, my
friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never
slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like
with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the
protection of my roof.” (Gen 19:7-8). The crowd gets even more rowdy, and the
angels pull Lot back into the house before striking the crowd with blindness.
They then tell Lot to gather his family and escape the city before they destroy
it. He managed only to convince his wife and 2 daughters to leave with him, and
they fled the city as quickly as they could.
Resting in a
nearby village, Lot and his family are safe as God “rained down burning sulfur
on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen 19:24) and wiped out every living thing in the
entire southern plain of Canaan. Unfortunately, the angels had said prior to
Lot’s family prior to their departure: “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back,
and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be
swept away!” (Gen 19:17). Lot directly disobeyed the angels’ orders by staying
in a nearby village, but he convinced God to spare the village. Lot’s wife,
however, disobeyed the order to not look back at the destruction and “she
became a pillar of salt” (Gen 19:26). In the end, God saved only Lot and his 2
daughters out of the cities on the plain. They fled to the nearest mountain and
stayed in a cave where the daughters proceeded to get Lot drunk on wine and
have sex with him: “The next day the older daughter said to the younger, ‘Last
night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and
you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our
father.’” (Gen 19:24). The 2 daughters then gave birth to children who would
become the fathers of the Moabite and Ammonite tribes in the land of Canaan.
This is how the Story of Lot ends.
Now, let’s
discuss the actions of the key characters in that story. Sodom and Gomorrah are
supposedly full of people so bad, so full of sin that God could not find even
10 people worthy of being saved. The people who lived there must have been
extremely despicable to have warranted destruction by “burning sulfur raining
down from the sky”. Lot, much like Noah in the Biblical flood story, must have
been saved from the coming catastrophe on the basis of his righteousness (and
the fact that he was Abraham’s nephew). However, we find that Lot is actually a
terrible person who commits deeds that we can only describe as morally
reprehensible. First, he offers up his virgin daughters to be raped by an angry
mob in order to save 2 angels who probably could have saved themselves. Next,
he abandons his sons-in-law to die in the cities and takes off in the middle of
the night with only his wife and daughters. He even disobeys a direct order
from God by not leaving the plain entirely; Lot’s wife, however, is not so
lucky. And finally, he manages to get drunk enough to have sex with his own
daughters, and even manages to get them pregnant. It’s pretty safe to say that
Lot comes out on the other end of this story looking like a person who was
definitely deserving of some divine retribution.
But what
about God in this story? First, he displays a distinct sexism that can also be
seen throughout the rest of the Bible. God has shown he will argue with a man
(Abraham or Lot), and even wrestle with a man (Jacob), but he will not take any
disobedience from a woman (Lot’s wife). Next, God practices nepotism with his
favorite humans and their families. Lot and his family are saved largely
because he is Abraham’s nephew – it’s hard to argue that he deserved saving
based on his own merits – and there are countless more examples of God showing
favor on someone’s family simply because they obeyed him (or like Adam, cursing
an entire family line because of one case of disobedience). Finally, God
displays a serious lack of justice when judging humans. Sodom and Gomorrah are
just one of many cases in the Bible where God destroys an entire city – sometimes
even nations or entire species – because they were full of “wicked” people. But
I would think that those cities had to contain at least a small fraction of
innocent people. You can’t seriously believe that a city the size of Sodom or
Gomorrah was empty of pregnant women or children. How could God in his right
mind ever massacre unborn children for being wicked?
The
Story of Lot and its exposition of God’s decisions and judgment serve as a good
place to start my case study on God. No one can agree on the exact
characteristics of God, but some of the common ones associated with him
include: loving, caring, patient,
all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing, and perfect. After re-reading
some sections of the Bible – including the Story of Lot – and after hearing
some different perspectives on the subject matter, I’ve concluded that the
following characteristics of God are also found in the Bible: sexist, abusive, racist, murderous, and
sadistic. These terms are all used to describe the dregs of humanity, but I
believe that they also apply to the God of Christianity. I plan on beginning a
series of five posts dedicated to each of these 5 characteristics of God, and for
each one I will be using direct evidence from the Bible to support my claims. My
hope is that I will be able to convince my readership that they can’t just take
someone else’s word when it comes to God’s thoughts or actions. According to
the Bible, no one is capable of knowing the mind of God; I believe that to be truer
now than ever before due to God’s apparent mental instabilities. In all
seriousness, I also hope this series will provide for my readership a new sense
of perspective on religion; a view from the outside looking in.
