TGD: Chapter Two - On the Character of God

Chapter Two of "The God Delusion" begins with the following sentence: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of 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, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Today's post is going to be a response to this one sentence. Now, I don't pan on walking through the rest of the book one sentence at a time, however, since I worship the God whom Dawkins is slandering, it seems only fair that I should offer a rebuttal.

I'll start by responding to the most egregiously false accusations.

On the top of that list would be the claim that the God of the Old Testament is unforgiving. This is simply not true. Throughout the Old Testament we see God forgiving people. He repeatedly forgives the nations of Israel and Judah, in the book of Jonah he forgave the entire city of Nineveh, which was the capital of one of the most notoriously bloodthirsty empires in the ancient world, and he famously forgave King David when he committed both murder and adultery. Those are just a few examples.

What's more, whenever God does punish people, it's almost always after he has been patient and forgiving over an extended period of time. He waited four hundred years to punish the Amorites for, among other things, ritually sacrificing infants. If anything, the God of the Old Testament is forgiving to a fault.

Then there's the accusation that God is filicidal. I will freely admit that I had to look this one up. Filicide is the act of killing one's own son or daughter. Presumably this refers to the crucifixion of Jesus. That doesn't happen in the Old Testament, but we'll ignore that for now.

First of all, Jesus was a grown adult who went willingly to his death. More importantly, God wasn't the one who killed him. Finally, as John Cleese might say, he got better.

(If we assume he's sticking to the Old Testament, this could be referring to the book of Exodus, in which God calls the Jewish people his firstborn son. The main problem with this theory is that the Jewish people are still alive and well.)

The accusation that God is megalomaniacal is more humorous than anything else. The God of the Old Testament made the whole universe out of nothing and Dawkins is accusing him of having delusions of grandeur. To what great heights could a delusional, omnipotent deity aspire to? Does he take a break from ruling the heavens and the earth so he can pretend to be the King of Scotland? Does the one who formed a human being out of dirt like to pretend that he invented the sandwich? In the preface to the paperback edition, Dawkins said that he wanted this sentence to come across as humorous*. This is one place where I think he succeeded admirably, although not as he intended.

The claim that God is racist presumably refers to how God treats the Jewish people compared with everyone else. It's true that God had a special arrangement with the nation of Israel, but that arrangement does not include special treatment. The Old Testament makes it clear that God cares for the nations surrounding Israel, just like he cares for Israel. In fact, as part of their special arrangement, the Israelites have an obligation to be a blessing to the nations around them. God's treaty with Israel isn't about God loving Israel more than everyone else. It's about God wanting Israel to be a blessing to everyone else, which is more like the opposite of racism.

Of all the accusations that Mr. Dawkins makes against God, the one that is the most accurate is that God is jealous. God is jealously protective of the Jewish people. He wants them to stay faithful to the promise that they had made to serve him. Even though they repeatedly break that promise, God keeps his promise and remains faithful to them. God becomes jealous, but he does not abandon him. In my mind, that is one of God's best qualities. He stays faithful to his people, even when they cause him pain.

The last accusation that I'm going to address directly is that God is unjust. In many ways that one word sums up the whole sentence. The central point being made is that God's reign of the earth, as described in the Old Testament, is unjust.

The question is to big for me to provide anything close to a thorough answer. Instead I will do my best to present, in brief, what the Old Testament has to say on the subject.

In the beginning, God made everything good. Humanity lived in paradise with God and God provided them with everything they would ever need. God gave them only one rule and it was easy to obey. Things fell apart when humanity broke that law. God punishes humanity in order to restore justice, and God promises to fix what is broken.

This is the basic pattern of Genesis 1-3, and it forms a template that recurs over and over again throughout scripture. The template goes something like this: 1) God does something good for an individual or a group of people, 2) sooner or later that individual or group does something evil, 3) God responds to the evil that has been done and 4) God promises to one day get rid of evil and replace it with good. Of all these steps, step 3 is the most flexible. In some cases it seems to be missing (in these cases God is being patient and forgiving). In other cases, God asks the person to make a sacrifice before forgiving the sin. Very rarely, God refuses to forgive the sin and punishes the person for what they have done. As I said above that last option almost always happens after God has already shown an incredible amount of patience and forgiveness.

When people question God's justice they concentrate on steps 2 and 3. They question why God regards certain actions as evil; they question whether or not the people who committed evil were truly responsible for their actions; they question the methods God uses to punish people; they question God's decision to forgive in some cases and not in other cases.

