Editor's note: This is Part Three in a series, "God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God is so Very Human."
Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;
(For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee. --Deuteronomy 6:14-15
And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. --Deuteronomy 7:13
Most religions posit the existence not just of a supernatural realm, but of supernatural persons, with loyalties, preferences and other human psychological qualities including emotions. This is true in the case of traditional Christianity, which asserts the existence of a whole realm of supernatural beings including angels, giants, demons, human souls and "God in three persons, blessed trinity."
What is a person? A few years back, my daughter, then in the sixth grade, wrote an impassioned essay arguing for the personhood of chickens. Chickens should be considered persons, she said, because they are conscious, with feelings, preferences and intentions. They experience pleasure and pain. They know what they like. They have distinct personalities. (She was arguing that they should be treated kindly and not have their beaks cut off.)
In an entirely different realm, Arthur D'Adamo's book, Science Without Bounds, explores theologies that historically have identified God as a person and contrasts them with others that have not. His treatment is deep and nuanced and I recommend it. But his starting definition of personhood is remarkably similar to Brynn's. It includes awareness, intellect and emotion (p. 210). The personhood of God, Adamo argues, is at the heart of traditional monotheism, including Christian belief and practice.
Even when believers say they that they believe in the more abstract God of theologians, most don't -- at least not completely. In their day-to-day lives (and in a laboratory setting) they talk and behave as if they were relating to a human-like person god. For example, students who say that God is outside of time will still analyze a story as if he completes one task and then moves on to another (Barrett & Keil, 1996). Our brains naturally incline towards interpreting stimuli -- rocks, ships, stuffed animals, clouds -- in anthropomorphic terms, and gods are no exception.
Christian apologists, meaning defenders of the faith, argue for the possibility of the existence of a highly abstracted form of God that exists beyond the realm of human reason and the reach of science. But what they usually want is something more specific: to create intellectual space for their belief in the person-god of the Bible. In this regard they are similar to virtually all religious believers. Humans in a monotheistic context ask four basic questions about God:
In reality, the first of these questions tends to be interesting only in the context of the other three: God is interesting only if he is knowable and has "hedonic relevance." By this I mean that understanding or pleasing God can make my life better or worse.
If God is defined at a level of abstraction sufficient to satisfy many scientists, philosophers and modernist theologians, he becomes immediately uninteresting to most believers. Consider, for example, Albert Einstein's statements: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. . . . I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own."
Within Christianity, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a stab at making this vision personally relevant : "I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be." But contrast this with the God of Evangelical Christians: "God loves me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus. If I ask from God in prayer, I will receive. People who die are going to heaven or hell."
Understanding emotions is irrelevant to Einstein and Spinoza's god-concept because the God of Spinoza and Einstein is not a person and does not have emotions. On the other hand, if one is trying to assess the Evangelical's god-concept, understanding emotions is highly relevant. In fact, one of the defining attributes of the Evangelical's God is actually an emotion: love.
Evangelicals call themselves "biblical" or "Bible-believing" Christians. Many are proud to claim the Bible as the literally perfect and complete word of God. (In fact, some modernist critics would say that Evangelicals and other biblical literalists engage in "bibliolatry" or text worship.) Whether right or wrong, biblical literalists like Evangelicals pin their life priorities and hopes for eternity to the god-concept of the Bible writers, and the Bible writers thought of God as a person, who not only loves but manifests a whole host of emotions.
"That is ridiculous!" some Christians might say. "It's obvious that when the Bible talks about God's emotions it is speaking in metaphor." For several reasons, this argument is weak:
For the rest of this series, then, I'm going to assume that "Bible believing" Christians mostly mean what they say when they use words like, "God loves you." Or "God is disgusted by homosexuality." Or "God is grieved by our sin." We owe it to ourselves to not play word games about life's most important questions. And, barring evidence to the contrary, we owe it to other people to take their words at face value. And if we value honesty, integrity and truth-seeking, we owe it to the world to ask what those words mean.
If you don't want to miss this series, you can subscribe to Valerie Tarico at this blog, or email her at vt {at} ValerieTarico.com with the word "Subscribe" in the subject line.
Dig Deeper:
Art d'Adamo, Science Without Bounds.
Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil, (1996). "Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts" Cognitive Psychology, 31, 219-247.
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Valerie Tarico: God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is So Human ...
God's Emotions - Why the Biblical God is Hopelessly Human (Part 1 ...
