The End of Christianity (22 page)

by Dr. Valerie Tarico

THE QUESTION WE FORGET TO ASK

H
ave you heard the joke about the little Scottish boy who refuses to eat two nasty shriveled prunes on his plate? His mother cajoles and pleads. Finally she tells him, as she has many times before, that if he doesn't obey her, God will be angry. Usually it works, but this time the stubborn child holds out, and the mother, herself angry, sends him straight to bed. No sooner does he get there than a storm sets in, with lightning and thunder crashing around them. Feeling contrite and thinking that her child must be terrified, the mother sneaks to her son's room to reassure him. She opens the door quietly, expecting to find him burrowed under the covers. But no, he is at the window, peering out into the night. As she watches, he shakes his head and says in an incredulous, reproving voice, “Such a fuss to make over two prunes!”

In the Hebrew Bible, in the book of 1 Samuel, the Philistines are battling with God's chosen people, the Israelites. The Israelites have a very special object, which you might recognize from the movie
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It is the Ark of the Covenant, a box made of wood covered in gold with sculptured angels on top and a golden jar inside. Maybe it contains manna—food that dropped from heaven. Or maybe it contains fragments of stone tablets. At any rate, the Philistines capture it in battle. The Israelites are angry, and God gets angry, too. No sooner do those Philistines cart off the box than plagues befall them. A plague of mice, for example. Then the ark is taken from town to town, but the men of each town get hemorrhoids, which must have been particularly wretched in the days before toilet paper and Preparation H. (Don't miss the full story; the resolution is awesome: 1 Sam. 6:1–15.) Mice
and
hemorrhoids. Such a fuss over a golden box!

In other stories from the Bible, both Old Testament and New, God gets angry and does things that strike us as a rather big fuss. In Second Kings, for example, the prophet Elisha gets mad because some kids (boys, of course) are making fun of him and calling him Baldhead. Elisha curses them, and apparently God is mad too, because he sends two female bears out of the woods and they maul and kill forty-two of those boys (2 Kings 2:23–24). In the book of Matthew, Jesus is traveling along and he sees a fig tree. He is hungry, so he goes over to it. But it is bare because—as the writer tells us—figs aren't in season. So Jesus gets angry and curses the tree, and it withers and dies on the spot (Matt. 21:18–19).

In all these stories, what jumps out at most of us is a sense of disproportionality. God's reaction seems so out of scale with the transgression! That is what makes us laugh at the joke, because the little boy notices it when his mom doesn't expect him to; and it is what makes biblical literalists squirm about the other stories. We expect God not to be the kind of guy who needs anger management classes. He shouldn't need to breathe deep and leave the room lest he, heaven forbid, do something he will regret. (Note: If you research these stories you will find all manner of convoluted apologetics arguing that God's reactions were, in fact, proportional. Those forty-two lads were Crips and Bloods carrying switchblades.…)

Adolescent psychologist Laura Kastner recently cowrote an acclaimed book about parenting during the teen years. The book,
Getting to Calm
, is about “emotional regulation”—getting yourself into a modulated sensible mental space so that you can teach self-regulation to your kid, whose frontal lobe isn't quite all there yet.
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According to Kastner, calling in the she-bears means that we, as parents, have failed at our own mission—we're in meltdown right along with our teens.

We expect God to be good at emotional regulation, even better at it than Dr. Kastner asks parents to be when faced with teens gone haywire. (If I have to “be the adult in the room,” then God does too; after all, he should have this stuff mastered.) Another way of saying this is that we expect God to have a very high “EQ” (Emotional Quotient). When this seems to be violated, we experience dissonance, and we may laugh, question our beliefs, or make intellectual moves to restore a sense of consistency.

What doesn't strike us as bizarre—in fact, what we tend to accept without thought—is the storyteller's assumption that God has emotions. We don't expect him
not
to have emotions, or that would be the crux of the joke: isn't it funny—the kid and his mom think that God gets angry! We simply expect him to have a sense of proportion. The idea that God has emotions seems so natural that most people who believe in gods never question it. The God of the Bible gets angry, has regrets, gets lonely, loves, has loyalties, is jealous, feels compassion, and is vindictive. In the incarnation of Jesus, he also is afraid and weeps.

For a psychology nerd like me, that is fascinating, and I think when you finish reading this chapter you'll understand why. Starting just from abstractions or the evidence of the natural world, it isn't a given that whatever force designed the DNA code would get mad or sad or jealous. Or rather I should say, it isn't a given—in the abstract. We will see that once we add a human interpreter, the idea that God is loving or angry or lonely becomes as natural as the odd idea that angels have two legs.

In religion, people make guesses about what is real based on highly ambiguous evidence. If the evidence weren't ambiguous, there wouldn't be so many disagreements—literally thousands of branches of Christianity alone. But those same ambiguities that make it so hard to come to agreement about God make religion very interesting from the standpoint of understanding our own psychology. In some ways, the concept of God is like an inkblot test. The blot is there, but what you see in it depends on who you are.

