Free The End of Christianity by John W. Loftus Page B

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 protest. “It's obvious that when the Bible talks about God's emotions it is speaking in metaphor.” For several reasons, this argument is weak: Historians of religion and philosophy tell us that theology has a flow that can be studied in the historical record. We have a tendency to project our own intellectual culture, including abstract god concepts, back into history. However, during the Axial Period when the world's great religions emerged, the gods (think Shiva, Zeus, Mithra, Yahweh) were typically person-gods.
    If we look at the internal record of the Bible itself, it would appear that earlier documents were taken literally by later writers. The book of Matthew, for example, gives Jesus a literal understanding of Old Testament events.
    Literalists say that the Bible was uniquely inspired or even dictated by God to the authors. In this case, claiming that in the Bible God's emotions are simply metaphors makes God a bad writer. A good writer doesn't use metaphors that he or she knows will be taken literally. Communication isn't just about transmission—it is about knowing your audience. Today many, many Christians take the notion of God's emotions literally, as have most of their spiritual ancestors. To say that God was communicating in metaphor through the Bible writers is to say that God needed communications training.
    For the rest of this discussion, 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. If we value honesty, integrity, and truth-seeking, we owe it to the world to ask what those words mean.
    WHAT ARE EMOTIONS ANYWAYS?
    Emotion is an energetic horse that, wild and rampant, brings us all to grief
    And Reason must constrain to keep on course, establishing command and being its chief. Yet Reason by itself is hard and cold, lacking Emotion's fires to inflame
    That passion and affection which draw gold from cruder ore, which is our human aim.
    —Alan Nordstrom (from “Reconciliation”) 12
    The Bible writers spoke as if God has emotions, and most Christians through history have spoken and behaved as if this were true. But to understand what that means, you have to understand what emotions are. And that requires a small excursion into the history of psychology and the budding field of brain science.
    We humans have feelings about feelings. By this I don't just mean that we like or dislike specific emotions—I like falling in love, or I hate being depressed—I mean that we have feelings about the whole idea of emotions, and our feelings about feelings have a long history. After a dark age of authority and dogma and religious fervor, the Enlightenment made rationality supreme. Reason, coupled with empiricism, demonstrably led to advances in knowledge and technology that had been impossible when critical inquiry was suppressed or discouraged. In this context, scholars convinced themselves that emotions were a liability.
    By the twentieth century, schools of cognitive and behavioral psychology argued that we could understand (and heal) human beings without paying any attention whatsoever to the affective (the “emotional”) dimensions of life.