I’ve been thinking lately about God, assuming He exists. Mainly, I’ve been thinking about the Judeo-Christian biblical conception of God, and asking myself, crazy as this sounds, if He exists, Is God a sociopath?
I pose this question seriously, and apologize in advance for offending anyone by probing this idea. But consider:
You are expected to worship Him.
You are expected to acknowledge His perfection.
You are expected to live by His standards.
You are expected to fear His Judgement.
You are expected to please, not disappoint Him.
You are expected to do penance when you’ve strayed from His rules.
You are expected to be in awe of, and fear, His omniscience.
You are expected to be in awe of, and fear, His omnipotence.
You are expected to prize His love, and fear His wrath.
You are expected to seek, and follow, His guidance.
When He feels unheeded, He licenses Himself to unleash cruel, violent, devastating rages (see the Flood, among countless other examples).
He is a punisher.
He is perfect.
He has no guilt; yet He instills guilt.
He “made,” and he “works,” the world and universe from “above,” sitting in Judgement of all who deviate from Him.
He is infallible.
He is unaccountable.
He is callous—a cause of, and silent witness to, untold violence and suffering in the history of humanity.
He is “entitled—”to judge, and punish, as He likes.
He is controlling to a highly pathological degree, for all the reasons stated above.
He is merciful, so long as you heed Him. Otherwise, He can be merciless.
He expects to be idealized and treated like a God.
He rages, and inflicts the cruelest of punishments, when He feels defied.
His word is the bible.
Now you tell me: If I were describing a human being in these terms, what conclusion would you draw? I suspect, if you weren’t feeling defensive, that you’d conclude that we’re talking about someone with a case of seriously malignant narcissism edging, perhaps, into the realm of sociopathy?
But, of course, I’m describing the Judeo-Christian God.
Think about this: from the earliest age, this is your almighty Father figure. You are taught to worship Him, seek His love, His mercy, accept His perfection and infallibility.
You are taught that His word is final; His wrath is justified; to feel shame before His eyes.
You are taught to have to work hard to earn your way back into His good graces, and to be grateful for His forgiveness.
His judgement is final, and even terrifying.
Now if this is the Father figure we’ve been raised to heed and idealize from birth, is it not fair to wonder how much this relationship—with God—might predispose us to end up with a sociopath?
Does one’s adult relationship with a sociopath not replicate, in certain ways, one’s relationship with God?
I pose this as food for thought, nothing else. But I will follow-up this post in the next several weeks, to further flesh out my thoughts, factoring in, as well, your initial feedback.
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
anitasee, my dad never acted like that
and I was not
expected to treat him that way.
Of course as a little girl I wanted him to be happy!
If he was mad at me, I was scared,
I was a little kid!
Millions of women have had dad’s
like mine, why am I “predisposed” to have a
relationship with a sociopath?
Maybe the S was a lying sack of shit
and I didn’t deserve it !!!????!!!
WHY is it now MY fault??????????
There are millions of women who must have had
horrible dad’s… but I’m sure
not all of them ended up with a sociopath,
they weren’t “predisposed”.
Ok. I get it now. It’s MY FAULT.
This is cr*p, and I’ve had enough cr*p
to last me a lifetime.
If there were a god, and that god had those characteristics, then life goes on as usual, nothing should be unexpected, and everything is copacetic.
It reflects current society. The majority are followers and not critical thinkers. The majority are totally comfortable having someone else think for them.
Thinking for yourself means (oh no!) you may need to take a stand … and that will break from Majority Rules, which are flawed in virtually every scenario anyway.
So you may be the only one who’s correct.
So, YES.
shabbychic, from the Christian perspective, we are at END OF DAYS. It is written in the Bible, that the end of days, people will endure famine. Meaning there will be more and more bag of bones (spiritually dead) blinded by the lies of Satan (not hearing the truth that Jesus taught) because they believe it’s OK to be lying, cheating, thieving pieces of chits. That this is the way to go while living on earth. They don’t believe there is an after life and they certainly don’t believe anyone is watching (aka God). Their loss.
Therefore, it’s not your (or any of our) fault! It is written.
erin1972, to truly hear the word of God taught, log onto sheperdschapel.com
Every day is updated. You can listen to them teach Jesus’ truth any time you want. At your pace.
P.S. I’m a Christian, but I’m a left winger. Also, it is written that Christians constantly tell folks about Jesus.That’s why we are here … to ensure others hear the word of God.
Peace.
