The End of Christianity (24 page)

What does all of this have to do with the God of the Bible, the God who becomes angry at evildoers and is pleased by the sweet smell of burnt offerings, or the Jesus who loves the little children—all the children of the world? That is precisely what I hope you are asking yourself. If I asked you whether God has a nose or a penis, what would you say? Most Christians would say probably not. A nose is for breathing and smelling. A penis is for sex and for peeing. God has no need of either. In the same way, I would argue that God has no need for emotions—intricate chemical reactions designed to activate and direct bodily responses to the external environment. As wonderful as emotions are, they are made of and for the fabric of this natural world.

A GOD WITH A TEMPER
(ANGER AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY)

[Wicked men] are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell. And the reason why they do not go down to hell at each moment, is not because God, in whose power they are, is not then very angry with them; as he is with many miserable creatures now tormented in hell, who there feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath. Ya, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell.

—Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
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In this 1741 sermon, Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards used the word “anger” three times, “angry” six times, “fierce” seventeen times, and “wrath” fifty-one times. He clearly wanted to make a point about God's feelings. Today, few American ministers would dare preach such a relentlessly threatening sermon. Fred “God-hates-fags” Phelps, of Topeka, Kansas, has been able to garner national media attention with his theology of rage in part
because
he is an outlier. Popular sermons today are more likely to focus on promises than threats. The late Oral Roberts promised, among other things, that devotion to his kind of Christianity would be rewarded with material wealth, and he became one of the founders of a school of theology now known as the “prosperity gospel.”

If you search the Internet, you will find all kinds of Christians arguing that God is not angry or fierce or wrathful, just righteous and bound by the obligations of justice—and aggrieved. “This hurts me more than it is going to hurt you.” But if we are honest, Edwards was closer in his vision to many of the Bible writers than was Roberts or today's celebrity preachers like Rick Warren.

Consider:

I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.

—Isaiah 63:3

Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet I will not hear them.

—Ezekiel 8:18

What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction?

—Romans 9:22

And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

—Revelations 19:15

Anger, as we have discussed, is an activating emotion. It is a response to pain and threat or simply being thwarted. When we are threatened or our goal-oriented activities are frustrated, anger can make us more focused, persistent, and determined. Socially, it serves to prepare our bodies for defensive action by making us stronger, more alert, more aggressive, and, consequently, more intimidating. It can be almost instantaneous, preparing us to respond to threats faster than our conscious minds can even assess a situation. This is both the advantage
and
the disadvantage of anger.
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You might think that if someone is omnipotent, then anger would be unnecessary. The force that created the universe has no need of it. For what? To make him more powerful? More able to focus? To break through inhibitions or fear? And yet it makes a lot of sense that we humans would expect God to get angry.

Consider the situation of the Bible writers. Their image of God as the most powerful person imaginable was modeled on an Iron Age Chief or King who wielded absolute power over his subjects and who was beyond accountability. One example is the situation of Job, who becomes the pawn in a contest between Yahweh and Satan. As a test of his loyalty to Yahweh, Job's children, along with his other assets—friendship, wealth, and health—are taken from him. When Job complains, God says, “Will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty? Let him who reproves God answer it” (Job 40:2). Absolute power allows caprice and cruelty. It always is maintained in part by fear, a level of fear that is virtually impossible to perpetuate without anger's unpredictability.

Saddam Hussein might have been thought of as a modern Iron Age ruler, holding together a nation made of tribal factions and kinship groups that were ever ready to dissolve into more primitive groupings. Hussein's ruthless brutality gave us a sense of what it takes to maintain absolute authority in such an environment. If you read the descriptions of the Israelite kings, even many of God's favorites, you will notice that their regimes were similar to Hussein's. They practiced genocide and scorched-earth warfare. They had female sexual slaves taken by force. They engaged in all manner of palace intrigue, they murdered rivals, and they amassed tremendous wealth, often claiming divine sanction for their worst atrocities (e.g., Num. 31:17–18). The consent of the governed was not even a consideration.

In a context like modern Iraq or the ancient Near East, where disputes are often settled without recourse to police or law, “formidability” is a social asset. A man may kill his adulterous wife in part because doing so increases his status among men. Engaging in visible violence puts him in a more powerful position when it comes time to settle a land dispute or negotiate a business transaction. Anger makes people more formidable in part because it seems so out of control. A king or god who is known for his caprice commands the full attention of his subjects.

We no longer settle many disputes by force or even force of will, and evolving theologies reflect our changing cultural conditions. The angry God of Jonathan Edwards has been replaced in part by a God who has a wonderful plan for your life or who seeks a personal relationship with you. All the same, recent research by cognitive scientists Aaron Sell, John Tooby, and Leah Cosmides suggests that there may be a biological basis for the intuitive expectation that God is anger prone.

We often think of anger being the domain of powerless, frustrated people, but the opposite may be true. One of the ways that anger functions is as a bargaining tactic. It increases formidability and, consequently, when I get angry, you pay more attention to my desires and less attention to your own. But that only works if you stick around. Most of us dislike being around anger, especially the sense that we are “walking on eggshells.” We generally try to avoid others who are chronically irritable, in particular if their anger is unpredictable or dangerous.

But the equation changes if the angry person is powerful. Powerful people are those who can inflict costs on us if we don't pay attention to their wishes or who can confer benefits when we do. They can reject us or injure or even kill us. Or they may be able to give us special privileges like wealth or sexual favors. With powerful people, we want to avoid their anger while staying connected. So when we figure out what makes them angry, we tend to become more compliant.