All of us engage in a process that Sigmund Freud called “projection,” and in fact, those inkblot tests are known in the trade as projective tests. Projection, by definition, is a matter of mistaking internal realities for external realities. If I look at a random inkblot and I see exploding bombs, a therapist might wonder if I am angry or worried (or living in a war zone). Projection happens particularly in social situations and when we are faced with ambiguities. We are angry, so we assume family members are angry at us. We feel rejected, so we assume our colleagues feel rejecting. We are dishonest, and so we mistrust the people we deceive.
²

How about our images of God? Which ones come from something outside us and which are projections of our own psyches? Answering this question is a process of elimination; to come any closer to knowing what is out there, we need to start by scrubbing our god concepts of anthropomorphism—of projection. We now know quite a bit about the human mind, how it constrains our imaginations by forcing information into boxes called ontological categories, and what kinds of cognitive errors (including projection) it is prone to. Years ago I wrote an article titled “Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science.”
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This article is intended to complement that one by examining another chunk of what is known about the human psyche—in this case, human emotions—and to look at the biblical god concept through that lens.

You have probably heard the saying “In some ways I am like no other person, in some ways like some other people, and in some ways like every other person.” For anyone who has a god-concept, all three of these dimensions shape it.

• Your image of God is shaped by your personal upbringing and present state of mind. If you have more authoritarian parents, you are more likely to see God as a strict father. If you are lonely, you are more likely to see God as wrathful.
⁴
If you feel good about yourself, you are more likely to see God as loving.
⁵

• It is also shaped by your culture: If your culture is bellicose, your God likely approves of war. If it accepts homosexuality as part of a natural spectrum, your God is likely to become less disapproving of it. Conversely, if your culture condemns homosexuality, that's how your God will think, too.

• Lastly, your God concept is shaped by your species. If your species has a mammalian, primate,
Homo sapiens sapiens
mind, your God probably does, too. Not that we have a great sample to consider. We have only one species with god concepts on this planet, to be exact. What we can say is that across cultures, regardless of what physical form gods may take (male/female, animal, tree, spirit), these deities have strikingly human psyches.
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It is this third dimension that will be the focus of this chapter. Specifically, we will be looking at how God's emotions are depicted in the Bible, what is now known about emotions as physical and social phenomena, and how these two intersect. In the process, we may learn something useful about ourselves.

DO CHRISTIANS REALLY
THINK THAT GOD HAS EMOTIONS?

Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;

(For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the ANGER of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee.…

—Deuteronomy 6:14–15

And he will LOVE thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.…

—Deuteronomy 7:13

Most religions posit the existence not just of a supernatural realm, but of supernatural persons with loyalties, preferences, and other human psychological qualities.
⁷
This is true in the case of traditional Christianity, which asserts the existence of a whole realm of supernatural beings including angels, demons, human souls, and “God in three persons, blessed trinity.”

What is a person? A few years back, my daughter Brynn, then in the sixth grade, wrote an impassioned essay arguing for the personhood of chickens. Chickens should be considered persons, she said, because they are conscious, with feelings, preferences, and intentions. They experience pleasure and pain. They know what they like; they have distinct personalities. (She was arguing that they should be treated kindly and not have their beaks cut off.)

In an entirely different realm, Arthur D'Adamo's book,
Science without Bounds
, explores ontologies that have identified the ultimate reality (aka God) as a person and contrasts them with others that have not. His treatment is deep and nuanced, and I recommend it.
⁸
But his starting definition of personhood is remarkably similar to Brynn's. It includes awareness, intellect, and emotion. The personhood of God, Adamo argues, is at the heart of Abrahamic theism, including Christian belief and practice.

Even when believers say that they believe in the more abstract God of the theologians, most don't—at least not completely. In their day-to-day lives (and in a laboratory setting) they talk and behave as if they were relating to a humanlike person. For example, students who say that God is outside of time will still analyze a story as if he completes one task and then moves on to another.
⁹
Our brains naturally incline toward interpreting stimuli—rocks, ships, stuffed animals, clouds—in anthropomorphic terms, and gods are no exception.

Christian apologists, meaning defenders of the faith, argue for the possibility of the existence of a highly abstracted form of God that exists beyond the realm of human reason and the reach of science. But what they usually want is something more specific—to create intellectual space for their belief in the person-god of the Bible. They craft abstract arguments to protect belief in something more emotionally satisfying (and primitive and humanoid).

In this regard they are similar to a wide range of religious believers. Humans in a monotheistic context ask four basic questions about God:

• Does God exist?

• What is God like?

• What does God want from us?

• How can we get what we want from God?

In reality, the first of these questions tends to be interesting only in the context of the other three: God is interesting only if he is knowable and has “hedonic relevance.” By hedonic relevance, I mean that by understanding or pleasing God I can make my life better or worse.

If God is defined at a level of abstraction sufficient to satisfy many scientists, philosophers, and modernist theologians, he becomes immediately uninteresting to most believers. Consider, for example, Albert Einstein's statements:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.…I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own.
¹⁰

Within Christianity, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a stab at making this vision personally relevant:

I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and, to borrow a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.
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