Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, the host of re·Christian. Welcome to episode 4: “God’s Tests.”
When I need to take a break from writing or editing, I usually scroll through YouTube Shorts for a while. Just a whole variety of quick videos on everything from a woman (with a charming British or Australian accent) skipping, to Jordan Peterson laying out the fundamentals of life, to this young blonde named Coco who seems to have nothing to say other than that men are easy to please if you offer them your three holes. And much more. It’s a total break from what I am working on, and I limit myself to about 15 minutes. I sometimes use Instagram similarly—but Instagram now knows that I’m doing a podcast on Christianity, and so I’m getting posts from the faithful. One of them was from the so-called @thebibleteam: “You get tested the most when you are about to be blessed. DON’T BREAK. DON’T GIVE UP.” I commented: “Why does God do so much testing? Couldn’t he spend his time better by ending a war or two?”
But testing is something God has been doing for millennia, ever since he discovered he was omnipotent and how much people wanted to live up to his false promise that if they died (presumably some time after the test) they would have eternal life, the good kind, with clouds, not fire. It’s a cruel and insecure way to treat a, let’s call it, friend, when good old-fashioned trust is always there in the bag of tricks as well. Also, if you’re nominally omniscient, but you need to test someone to find out a fact, then it’s time to take yourself in for servicing, because some gasket or computer chip is not functioning well.
The God of the Old Testament handed out more tests than I had to take all through grade school and five years of undergraduate study. Perhaps one of the more famous ones is the manipulative evil he manifested on Abraham, as reported in Genesis:
After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
2 Then He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”
3 So Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place that God had told him. 4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from a distance. 5 Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there and worship and then return to you.”
6 So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. 7 But Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father!”
And he said, “Here I am, my son.”
Then he said, “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
8 Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” So the two of them went together.
9 Then they came to the place that God had told him. So Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on the wood. 10 Then Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
12 Then He said, “Do not lay your hands on the boy or do anything to him, because now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your only son from Me.”
13 Then Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up as a burnt offering in the place of his son. 14 Abraham called the name of that place The Lord Will Provide, as it is said to this day, “In the mount of the Lord it will be provided.”
15 Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham out of heaven a second time, 16 and said, “By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will indeed bless you and I will indeed multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens and as the sand that is on the seashore. Your descendants will possess the gate of their enemies. 18 Through your offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Gen 22:1–18)
Well now.
The narrative of it is bad and clear enough—you love your son, so kill him to prove that you also love me—but what may be worse are the back story and the psychology and the knots that some Bible scholars tie themselves in to assert that Isaac’s life was never in threat.
What strikes me about the narrative is how calm and detached Abraham feels from the whole thing. It’s his son for fuck sake. I’d like to see a bit of Job’s complaining or Thomas’s doubt about the plan. Perhaps Abraham has so much faith in God that he can remain cool throughout. On the other hand, Abraham was about 125 years old at this point. He may have been in second-stage dementia and had limited cognitive recognition of what was going on. Who is this young man with me? What was I doing?—oh, yes, building a fire! What are these voices I am hearing when there doesn’t appear to be anyone else around? If that’s the case, then wily old sociopath God, may have known that the old man would have no clue and wouldn’t suffer any trauma from the event (or during it). These are two seriously deranged old coots.
The other thing, of course, is that God is allegedly omniscient or all-knowing, or at least he won’t stop going on and on about it. He already knows that Abraham loves him and so there’s no drama. So the question is begged: why does God do this kind of shit in the first place? Is he that fucking insecure that he has to have his own omniscience proved to him? Or is he tired of whittling on the porch, so instead he decides to play games with his creation? It makes you wonder if there would have been less killing in the Old Testament if only God had developed more hobbies.
The great writer Christopher Hitchens, who spent the last five years or so of his life lecturing publicly about atheism and challenging various high-profile Christians to debates, has a comment about this perverse little game that God plays with Abraham:
The second thing I live for is, if not exactly passing on my genes, taking part in activities that might allow those genes to be passed on. And not scorning the three delightful children who result, who are everything to me and who are my only chance of even a glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one. And I’ll tell you something, if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do, and admire the man who said, Yes, I’ll gut my kid to show my love of God, I’d say, No, fuck you. Thank you. And so should you, and the religions that say you should admire infanticide as proof of the love of God, have no claim, no claim at all to be preaching ethics, let alone morality.
(transcription by notta.ai)
How could the relationship between Abraham and Isaac ever have been the same after this?
The sad truth is that God carries out many such tests in the Bible. It should be proof enough to Christians, but alas it is not, that there is and never has been any God. Regular men wrote the Bible and they gave traits to the God they created which they imagined an insecure, malicious, narcissistic, and sociopathic man would have. God should have been more robotic, more computerized, more AI-generated. If God, the database that contained all knowledge, wanted to know something, all it needed to do was consult its own files. He didn’t need to be fiddling around with little experiments which were emotionless to him but potentially PTSD-causing for the humans he was playing with.
The part of me that inclines toward public service announcements wants to do the inverse of what those bright-faced young Aryan Jehovah’s Witness men, in crisp white shirts and pinned-on name tags that gave away their cause and lessened their respectability—the inverse of what they were trying to do in converting me to their niche brand of Christianity. I want to travel the world in a tagless T-shirt, sometimes having long conversations with them about the godlessness I would be proposing, and sometimes asking them only partially rhetorical questions. Take a good look at the God in that book, in the Bible, of yours. Is that really, really the entity you are worshipping here on earth? How can you ignore his manipulation and murderousness and flat-out psychopathy? Come with me, my friends. Come with me back down here on this imperfect earth. We will try to figure something out.