Outgrowing God

It’s unfortunately true – and the internet brings home as never before – that people simply make stuff up. And rumours and gossip spread like epidemics, regardless of truth. The great American author Mark Twain is supposed to have said: ‘A lie can spread half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ And not only malicious lies, but good stories that aren’t true but are amusing and fun to recount, especially if you were told them in good faith and don’t positively know they’re untrue. Or stories that, if not amusing, are spookily uncanny – another reason why so many are passed on.

The doctrine of atonement, which Christians take very seriously indeed, is so deeply, deeply nasty that it deserves to be savagely ridiculed. God is supposed to be all-powerful. He created the expanding universe, galaxies hurtling away from one another. He knows the laws of science and mathematics. He invented them, after all, and presumably even understands quantum gravity and dark matter, which is more than any scientist does. He makes the rules. The one who makes the rules has the power to forgive whomever he likes for breaking them. Yet we are asked to believe that the only way he could think of to persuade himself – himself – to forgive humans for their sins (most notably the sin of Adam, who never existed and therefore couldn’t sin) was to have his son (who was also himself) tortured and crucified in the name of humanity. So, although the Old Testament is richer in sheer numbers of horror stories than the New, you could say that the central message of the New Testament is a strong contender for the grim distinction of being the most horrific of all.

Yahweh evolved in people’s minds to become the one God of the Jews, and eventually of Christians and Muslims too. Before that he was a ‘storm god’, one of many gods of the Canaanite peoples from whom the Jews sprang. Other Bronze Age Canaanite gods who were originally worshipped alongside Yahweh included Baal the fertility god and El, the chief god, and his wife the goddess Asherah. According to some scholars of religious history, Yahweh was later merged in people’s minds with El and Asherah to eventually become the one and only God of the Jews. So Bronze Age animism came to be pared down to Iron Age monotheism. Later, Christianity and Islam adopted the God of the Jews. And later still the storm god of the Canaanites evolved further sophistication and became the hero of books on theology by learned professors at Oxford and Harvard.