Some do, some don't -- now I suppose I'll read the article to see if it is more complex than the title suggests.
The god of the Bible changes in personality over the course of the Bible. Always human and with all of the human "good" and certainly with all of the human psychological disfunction and psychosis. Certainly, the top messages from Jesus were very, very helpful to humans. The golden rule, turn the other cheek, and help the least among you. That is it and I like that Buddhism also practices this.
Probably.
"That is just too weird. What does that say about humans that believe such things?"
I have no idea what it says to you. It says nothing at all to me. Somewhere in the universe is a being more superior to all other beings. That is the supreme being. It is arrogantly human to suppose such a being is without emotion (or with emotion, or anything at all that has not been revealed).
As the bible is the only source of the three Abrahamic religions and it is a reliable account, then it is packed full of God displaying his emotions: jealousy, rage, anger, love, hate, etc etc.
What do we believe, human intepretation or the bible?
God is necessarily anthropomorphized. How can we help it? We're human! Our perception of God is colored by our human situation. To borrow Kantian terms, we will never experience the noumena of God. Whether God descends from some heaven and makes himself known to us, or we are born with some spark that inevitably leads to knowledge of some idealized humanity does not seem to matter. As long as we are human we will understand God in human terms, and he will seem to have serious feelings about silly human concerns.
There is a God whose details I do not entirely possess. However, this being is aware of my existence and the existence of others, is interested in our lives, does not usually intervene but at times will provide advice and communications, and in my experience, even change some natural phenomenon seemingly on request.
There is no "us". God makes himself known to persons, not to "us", for if he did, there would be no dispute.
To paraphrase your question: How can anyone look at disease which kills millions of innocents every day and the death and destruction from natural disasters such as earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, flood and drought, which are all part of the great designer's bungled and flawed creation and believe He has any emotions?
What emotions might he have to sit back and ignore the deaths of innocent children? What emotions might he have to ignore the suffering of millions affected by the floods in Pakistan etc etc?
Your God is, and always has been, invented by people like you to suit your notion of who and what He is. You believe He answers prayers for something trivial but "His purpose is beyond our understanding," when the question is asked, "Why does He allow suffering?
For a view on his Biblical psychopathic behaviour, read, Leviticus, Joshua and Deuteronomy.
Joy, probably. Think of it as your kids gone off to a dangerous place, alone for the first time. When they return, it is a time of reunion and joy.
You are imposing YOUR ideas of God, on God, and then finding them wanting. That's not impressive, but at least it opens the door for me to do likewise and view God from what may be his point of view. Mortal death, human death, is not a bad thing to God. It is probably inconsequential to God and very likely inconsequential to our eternal spirits, although it won't seem that way right now.
The brain is running the show. The brain/body is creating the emotions that we sense as representations of our instinctual drives, including our sense of "right" and "wrong". For whatever reason, some brains represent the physical biological process of the human being as one agent, and some represent it as two. In the second case the part of the process that is external to the interests of the self representation are represented as coming from beyond the self; from out there; interconnected with the web of life and other human beings and what is loosely called the "ground of being". All but the most die-hard atheist, in denial to the nature of our experience, gets what is "meant" by God. Of course God has emotions.
For you there is no God and thus no reason to participate in a discussion about whether God has emotions.
Your arrogance gets the way of your reason (and manners).
The Catholic faith speaks much more in metaphorical terms than in absolutes. I believe that extends to emotions of the divine.
God can handle this all by himself; he does not need the bumbling had of man to interpret him. People that claim to know the mind or intent of God are delusional. Letting them dictate morals to the rest of us in madness. Letting them set up the laws of the land is pure insanity! It will however make them rich and powerful. Great plan children.
BG 7.24: Unintelligent men, who do not know Me perfectly, think that I, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Kṛṣṇa, was impersonal before and have now assumed this personality. Due to their small knowledge, they do not know My higher nature, which is imperishable and supreme.
Krishna is also known as Govinda. From Brahma Samhita, the creator of the universe speaking:
"BS 5.33: I worship Govinda, the primeval Lord, who is inaccessible to the Vedas, but obtainable by pure unalloyed devotion of the soul, who is without a second, who is not subject to decay, is without a beginning, whose form is endless, who is the beginning, and the eternal puruṣa; yet He is a person possessing the beauty of blooming youth."
In my opinion, it all speaks to the validity, or lack of validity, of the whole concept of a "god".