BREAKING UP WITH GOD
Reading the Bible leaves us wondering what kind of god we're going to get from one scripture to the next. We might get the god that loved his people so much he rained bread from the sky when they were hungry, or hated them so much he was threatening to force them to eat their own children.
Maybe we'd catch him raining fire on them or drowning them. He might be busy sending bears to eat children, commanding his army to kill cities of civilians by the sword, specifying women and children, or to keep the virgin girls for themselves as spoils of war.
Of course Yahweh was awful. He was a war god.Initially a storm and war deity associated with specific wilderness regions, over time, Yahweh absorbed characteristics and titles of the chief Canaanite god, El. Eventually monotheistic ideas took over and he became the Israelite's single god. Still very much a war god.
Of course as a 21st Century Christian you've got Jesus to play "good cop" so you pray to the Jesus in your head to intercede on your behalf to the God in your head (per Hebrews 7:25) and don't forget the Holy Spirit. He lacks Yahweh's anger but doesn't feel as personal as Christ. You still have to have faith in him too.
In any case it is Yahweh who demands obedience and worship under threat. It's Yahweh portrayed as a monster in the Scriptures. It's Yahweh who ultimately decides our fate.
To grow up with this god is to grow up on bedtime stories about genocide, rape and murder, perpetuated by the very spiritual force we are commanded to love. His cruelty is normalized, his creations blamed. In the fundamentalist flock the narrative that these stories may be metaphors is never given to children. God did these horrible things. Deal with it. He works in mysterious ways.We learn to make excuses for God's cruelty in the Bible early -and for his apparent current indifference to the state of his creation today. It's mostly a lot of rhetoric about humans being stupid and sinful and God being mysterious and perfect even when he was written with every character trait of a narcissistic sociopath.
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 DawkinsYahweh is detestable, to be sure, but gratefully, it is just a character: a bad idea. But ideas can hurt people. Ideas can destroy minds and lives. They can turn kind souls judgmental and arrogant. They can stifle self worth and introduce neurotic guilt. They can terrify.
The Yahweh idea has left millions terrified for our eternal souls. Fear God! demanded Deuteronomy 6:13 and Ecclesiastes 12:13, and we did didn't we?
If you're like me, you tried to give him the love he demanded. You worried he could read your resentful thoughts.
He couldn't. And he will never know if we ever secretly hated him.
Maybe you aren't ready to let go of the idea of God. Yahweh is scrappable but it's hard to abandon the idea that some conscious being must be responsible for creation. Indeed our urge to know how we got here has inspired us to make up all sorts of stories throughout all history.
I am of the opinion that if a conscious creator exists, it is indifferent and uninvolved.
If it concerns itself with humanity and possesses the power to distribute retribution or reward, it makes sense to imagine it will do so based on values that reflect compassion and justice, rather than faith and allegiance to an idea. How could so much value be placed on suspension of critical thought? Our capacity to think is the finest attribute given us human animals. One can imagine a god would take pride in creating our incredible minds.
Not Yahweh- that god demanded you trust him with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
That god demanded endless worship and love. But he sucked at loving you back. He created you with sin and blamed you for it. He killed his own son and blamed you for it. His grace came with a guilt trip. That god was the most toxic relationship we ever had.
If we were to dream up our own gods, how different would they be from old Yahweh the war god we inherited? What commandments would this god impose? What cruelty would this god refrain from inflicting on its creation? Surely we would do better than a tribe of shepherds 6000 years ago. They could only create a god in the image of a king with a very human chip on his shoulder.
Did your animosity toward the god character lead to feelings of guilt and fear for your soul? You don't have to be afraid anymore. Tell your inner child: It was OK to dislike Yahweh. He wasn't a good guy.
Healing Exercise
If you're tired of trying to love a god that doesn't answer your prayers, that behaved like a real dick in the Bible, you can let that internalized obligation go.✒️Write a letter to Yahweh detailing your grievances against him. Then throw it away. He doesn't exist for you to give it to him.
When you're programmed to feel rewarded by faith and punished for curiosity, reversing the damage takes time.
Don't scold yourself for clinging to beliefs. Affirmations are most effective against cognitive dissonance when they do not immediately contradict a deeply held belief. Instead of telling yourself "Yahweh isn't real" for example, try affirmations that focus on incremental growth, curiosity, and self-compassion:
This approach helps reduce the emotional distress of cognitive dissonance, making it easier to change beliefs and behaviors over time.
Changing our minds can be a tremendous challenge. When we're taught to avoid critical thought, under threat of punishment, our bravery must catch up to our curiosity to allow for deconstruction.
Try to let critical thought lead. Are the actions of this God rational? Are they a good moral example? Or are they indicative of a human being who struggles with emotional intelligence? Shouldn't this god reflect more knowledge than a human living thousands of years ago? Shouldn't its values make sense and sit right in your heart? If these are the commands of the one true god why are they so specific to this ancient Israelite tribe? If this god is the only true god that ever was why is there literature that shows how he was transformed through time?
These questions are hard to ask out loud or even in our minds when we believe a god is up there reading it. We have been taught that they could cost us our soul. You might find yourself on a roller coaster of asking questions and repenting for curiosity for a while. Give yourself grace during the wild ride.
The fundies love to say that God changed after Jesus's sacrifice. We just have to accept Jesus but this was a very arbitrary acceptance. If you didn't believe all the way or obey all the way, you were still subjected to God's wrath in the next life. How grateful we can be, that Yahweh was a lie!
READ:
The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark SmithDeep Dive:
God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulo
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