Skip to main content

God’s Emotions 8: God Cares About What I Care About

By Valerie Tarico ~

Note: This is Part Eight in a series, “God’s Emotions: Why the Biblical God is so Very Human.” Parts 1-7 are available at this website or at http://www.awaypoint.wordpress.com/.

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do. --Anne Lamott

Divorce, fags, figs, workers of iniquity, homophobes, Lady Gaga, remarriage, Ireland, techno, furries, war, a coward, shrimp, lying lips, abortion, your outfit, bad manners, amputees, begging, Haiti, religion, complaining, Canada, haughty eyes, murmuring, anal sex, mobile homes, haters . . . . The Internet is full of articles about things and people God hates. Some of them are tongue in cheek. A remarkable number are not.

Fear God, Hate SinImage by buildscharacter via Flickr
Through history, the prevailing consensus on what and who God despises has drifted on the cultural currents. A seemingly continuous anchor point for Christians has been that God hates sin, although whether he hates the sinner too is contested.

Even more contested is which sins he hates. Does God really hate shellfish consumption and blend fabrics and beard trimming as much as he hates anal sex, for example? The book of Leviticus seems to say so. But most modern Christians and Jews simply can’t bring themselves to care about these things, and so they find it almost impossible to believe at a gut level, that God does. A similar laissez faire attitude can be seen among young people toward homosexuality. Having been raised on Modern Family and Little Miss Sunshine and Glee; having encountered openly gay relatives and friends from childhood on, they simply can’t find it in themselves to think that God cares terribly much who we love.

Half a century ago, a social psychologist named Fritz Heider made a series of observations that he distilled into what he called “balance theory.” His theory is useful in thinking about why our images of God change. Heider found that positive and negative feelings in relationships need to be balanced to be stable. For example, if I love my gay brother (positive), and I worship the biblical God (positive), but the Bible says gays are an abomination (negative), then my loyalties are in conflict and so unstable. In this case, I might start feeling more negative about my brother, or I might start feeling more negative about the Bible. Either would help me resolve my conflict and create balance. Over the years, other scholars have refined Heider’s theory, but the general ideas of balance and stability persist.

Think about social balance as it relates to me and a god. This is a relationship in which one party (the god) either exists exclusively in my mind or is highly ambiguous, which means I have a great deal of latitude in what I imagine his attitudes to be. In a human-to-human social relationship, I can’t resolve conflict simply by adjusting another person’s attitude, at least not without putting out some good arguments and evidence. But in the human-to-god equation, I can. And, in fact, adjusting a god’s attitudes to fit mine may be quite a bit easier than the reverse.

At the heart of humanity is a sometimes sweet, sometimes not-so-sweet narcissism that makes it almost impossible for us to get outside ourselves. This narcissism is visible in a small child who can feel another person’s distress but doesn’t know quite how to respond and so offers the comfort she herself would want. A two-year-old may offer her crying mother a stuffed animal or a soggy cookie. But even adults make a similar well intentioned error. What makes you feel really loved by a partner? For some people the answer is sex. For some it is gifts. For some it is being told, “I love you.” For some it is having a task or burden taken off of their shoulders. To communicate love effectively, one has to know what makes a specific recipient feel loved. But spouses often make the mistake of offering whatever they most want to receive. When a partner is feeling distant or sad, they ramp up efforts to give what they themselves would want—and then are disappointed in the reaction.

Have you ever noticed how utterly indifferent God is to how humans treat fish?What I’m trying to illustrate is that by default we use ourselves as the measure of the world. The Golden Rule acknowledges this: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In other words, start with what you know—yourself—and imagine that others want the same (and you’re likely to treat them fairly well). By contrast, the Platinum Rule, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them,” can bring us a mental screeching halt, because it asks us to step outside ourselves. That’s tough. In the XTC song, “Garden of Earthly Delights,” the refrain, “don’t hurt nobody” is repeated –and then, just once, it is followed by “ ‘less of course they ask you.” The listener is startled and maybe laughs. Most of us don’t want to get hurt, even for titillation, and so we don’t expect the exception.

In a similar vein, we tend to assume that God shares our perspective and priorities. Have you ever noticed how utterly indifferent God is to how humans treat fish? Jesus himself magically multiplied fish so they could be hoisted in nets and subjected to slow suffocation. Fish brains are very unlike ours, and the more alien a mind is, the less we are able to empathize. This may be why we concern ourselves less with the treatment of octopus than chimpanzees, even though scientists tell us that octopus are some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Unless we can somehow resonate with an animal’s experience, meaning feel it, at least at a tentative hypothetical level, it falls outside our moral sphere—and God’s priorities.

Our ability to empathize with other humans, though one of our great gifts, has similar limits based on whether they are familiar or alien to us. We care about their happiness and suffering in proportion to several factors such as attachment, proximity and similarity. In other words we care about people more if we spend time with them and they are like us—same country, same religion, same race, same gender, more shared DNA . . . . When other people get hurt, it hurts us less if they are more alien. Our moral outrage at a child being “collateral damage” isn’t the same if they live in Iraq as it would be if the bombs fell in our neighborhood.

We relate only distantly to most people on this planet. And even though believers insist that “Jesus love the little children of the world”—equally-- their behavior in the practice of Christian living suggest otherwise. Consider: Thoughtful people sometimes balk at football prayers, the idea that God will favor one team over another. But who balks at grace before dinner? Almost no-one. And yet, those who believe God loves the children of the world equally should. If you had two children, one who had goldfish crackers and juice and cheese sticks and peaches for lunch and then an after school snack; and one who hadn’t eaten since yesterday—and then only a thin gruel—which would you feed meat and potatoes tonight? In a less self-centric world, deities wouldn’t be thanked for directing the food to American dinner tables; they would be scolded or politely declined.

“Jesus loves the little children.” “His eye is on the sparrow.” “Ask and ye shall receive.” – these soothing verbal mantras work their magic because what is really at stake for each individual believer is a vortex of well-being that centers on him or her, thinning as it reaches beyond family, friends, countrymen and co-religionists to a hazy netherland of alien cultures and creatures. Unfortunately, those of us who lack person-gods have little cause to be smug. The vortex is the same; we merely lack the validation that comes from a deity sharing our personal priorities. Only a mindful commitment to compassionate living can carry us through life in a manner that draws the world into the self-- whether or not the self includes some concept of God.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light, (Revised ed. of The Dark Side) and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not