Is the biblical God a psychopath?

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From a certain perspective yes.

Humanity used to suck. The stories of the Bible illustrate that horrendous suckitude quite vividly. Pointless wars, sexual slavery, while many of the stories in the Bible make for great bedtime reading for your kids, a lot of them are just thoroughly repugnant, scary cautionary tales that could have only appealed to a society of psychopaths.

Well, when you have to teach a society of psychopaths, you yourself need to get in the spirit of just not giving a crap about people’s lives. Because if you do, they’ll think you’re weak and try to take advantage of you. Everybody’s had the experience of doing something nice for someone and having their gratitude be a swift kick in the teeth for your trouble.

Eventually you learn that sometimes you just have to be hard.

God got hard. He turned into the hardest guy around. He once demanded one tribe to start a war, punished them when they didn’t, then lengthened the day in order so they could slaughter more people. He’d lie to one side saying that they were going to win, then played both sides off against each other until they got all that pesky war out of their system. Then made them fight some more. I presume the ones that survived were far wiser and humbler for the experience.

The way to read this aspect of Abrahamic scripture is to find the beauty in the tragedy. Ancient peoples wrote and told these stories for the same reason that any people write and tell stories, because it helped them find meaning in a seemingly meaningless existence. A murderous, jealous God may seem to have been the only way they had to make sense out of the chaos they were experiencing.

Another way to see this is that God simply doesn’t place the same value on our lives that we do. He sees things from a different perspective. All those people that suffered needlessly in life due to God’s plan, perhaps He had plans for them in the afterlife that made it all worthwhile. Does this make him psychopathic? Well maybe in the same way that you’re psychopathic towards all the video game characters you kill in games.