Is the Christian God a Psychopath?

Growing up Protestant-Christian, I was taught that one of the most important verses in the Bible was II Timothy 3:16, which says that "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness."

Furthermore, I was taught that the most important part of that verse was the bit about all scripture being God-breathed, and that it meant that God sorta-kinda-basically dictated the words of the Bible to the various robot-writing-people who put them down on parchment (or vellum, or whatever).

I was taught that if you questioned even the translation of one jot or tittle, you were in danger of the fires of hell.

I was also taught that when Paul (who was revered as almost a Jesus 2.0) wrote his letter to young Timmy, he intended for this lofty pedigree to be applied to the very words he was writing at the time, and all the other letters he was to write after... Not to mention anything else that managed to get past the Gathering of Old Dudes who years later would decide what letters and whatnot deserved a place in ye olde New International Version.

To beef up this claim, these Old Dead Dudes pointed to Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:17 that he hadn't come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them (ignoring, of course, the logically-consistent possibility that Jesus had come to abolish the non-law-or-prophets books of the "Old Testament" -- like, say, the sex-poems, the song lyrics, or the story about Davey the Giant-Killer).

Which leads, I think, to the question at the crux (no pun intended) of the issue:

Is the Christian God a psychopath?

This is not as easy a question as you may think. It is, in fact, one of the Biggest Questions that anybody who's gonna claim to believe in the Christian understanding of God is going to have to deal with.

The reason this is such a big question is that there are a lot of places in the Bible where God does things that seem, well, mean. And if, as I was taught, the Bible's pretty much dictated by God and confirmed not only by Jesus but also by second-Jesus (Paul), then at some point you're going to have to deal with the fact that the God of the Bible engages in behavior that most of us would see as incredibly not-cool, if we were to observe it in any other context.

If someone told me to go do something like smash some babies' heads against the rocks to make him happy, for example, I'd probably think he was a psychopath. But time and time again, the Bible depicts God as doing just that sort of nonsense.

There are a number of ways that people reconcile the problem of a psychopathic God with their allegiance to the Bible and Christianity.

The first and by far most common way is to ignore the problem. Most people aren't psychopaths and don't want to condone psychopathic behavior. But they also want to maintain what they have been told is a key Stance-They-Must-Take if they want to be part of the Jesus Club: The Inerrancy of Scripture (which is taken by the hoi-polloi to mean that they must unquestioningly accept as Literal Truth whatever it is in the Bible that their pastor tells them was intended to be read Literally).

They therefore resolve the problem of a psychopathic God by not thinking about it, directly -- rather, they let their pastor think about it for them.

There are very few pastors who are willing to completely ignore or discount the wide swaths of scripture that seem (to our pathetic, misguided, sin-drenched, et cetera human eyes) to be depicting a God who is kind of a psychopathic jerk. So the average parishioner nods his or her head, accepts the pastor's statement that God Hates Gayness (or whatever other bit of Reality God has created/allowed to exist), and tries to think about pleasanter things.

This is by far the most popular way to deal with the problem of a psychopathic God. Because while most have bought into the narrative that their pastor (a.k.a. mini-pope) is showing them what they have to do to get into heaven, most are too compassionate and sensible to drink the whole glass of Kool-aid. They're willing to be thrilled when they read about how great it was that the Israelites were able to settle in the land of Canaan and stop eating manna every day, but they'll do so by completely ignoring the fact that the Israelites were able to eat the produce of the land because they'd killed all the Canaanites who'd raised it -- apparently at God's say-so.

If you bugged them about it, they'd probably change the topic. Or punch you. Or quote something by someone that explained this killing-for-land away, and then forget about it as quickly as possible.

I have a problem with this approach.

I think it's gutless. I think it's lazy. And I think it leaves the door far too open to the sort of silent acquiescence that makes it possible for powerful people to run rough-shod over less-powerful people's lives. I think this approach is one reason why history is rife with instances of the ostensibly "Christian" Church being on the wrong side of the Truth -- standing with Power and Privilege against the Poor, the Weak, the marginalized, and Jesus.