But the claim that God is just does not depend primarily on steps 2 and 3. The books of Ecclesiastes and Job openly acknowledge that how God punishes evil, or fails to punish evil, can seem very unjust at times. Instead, the claim that God is just depends on steps 1 and 4. God is just because in the beginning he made everything good and in the end he will make everything good again. Moreover he has promised us that we will be included in that future where everything is restored, even though we sometimes do evil. That is why I can say with confidence that God is, indeed, just.

This was a bit of a dense post. If there's something you don't agree with, or something that doesn't make sense, feel free to post it in the comments. I look forward to reading them. Thank you.

* In the preface, Dawkins was responding to critics who complained that his writing was too shrill. The above sentence was the example most often given. Dawkins wrote, "It is not for me to say whether I succeeded, but my intention was closer to robust but humorous broadside than shrill polemic." I will say that I think the sentence failed to be humorous, if only because the idea is so unoriginal. As for the broadside, I think it missed its mark. Most of the shots are wildly off course, as I have already shown.

Engaging the Pain

How do we respond to people when they are going through a tremendous amount of pain?

Last Sunday, after church, a woman came up to me and asked me to pray for a friend of hers. Her friend was a woman who had lost her son, lost her job and was in danger of losing her house.

She was upset. She was in a lot of pain. She was grieving the loss of her son. She didn't have the resources, either financially or emotionally to deal with her current crisis.

I sat there with her. I prayed for her. I listened to what she had to say. I listened to her anger and frustration. I listened to her tears.

I offered her a few words of comfort, encouragement and support. Understandably, they didn't make much of a difference to her. I gave her the names and numbers of a few people I know who might be able to help her. I don't know if that will make much of a difference either, though I hope it does.

Mostly, I just sat there in silence and acknowledged how completely useless I was in this situation.

I know that one day, the ruler of heaven and of earth will come back, and he will wipe away every tear, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. But until that day comes there will be pain and crying and mourning and death, and I don't know how to respond. This is the dilemma we all face.

I believe that every person has an obligation to help people in need to the best of their ability. At the same time, I know that that's not the answer this woman needs. No person can give this woman her son back, or give back the years this woman has lost to grief.

Ultimately, it is up to God to restore this woman, to give back what was taken from her. Until that happens, we live with the pain. The question remains, how do we respond to it?

The Last Word

Last week I talked about the inappropriate comments made by Pat Robertson regarding the earthquake in Haiti. I said that there would be people who reject Christianity because of what Mr. Robertson said. Since then I've read a few articles that comment on what Mr. Robertson has said and both come to the conclusion that Mr. Robertson's remarks, while tactless, are basically an accurate reflection of Christian beliefs.

Both articles talk about the problem of evil. Simply stated, the problem of evil is this: If God is good and God is all powerful then why does evil exist?

I don't enjoy trying to answer the problem of evil. Attempts to reconcile God's goodness with human suffering tend to be insulting to both God and the people who are suffering. The only Godly response to suffering is compassion.

Still, there is more that needs to be said. We must remember that God Himself has compassion on those who suffer. We must also remember that God has made a promise to humanity. He has promised to set right everything that is wrong with the world and to comfort everyone who suffers.

This is not an answer to the problem of evil. It doesn't take away the very real pain and suffering that the people of Haiti are experiencing right now. This is only a reminder that, as bad as this earthquake is, it is not the end of the world and it is not the end of the people of Haiti.

For now, many people will need to ask, "Why has God forsaken me?" and it is all right for them to ask. This earthquake in Haiti will not be the last word on the matter. It might take a long time, but God's love and mercy will triumph over evil. That is the last word on the matter.

Understanding Evil

In today's post I'm going to be talking about the quake in Haiti. Before I begin, I'd like to encourage you to consider donating money to disaster relief efforts and to long term development in Haiti. Here's some advice for how to give money to disaster relief efforts. Here is the website of a nonprofit that does development work in Haiti and several other countries. Please check out those links and consider how much you think you should give. Thank you.

Today I would like to talk about how we try to understand and make sense of large scale tragedies like the recent earthquake in Haiti.

In one of my early posts I asked the question Is God Really Good? In that post I was looking at the book of Job, but I think similar rules apply for wide scale tragedies such as this. In that post I comment that the mistake that Job's friends make is that they try to provide a reasonable explanation to an unreasonable situation.

Evil is always unreasonable. Evil always defies comprehension. Evil is always without justification; otherwise it would not be evil.