Wini-thanks. I cannot yet at this time hear of that yet because all of it reminds me of my childhood with my narcissist mother. She forced me into churches that I didn’t want to be in. She used the name of God to emotionally abuse me and try to make me JUST LIKE HER and I fought my whole life to get out from under it. I cut her out of my life in February because even though I am almost 38 years old she still tries to play mind games with me and control my life.
anitasee, my father was exceptionally loving. He had an abusive alcoholic father and swore (at the age of 10) that when he grew up … if he was ever lucky enough to get married and have children he’d treat his wife and children like Gold, not how his dad treated him, his siblings and his mom.
He did what he acknowledged he’d do from the age of 10. I adored my dad.
My grandparents were older when I was born and supposedly my grandfather was mellowed out by that time. He treated the grandchildren just fine. I was the youngest and my grandfather’s favorite. My dad said it was a big difference living with an alcoholic parent. He never knew if good daddy or bad daddy would walk through the door. It was a constant crap shoot which put his stomach in knots. So, my seeing my grandfather on weekends and holidays wasn’t the same as living under his roof, day in and day out throughout my childhood.
Peace.
This one is going on the refrigerator. Definitely.
I am a sociopath magnet. Steve’s article stands out for me because I am who I am, partially, because of my faith. My belief system was skewed at a young age because of my fear of God. I accepted people into my life without critically judging them. I loved them unconditionally because isn’t that “God-like”? …..All the while they took what they could, deceived, lied and cheated, manipulated…..Well, you know what they do. But again, I GET IT Steve.
erin1972, I’m sorry that you had to endure that kind of trauma in your childhood with a parent. I give all of you who had that kind of horror with the caretakers in your life credit for making it through the best you could. I would think that I would have gone over the edge a long time ago, if that was the case in my life. I only had a witch of a sister that constantly used me as her human target for insults, nasty manipulative games, lies and conning. An evil sibling was tough enough. I can’t imagine if she were my parent. She always did the build me up, then smash me down. She’d give you the shirt off her back one minute, then the next minute, po’d over something stupid and you could never figure out what that something stupid was.
Anyway, I’ve read the Bible for most of my life … but never heard it taught the way these pastors (father and son pastors) teach it. I love just listening to them … it sooths my soul every time they talk. They are that good … and they don’t preach … like you’d hear a preacher in church. They just talk and explain the Bible, book by book, scripture by scripture. The father of the team is exactly how my Dad’s personality was. Mellow, mellow, mellow with a great sense of humor.
Wow, Steve, that’s a post I won’t soon forget. Thanks for putting it out there. I haven’t read everyone’s replies, but I have a few thoughts I felt like adding.
1st. For a human to think that he’s God (with qualities listed above) is textbook narcissism, no doubt. And we hate them for it (and they are perverse for doing so) because they aren’t God.
2nd. For believers, God doesn’t instill guilt for self-serving, twisted reasons. And God doesn’t watch passively, without a greater plan and a longer view, while humans suffer hideously. The suffering has a point to it, the reasons and ends of which we humans can’t always expect to be able to see or understand.
3rd. There’s a tradition as old or older than the teachings in the Bible, to which people of many faiths have belonged (including Christians) that sometimes goes under the name of gnosticism. Some of the greatest thinkers (and believers) in human history have subscribed to it, although usually secretly, because this kind of belief would get the heads of many people a one-way ticket to the chopping block throughout history – the modern version or account of it appears here and there, but most visibly in the film the Matrix. I’ve never looked into the question of whether the writers of the Matrix meant to present a gnostic conception of the world, but they certainly did.
The basic idea, with lots of qualifications that I’m not stating, is that the god of this particular world was corrupt, he created it with a flawed, selfish, evil plan, trying to rival the one true God. His aims are sociopathic: power, control, domination – for himself and anyone who will serve him. And until we ‘wake up’ to that unthinkable reality, we aren’t able to see the one true God, the one who can save us. We choose to save ourselves by waking up to the dark side of this reality, and connecting with the truth that exists on a higher level than our usual existence. And our job, as the tradition would have it, is to bring that higher truth into this world, partly by dying to our former ‘blind’ selves (a crucifixion of our egos, if ego is what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us, rather than what might actually be true).
In my experience, this stuff sounds unbelievably esoteric to most people, and like unthinkable heresy to many others, but for me, the tradition explains a lot of things that I experienced as I ‘woke up’ to the ugly truth about sociopathy and narcissists. For the gnostics, the god of this world is the ultimate sociopath, and the ‘father’ of all the sociopathy that we experience here, that tricks us with illusions into giving our lives to him. And most people are not fully aware of what’s going on, as they watch the most evil, deceitful and make no mistake about it, often the most *charming* and beguiling people take positions of power. And we watch those who don’t ‘play’ like sociopaths do all of the suffering, giving their energies and beliefs to abusers all around them . . . until they wake up. If analogies from the Matrix are of any help, think about the choice Neo makes between the red and blue pill. Gnostics say we’ll all have to make that choice at some point.