Another, less-gutless-but-far-more-cruel approach is to try to reconcile the psychopathic God-behavior depicted in the Bible with the loving side -- to make the argument that there are instances where smashing a baby's head against a rock is a loving thing to do.

This sort of argument -- perhaps most notably systematized by the more "Reformed" (hardline Calvinist) denominations -- says that all babies (by dint of having been born as totally depraved worm-monsters) deserve to have their heads smashed and to be tortured for all eternity, but that God is so loving that He (yep, God's a man... apparently) only does that to some of them.

I'm grossly over-simplifying this, but I don't care.

When this sort of thing gets pounded into your skull and you're forced, as a young Christian, to choose between your conscience and what you are told is God's Plan for the Universe... well, it's worth calling a spade a spade. As you may have guessed, I'm none too fond of this approach, either. I think it's, ummm, a little psychopathic.

And yet, as annoyed as I am by the two most common approaches to one of Life's Big Questions (to ignore it, or to convince myself that it's not really a question), I nonetheless do not wish to ditch the Christian faith. I'm too attached, you see, to the Christ it's supposed to be all about. Jesus is way cool. Jesus is the reason for the season. And cetera.

This leaves me with one option, I think: I have to be willing to re-examine the way that I am reading the Bible. I have to be willing to go back to my childhood and question if maybe the rigid interpretive framework I was handed for the reading of the Bible is just plain wrong.

If you didn't grow up in that, you have no idea what a massive can of worms this really is.

When you are emotionally conditioned to think of the Bible as a monolithic block of text, and to believe that the frame of reference you've been handed is the only way to avoid being tortured by God forever in Hell, well, things be gettin' real, know what I'm sayin'?

But I'm trying to follow Jesus' example, here, and Jesus was (in the words of my planting buddy Jonathan) "The Great Poo-Disturber." So I'm going to go ahead and listen to my conscience, and read the Bible in the way that seems most honest to me as a writer and artist.

I'm going to read it as a narrative cobbled-together by a whole bunch of people who were trying their best to explore on paper how God was interacting with them, their community, and the world.

I'm going to read it as a Work of Art, and as such NOT a book to be picked into tiny bits, lit on fire, and hurled at anybody who disagrees with me.

I'm going to read it as an exploration of Truth, in which the pieces don't matter as much as the overall thrust.

I'm going to read it as inspired by God in the way I understand all inspiration -- a beautiful, mysterious force that somehow manages to transcend in small ways here and there the abilities and intentions of the artisans who crafted it.

Most importantly, I am going to read it as a book that reveals a God of Love. Period. And anything that doesn't fit with that, I'm going to chalk down to a failure of interpretation, creation, or both. God isn't a psychopath. God is Love.

The Old Dudes with Power will have a problem with this. They will call me a heretic and a wishy-washy, po-mo numbskull. They will deny me membership in The Club for rejecting the conclusions of their dead, all-male forbears. They will lift their noses and turn their heads from a guy who, for some reason, isn't willing to let them dictate his life. To which I say, "Let the dead bury their own dead." I'm gonna live.

I'm done with allowing the Pretension of Knowledge to make me an unwitting or unwilling servant of ugliness.

I'm done with the psychopaths.

- - -

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Comments

  1. Really glad to read this. My big Lenten revelation was that God literally IS LOVE. That stories about Jesus have to be read as stories about what it means to be a human being who acts the way Love acts.

    Love is bigger and wilder than we know. Love is powerful—not as in "power over" but as in "power to." If anyone tells me they know what God is or what God wants and I can't substitute the word "Love" for the word "God" in their description, I'm not going to believe what they say.

    We are saved by Love. Love forgives the beloved. We are made strong in our weakness by Love. Love is compassionate and suffers with the suffering.

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  2. That's a lovely/useful rule, Nina. Thanks.