This is a truth that Pat Robertson doesn't seem to grasp. If he did, he wouldn't have claimed that the earthquake in Haiti was the result of a pact with the devil.

Pat Robertson's claim that the earthquake is the result of a pact with Satan is troubling on a few levels. It is troubling because it reveals a gross insensitivity to the extreme pain and suffering that the people of Haiti are going through right now. What they need right now is our support and our compassion, not our condemnation.

This is made even worse because Pat Robertson is a spokesman for a large segment of the American Christian community. When he slanders a nation, he doesn't just damage his own reputation. He hurts the reputations of Christians everywhere. I suspect that more than a few people will turn away from Jesus because of what Mr. Robertson has said, and I can't say that I blame them.

Finally, the most troubling thing about Pat Robertson's words is that they provide his followers with a false sense of security. Pat Robertson has often claimed that wide scale tragedies are the result of divine judgments, but those judgments are always directed at someone else. Pat Robertson's God is often angry, but never at Pat Robertson or his followers.

Jesus warns his followers not to have such an attitude. If I may paraphrase Jesus a little bit here, "Do you think that the Haitians are the worst sinners in the Western Hemisphere because they have suffered in this way?" Pat Robertson foolishly seems to believe that the answer is yes.

If we must talk about God's anger and judgment at a time like this, we should think about how God feels about us right now. We ought to consider the fact that Haiti's poverty and poor infrastructure is what allowed this quake to be so devastating. We should consider the fact that the U.S. is at least partially responsible for Haiti's current economic state.

There is a parable of Jesus that speaks to the relationship between Haiti and the United States. It is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In the story a poor man (Haiti) sits and begs just outside the gate of a wealthy person's home. but the wealthy man(the U.S.) does nothing to ease the poor man's suffering. I won't spoil the story except to say that it doesn't end well for the rich man.

This is the truth that Pat Robertson is concealing from his followers when he tells them that the Haitian people are responsible for their own misery. He prevents them from seeing the simple truth that we are obligated to take care of people in need. He prevents them from seeing that God's true anger is directed not at the Haitians, but at those people who see their misery and do nothing to help them.

Is God Really Good?

As I said when I started this blog, I hope to address some of the common objections to Christianity. Today I will be talking about the Book of Job and about the problem of evil. I don't claim to have an answer to this age-old dilemma. I'm simply going to present what the bible has to say about the matter.

"Is God Really Good?" is the central question raised by the book of Job. This book presents us with a situation that seems completely unreasonable. From the beginning of the story we know that Job is an upright and blameless man, entirely devoted to God. As the story progresses Job faces a series of incredibly harsh trials. First he losses all that he has, including his servants and children, and then he is afflicted with a terrible disease. For those who believe in God's goodness, the story is completely outrageous and it forces us to face our doubts.

In the story we see how Job's friends respond to Job's suffering. When Job complains that his situation is miserable and that God is being unfair, they respond by telling Job that it must be his fault. They believe that God is just, and they know that Job is suffering terribly, therefore they conclude that Job must have committed some secret sin that warrants the punishment he is receiving. Their understanding of God does not allow for someone who is as righteous as Job is to suffer as horribly as Job has.

Job's friends are very reasonable people with a very reasonable kind of faith. The problem is that when they are confronted with an unreasonable situation, they behave very unreasonably.

I'd like to compare Job's response to his suffering, with the response of Job's friends to Job's suffering. Job's friends say that God is righteous, so they accuse Job. Job maintains that he is righteous, so he accuses God. I think Job's response is the better of the two. Job's response offends God, but the response of Job's friends offends both God and Job.

There is one character who speaks in the Book of Job whom God does not rebuke in the end and that is the character of Elihu. Elihu rebukes Job for making accusations against God and he reminds Job of God's glory, power and righteousness. He doesn't claim that God's punishment of Job is just, but he does say that God is just.

I don't think that Elihu's response is perfect. I certainly wouldn't use it as a model for grief counseling, but I think he does show us a better way to respond.

When we see suffering in the world, there is a temptation to provide an explanation. When we give in to this temptation we become caught on the horns of a dilemma: either these people who are suffering are evil, or God is evil. We become caught in this trap because we are trying to provide a reasonable explanation to an unreasonable situation.

This is why I think that the book of Job is helpful. By presenting us with an unreasonable situation, the book of Job forces us to confront our doubts about God's goodness. And in the end, the only way we can believe in anything is by confronting, and answering, our doubts. Reading Job's story gives us an opportunity to be open about our doubts and see if God will answer them.