The lies of this false god are supposed to work on one level like an addiction, so the god of this world charms us into delusions that we like, because we have fundamental weaknesses that make us vulnerable and needy. According to the tradition, it’s not until we see through and willingly put sociopathic things aside (like bad relationships, false beliefs, willful ignorance, self-serving logic, manipulative half truths etc.) that we can find what belongs to all of us (and what is supposed to save us), and that’s our connection to the one true God. Many gnostics stated that we all had to sacrifice ourselves to find this path (with Christ as our model), and that this is the only path that could save us from the evil that rules this world (think Thomas Gospel, e.g.). Psychologists like Jung would relate gnosticism to the process of individuation. Some alchemists would relate it to the quest for the philosopher’s stone (= finding our inner ‘gold’ in this world of ‘lead’).
Anyway, it’s a tradition that takes a lot of twists and turns throughout human history, getting expressed through various ideological lenses, and it speaks to me. I’m by no means giving it a clear explanation here because it’s really not all that well defined as a tradition, and it’s complex. I also don’t know all there is to know about it, but I’m putting it out there because your post made me think you might find it interesting, if you don’t already know about it. Some of those traits you list above are exactly what the gnostics would think of as classic attributes of the sociopathic god of this world, not the true God.
Take care,
Psyche
Interesting. My first marriage was to a “Reborn Christian” who used the old testament to justify anything he wanted. I was raised with religious freedom and have always been more spiritual than religious. I studied religions on my own. Went to the different churches and a few cults. Read the old Testament. Researched it.
It was rewritten at the Diet of Worms, that’s historical fact. In a patriarchal society in the dark ages. Maybe the Torah is better, I haven’t read it yet. But it was a different time, death was cheap, it was, by our standards, barbaric. That’s the way the Gods were, just over grown humans with complete power over us. Joining them into one God didn’t change the basic belief structure. Cleaned up his act a bit, this God didn’t run around impregnating everything in sight (back then, fertility was a GOOD thing, remember?) Ok, there was that incident with the one virgin, but since no sex was involved….
The Bible was written by MEN. I don’t care if they were inspired, they had to translate it into terms they could understand. So they made God in their own image.
Don’t get me wrong, I very strongly believe in a higher power. And as long as it does no harm, I’m fine with whatever form that takes for anyone. I do take acception to many things that people do that they claim are “God’s Will”. I read the New Testament before I read the old, as a kid I guess I believed that Christ wiped the nastiness of the old Testament out. At any rate, I never believed in God-as-boggey-man. I figured, he’s all powerful, he has no reason to be mean.
What I learned in my life time of study…I’m not done yet because I’m still breathing…is that at the core of all the real religions I studied, God wants us to be happy and at peace, no matter what name or concept “he” goes by. By “real religions” I mean ones that were actually formed around the belief of a higher power, not to worship the holy buck or one or more humans claiming to be all powerful and wise. All the prophets, if you read them, were humble men.
Yep, I can see the Old Testament God having sociopath tendencies attributed to “him”. It really points out how the Christians usurped the pagan beliefs of the time. I’d like to think most of us have risen past that, no matter what our faiths. Obviously the loud troublemakers of any faith are the ones we hear about.
It was an interesting article, as were the reactions to it. I’ve had enough miracles in my life to be certain of a higher power that is loving. Being in personal contact with so many “uncivilized” animals also tends to confirm my faith. It’s just humans I don’t believe in, LOL.
I never used to believe in evil. After all those years with a NSP and having met a few others, I now associate them with evil. Not a vague hovering invisible being making you do things against your will, but what I think of as the “souless ones” The worst thing that came out of that relationship is for a time it shook my faith. I had allowed my life to revolve around X. I don’t think it’s too far out to think I worshiped him, I believed he was a gift from God. He’s not the embodiment of evil either, just a human with a personality disorder that makes life around him hell on earth. Oddly enough, he also was some of the best years of my life, because I finally was living in my fairy tale. Like so many of Grimm’s, it finished with a moral, not a happy ending.
Frankly, while I do actually believe in the miracles Jesus and other holy men reportedly did, it wouldn’t change the message for me if they just turned out to be really spiritual teachers. It’s the message, not the dogma, as has been said before.
Anyway, I’m mainly a cat person, lol. I find God in nature and reasonable discussion with open minded people. Once in awhile I’ve even stumbled across him in organized religion. Once it was even suggested I become a minister and I seriously considered it. My faith is an unlimited learning experience. No two people can even see a color the exact same way, so I’m pretty OK with how they perceive a Spirit. For me, God is love. I’m good with that.