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  3. I don't mind your gross over-simplification at all here Josh, because it needs to be broken down to a point where we understand how outrageous some of our claims about God really are. It is so strange to me how easily people gloss over those irreconcilable differences between OT-angry God and love and peace Jesus by saying God isn't only love but wrath also (and apparently pychosis as well). Here's the thing - if you can't reconcile those two wildly divergent images of God, just go with what Jesus said and did. As our friend Colossian said in his self-titled book "(Jesus) is the image of the unseen God" and "God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him".

    i.e. Jesus wasn't/isn't one facet of God that He wanted to show us at a time in our history. Jesus was full-on the image of God. You know that stuff about bashing babies heads in? Yeah, that was you guys, not me. The OT is full of the history of what God's people did and thought - not all of the things they did were good, and neither were all of the things they thought. But they did write down what they thought and all the things that they attributed to God has been immortalized in a collection called the bible. A holy, inspired collection ... of imperfect actions and thoughts - an anthology. Can't reconcile all that hate and violence with all the love and peace Jesus begged us to embrace? Stop trying.

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    1. It's amazing the intricate arguments people come up with to reconcile this stuff. Sometimes it feels like an emperor's-new-clothes situation, where it takes a child-like simplicity to acknowledge what everybody else is either too proud or too scared to acknowledge. Grrrrr.

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    2. Point is, the writers of the book just wanted to justify their wickedness, cognitive dissonance keeps folks from facing yhe reality that its a book of FABLES...
      How else u explain a 600 YEAR OLD MAN packin two of every creature on earth in a tiny ship (450 feet).. #ItsNotReal

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  4. I had this discussion the other day with a biblical 'literalist' who has been following the Bible dramatization on the History channel. The OT is history and myth mixed. No one knows who wrote 2 Timothy and the other pastorals, but it probably wasn't Paul. I love reading he OT's wisdom literature (Job, Songs, Provers, Psalms). I love reading the Gospels, they are the beginning and the end for me.

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  5. Surely, the question as to whether God is/was a psychopath is rhetorical rather than a serious question. If the Bible is to be believed then the answer is quite obviously YES. What else would you call a genocidal maniac who callously drowns all living creatures except Noah and his family and the creatures taken on board the Ark?
    Theologians claim that the genocide took place around 2300 BC. The world population at that time has been estimated to be 80 million, of which about 2 million would probably have been pregnant women. God not only murdered 80 million humans and hundreds of millions of other creatures on the premise that they were wicked, but also aborted 2 million unborn children on the premise that they deserved to die because their mothers were wicked. The Bible also claims that God was a serial killer by relating 50 separate incidences in which God killed a total of over 2,376,000 humans. He also told us we had an obligation to stone to death homosexuals, women who have sex before marriage, those who worshiped a god of a different faith and those who worked an Saturday.
    The only way to dispel the Bible's revelation of God as a psychopath is to accept the truth. Namely, that the scribes who in compiling the Bible depicted God as a psychopath had a vested interest in portraying a fearful god for the sole purpose of empowering the priests by bending the will of simple minded folk to the jurisdiction of the church.
    Fortunately, Christians no longer respect God's laws so I can safely say I have never met a Christian who wasn't a heretic.
    Biblical references to the above events can be found in "The Missing Gene of Reason"

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    1. Thank you and right on. Every Christian I know spins, twists, and edits the bible until it becomes palatable to them, or comes up with any and every way to explain away the horror of the bible so they can make it work. Not to mention the volumes of contradictions found throughout the old and new testament. The fact that the writings are placed out of order so from the start we assume there was a virgin birth, which by the way Paul (first writings) never mentions because he didn’t know about it. That is because that nonsense was added later because any “god” worth his salt had to have a virgin birth back then. And let’s really not consider the fact that Jesus left no written words. We really don’t know what he said or thought. There is a good case that can be made, if he existed at all, that he was another wanna be Jewish Messiah of the time and there were many running around. There is also the fact that no writers of the time mention Jesus at all, except one small section almost 100 years later by Josephus, which is considered, being generous, a partial forgery, and by many a total forgery. So spin away, you can’t make it work. Your time would be better spent going line by line through the bible and reading science and history at the same time. I was raised in a Christian home, born again hooked by the work “sin” which I never stopped to contemplate, and stayed in that mind numbing cult for 16 years before I made it our alive, barely. Since my escape I have lived in dancing joy every day. There is nothing in the bible that you can’t find in dozens of other sources and you won’t have to do the spinning.