In a study by Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides, stronger men and more beautiful women were more anger prone than their less beefy and more ordinary counterparts. The researchers theorize that these are kinds of people who in our ancestral environment could have inflicted violence or offered premium reproductive benefits.
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Having more ability to threaten—or more to offer—creates a sense of entitlement, which when violated produces anger. It is one way that high-status people get the rest of us to do what they want, and because we value or fear them, they get away with it. Who is more powerful than God? Who is more able to inflict costs or confer benefits?

It may be that we are biologically predisposed to be anxious about God's wrath, but the fact that we are disposed to expect something doesn't make it real. Our minds are optimized to help us anticipate and adapt to the feelings, desires, and behaviors of other humans—including high-status humans who have the power to make our lives easy or wretched. It is far too easy to take this same template and project it onto the universe and the supernatural. The Bible writers’ belief in an angry God may be, essentially, an artifact of human information processing.

That is interesting but not entirely satisfying. When we talk about God, most of us are trying to glimpse a reality that is external to us, not trying to learn something about the architecture of our own minds. Are we sinners in the hands of an angry god or sinners in the hands of angry humans? Only by seeing ourselves do we have a shot at seeing beyond ourselves.

PLEASING A HIGH-STATUS DEITY
(SUPPLICATION, ADULATION, AND SUBSERVIENCE)

Imam Muhammed Baquir is said to have related this illustrative fable: “Finding I could speak the language of ants, I approached one and enquired, ‘What is God like? Does He resemble the ant?’ He answered, ‘God! No, indeed—we have only a single sting, but God, he has two!”

—author unknown

Do people think I am crabby? Or insecure? Or jealous? Do they think I am easily pleased? Happy? Contented? One way to tell would be to ask them. Another would be to watch how they interact with me. Christians spend a lot of time interacting with God—or at least attempting to. We may not be able to tell what is happening on God's side of the conversation (that is highly contested), but we know a good deal about the human half. How humans attempt to approach, influence, or simply relate to God tells us about how they perceive him.

The writers of the Bible provide pages and pages of advice on how to relate to God. Consequently, we have information about how they perceived him, too. According to cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer, most supernatural beings, regardless of their physical form, have human psyches, including emotions. The God of the Bible is no exception. I have said that biblical ideas about God's anger may come from how humans expect powerful people to behave toward those of lower status. In actual fact, sermons and sacred texts that wax eloquent about God's anger are just one of many clues that most of the Bible writers related to God as a high-status human. Most Christians since do, too.

Another bit of evidence can be seen in biblical notions of what gives God pleasure. The counterpoint to the threat of God's anger is that certain ways of relating to God please him, and so court favor. Making burnt offerings, for example: “He is to wash the inner parts and the legs with water, and the priest is to burn all of it on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord” (Lev. 1:9).

Besides gifts/offerings (burnt or otherwise), what kinds of attitudes and related behaviors please high-status people? My daughters recently negotiated the middle school world of queen bees and wannabes. Queen bees want to be the center of attention. They like being admired and imitated. (After all, “imitation is the highest form of flattery.”) They like exclusivity and often will reject girls who spend time with outsiders to their clique. They like calling the shots. They like bequeathing special favors and getting pathetic gratitude from the lowly in return. If we think about this list, it is remarkably, even painfully similar to what the God of Christians desires from his followers:

• Attention (On thee will I meditate night and day);

• Praise and admiration (For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised);

• Subservience (I will bow before the Lord my maker);

• Dependency (Ask and it shall be given);

• Uncritical Compliance (Receive the kingdom of God like a little child)

• Exclusivity (Thou shalt have no other gods before me For I am a jealous god);

• Gratitude (For this unspeakable gift).

These components are central to how Christians relate to God. In searching to demonstrate this point, I went to my browser and typed in, “Prayers for children.” The first one that came up, a rhyming prayer to start off a child's day, fit the mold. It included bowing (a gesture of subservience), expressions of gratitude and praise, promises of compliance, including “I will travel where you lead” and “Where you send me I will go,” assertions of dependency, and pleas for safekeeping in God's hand.
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This prayer was not unusual. In fact, the point I am making seems almost trivially true. What may not be so obvious is the hidden assumption underneath this anthropomorphism. The “submission displays” described above are valued by powerful humans because our species developed under conditions of insufficiency—inadequate food supplies, not enough high-quality mates for every man to have as many as he wants, limited fertile land, and so on. Dominance hierarchies appear in virtually all social animals that need to compete for resources, and submissive displays on the part of underlings allow this hierarchy to be established and maintained without physical violence.
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For example, weaker chickens duck and move away from food or off the most comfortable perch if their superiors in the pecking order arrive. In chimpanzees, a subordinate may crouch, hold out a hand, or squeak. Humans show submission through both words and behaviors, and these signals are so pervasive that actors are trained to incorporate hierarchy signals into every conversation. This is because acting and improvisation tend to fall flat unless social hierarchy is established among the characters.
²⁶

As social information specialists, we depend on each other, but we also compete with each other, and to minimize how much energy we spend competing, we establish hierarchies. Our desire to get as good a position as we can in the hierarchy makes us emotionally insecure. We are unsure of where we stand. Signals that other people will submit to us are reassuring. Pleasing.
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Most people find it uncomfortable to be told that “Islam” means “submission.” The images of forced submission can be a little too graphic. And yet the reality is that dominance and submission are an integral part of human relations and of religions with personal gods.