Free The End of Christianity by John W. Loftus

realities for external realities. If I look at a random inkblot and I see exploding bombs, a therapist might wonder if I am angry or worried (or living in a war zone). Projection happens particularly in social situations and when we are faced with ambiguities. We are angry, so we assume family members are angry at us. We feel rejected, so we assume our colleagues feel rejecting. We are dishonest, and so we mistrust the people we deceive. 2
    How about our images of God? Which ones come from something outside us and which are projections of our own psyches? Answering this question is a process of elimination; to come any closer to knowing what is out there, we need to start by scrubbing our god concepts of anthropomorphism—of projection. We now know quite a bit about the human mind, how it constrains our imaginations by forcing information into boxes called ontological categories, and what kinds of cognitive errors (including projection) it is prone to. Years ago I wrote an article titled “Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science.” 3 This article is intended to complement that one by examining another chunk of what is known about the human psyche—in this case, human emotions—and to look at the biblical god concept through that lens.
    You have probably heard the saying “In some ways I am like no other person, in some ways like some other people, and in some ways like every other person.” For anyone who has a god-concept, all three of these dimensions shape it.
    • Your image of God is shaped by your personal upbringing and present state of mind. If you have more authoritarian parents, you are more likely to see God as a strict father. If you are lonely, you are more likely to see God as wrathful. 4 If you feel good about yourself, you are more likely to see God as loving. 5
    • It is also shaped by your culture: If your culture is bellicose, your God likely approves of war. If it accepts homosexuality as part of a natural spectrum, your God is likely to become less disapproving of it. Conversely, if your culture condemns homosexuality, that's how your God will think, too.
    • Lastly, your God concept is shaped by your species. If your species has a mammalian, primate, Homo sapiens sapiens mind, your God probably does, too. Not that we have a great sample to consider. We have only one species with god concepts on this planet, to be exact. What we can say is that across cultures, regardless of what physical form gods may take (male/female, animal, tree, spirit), these deities have strikingly human psyches. 6
    It is this third dimension that will be the focus of this chapter. Specifically, we will be looking at how God's emotions are depicted in the Bible, what is now known about emotions as physical and social phenomena, and how these two intersect. In the process, we may learn something useful about ourselves.
    DO CHRISTIANS REALLY
THINK THAT GOD HAS EMOTIONS?
    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. 7 This is true in the case of traditional Christianity, which asserts the existence of a whole realm of supernatural beings including angels, demons, human souls, and “God in three persons, blessed trinity.”
    What is a person? A few years back, my daughter Brynn, 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