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    2. The truth is whoever wrote this.is most likely a psychopath or an atheist trying to get valid points that they do not have.they all say that they went through some kind of turmoil an god wasn't there to help them but only because they deep down inside did not want any help from the Almighty they just wanted a pittymy for themselves and God and they also have no limited to no belief at all an with that you kill your blessings and salvation.its you not god an he does exist with or without humans or any organisms believing in him.an he's not a psychopath your disbelievers are . And honestly if we got wiped out the whole planet with water then that means that we done something to really piss him off and we deserve it.but not as whole because the good ones wouldn't already been sent to heaven before any rath or judgment day comes. Whatever energy you put into the universe you get back .yes.yes God is the universe and yes the universe is God. So either way around if you would say that God didn't exist he do exist and even if you saying God is zero zero is not nothing because nothing is everything. Do you get it there is no truly nothing in our understanding or our universes of universes or known reality of realms. There's probably a place where their exhibits exactly nothing but nowhere of our understanding and knowing and definitely know we're nowhere near us not in our universe but most likely probably the outside of the universe is exactly zero .

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  6. The Christian God is a stupid psychopath. My life has been indeed utter bullshit, and almost all the assholes who pick on my get rewarded by life. Where the hell is God then?

    Christians like to rave on about how Satan is the "father of lies", deception and lawlessness.

    Yes my sister is a demon and still gets all perks of life (although acts nice in front of elders). Tortures me - where the hell is God? All of the sane people in my life also get tortured by society, where the hell is God?

    Even more importantly - millions of starving children in Africa and Asia while fat politicians make money from wars. Where the hell is God? NOWHERE.

    Apparently in the Christian eyes, God waits until you die just to tell you you've been bad and send you to eternal hell. That's truly how psychopathic this "Jehovah" is.

    Either two things.

    a). God does NOT EXIST
    b). God is a psychopath who could care less

    Apparently you have to be a King in order to commit polygamy. Does the Israelite conquest of Midian remind of you anything? All virgin women were taken as spoils, to be married to Israelites (God's "chosen" race) but apparently the Israelites wanted more so they invaded more towns!

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  7. I'm glad I asked Google if God was a psychopath. Your piece was at the top of page one. Our childhood experiences were similar, although mine were Catholic. Now there's a can of psychological worms!!! I have wrestled with the good/evil thing for many years. The Hindus portray a trinity that makes some sense-Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. I think you are on the right track by deciding what your god looks like FIRST, and then reading the Bible with those attributes in mind. The conundrum for me is, if this entity created all that is, and IS all that is, well, it's part psycho. Or else you have to believe in a Devil who, oops, was ALSO created by the one thing that made it all. Hmmmmm

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  8. Honestly, If you are going to ignore bits why bother? Why not just say I am going to believe what is in my heart, not try and reinterpret something written by people from a culture utterly removed from my own, and be done with it? I really don't understand what the approach achieves other than a form of intellectual dishonesty. Saying you are a christian when you actually arent, either to resolve some cognitive dissonance, or to fit in with the crowd. Surely either you believe something or you don't..Your method can be used to justify literally anything, and has been. All the greatest evils of the last 2,000 years seem to be from people picking the bits of the bible they liked, or re-interpreting them to suit what they wanted rather than reading it to find what god wanted. The catholic church even banned lay folk from owning bibles so they could notbe called out on their interpretation as they robbed, derfrauded and murdered.
    But, if you are going to pick, why worry what the nicean council would best suit their own purposes and retention of power? Why listen at all to the rantings of someone who was a psychopath - the serial mass murderer Saul, who found more power to sate his ego perverting christians than killing them? Why not include the gospels the early church they didn't like? Why worry about anything beyond the pentateuch and the gospels even if you were going to bother with the bible at all?
    None of it makes any sense whatsoever.

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