Why I Think God is Angry, Part 1

[andyfox]

In another post in another thread, I referred to the God of the Bible as a "mean old bastard." My apologies to those whom I offended for that unfortunate phrase.

But I think there is a very good reason to see the God of the Old Testament as an angry God. The argument is a long one, but I think a convincing one. In this, I largely follow the argument of Frederick Turner in his book Beyond Geography.

Western Civilization had its foundation in the ancient Near East. While we are all the inheritors of the techniques of civilization (agriculture; animal husbandry; the designs of polity) worked out there, we are also all the inheritors of certain attitudes towards the natural world. The main avenues for these attitudes into the civilization of the West has been the sacred history of the ancient Israelites, the spiritual matrix out of which Christianity arose and that eventually formed the first half of Western Civilization’s Holy Scripture, the Old Testament of the Bible.

The Israelites shared much of the same landscape and the same challenges with other ancient peoples, such as the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and they also shared much of the same attitudes toward that landscape. These hardened semi-nomads viewed the luxuries of the cities of the valleys from their tents, and to them the city and the settled life in it became a reference point in many of their traditions. It stood in contrast to the dry, marginal existence they themselves lived. Later, as they became non-wandering agriculturalists themselves in lands given to them by their God, the ex-wanderers looked out into the world in which they had once themselves lived and they looked out in fear or the wilderness and chaos it seemed to be. It was through their eyes that the wilderness, and more importantly, those who lived there, assumed the forbidding shape that the Old Testament (and Christianity) would emphasize.

Western attitudes towards the wilderness, towards supposedly unimproved nature, and towards those who lived in the wilderness, are traceable to the struggle of the ancient Near Eastern peoples with their tough and tricky environment.

The region in which the early settlers of the Near East settled presented them with very difficult challenges that they learned to meet only very gradually and very painfully. The area of good soil between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was a very small fraction of the area and it was surrounded by dry stone ground, by steppe lands, by desert, and by other marginal lands. This was a place of great extremes, of floods and burning dry spells.

Every environment encourages its own special mythology. The weather patterns, the size and shape of the sky and clouds and what they bring, the contours and colors of the land, the animals and plants and their rhythms, and, above all, the human adaptations to all this as they developed over time--these are all brought by a people into their sacred narratives and thus into the personalities of their god or gods.

In the Near East the hard-fought and hard-won evolution from encampments to villages to towns to large cities, all achieved over thousand of years in a very difficult environment, nurtured the belief that civilization meant the walled block, the city with grain stocks and that civilization could be achieved and perilously maintained only by hand-to-hand combat with nature.

Nature would grant very little by itself. Only the work of human hands protected civilized man from nature. Humans were not assisted by the earth, which was hostile, but by the god or gods of the sky, far removed from the earth.

So whereas the mythologies of the earlier settlements seem to have been based at least partly on the earth, when cities developed the location of divinity shifted to the sky and to the irrational, violent god or gods who dwelt there.

The rise in the Near East, then, of civilization as the West would one day come to think of it, saw as a significant element of it the replacement of an older feeling of gratitude toward nature and of the interdependence of all things by ideas of force meeting force, of the opposition of man and nature. The old notion of Mother Earth was changed into the notion of a struggle with the earth.

The wall, in this environment, became not only a physical thing bounding the city from the wilderness, but also a spiritual boundary of even greater importance: a psychological "wall" preserving and protecting those within the physical wall from thos that were outside. What lay beyond the walls became something "Other" and less than civilization: people who lived outside the walls came to be seen as something less than civilized, as objects of hatred and of fear and of derision.

[BluffTHIS!]

Andy, I think that you have made no logical connection in your post between the Judeo-Christian God being an "angry" God and city based communities somehow moving from nature based worship to other types of gods. Arguments like yours conveniently focus in on only the times when God was angry with His children, and overlook the many and much more important times when He, the loving Father, forgives them their transgressions and welcomes them back with loving arms. It is true that the forgiving aspect of God isn't as emphasized in the old testament as much as the new, and if you only want to make your arguement with Jews then that's OK, as long as you realize your arguement doesn't address Christians.

As to the struggle for survival against an often hostile natural environment somehow being the reason for angry city-slicker gods that replaced more nature-oriented worship, I would only say that just because you and others may be intent on showing an anthropological development that supports your atheistic/agnostic views by denigrating the history of Judeo-Christianity, and even though you might explain the worship practices of other city-states, this has nothing to do with Judaism or Christianity which depends upon divine revelation.

<<I would only say that just because you and others may be intent on showing an anthropological development that supports your atheistic/agnostic views by denigrating the history of Judeo-Christianity, and even though you might explain the worship practices of other city-states, this has nothing to do with Judaism or Christianity which depends upon divine revelation. >>



hehehe I bet that god talks to you and that you voted for bush hehehe rednecks hehe

[andyfox]

My sense is that Christian's spirit against the wilderness and its inhabitants, as evidenced by how they reacted to finding new lands when they ventured out en masse from Europe beginning in the 15th century, shows that their God looked upon the environment they found based on their experiences.

I think the type of God found in the Bible makes sense based on environmental influences. As does the kind of worship aboriginal peoples practiced. It would be quite a coincidence if divine revelation just happened to reveal the proper gods, so different from one another, to the two different sets of experiences which were also so different from one another.

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But I think there is a very good reason to see the God of the Old Testament as an angry God.

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Any supreme being who demands to be worshipped by lesser mortals or he casts them into an eternal fire is clearly a being with a temper problem. This is the real (and obvious) issue, to me, the rest is nitpicking fluff.

[David Sklansky]

"Any supreme being who demands to be worshipped by lesser mortals or he casts them into an eternal fire is clearly a being with a temper problem. This is the real (and obvious) issue, to me, the rest is nitpicking fluff."

However that point is unrelated to why people shouldn't be religious. You understand that I hope.