There’s a proud tradition in literature to write stories from the perspective of despicable protagonists and unreliable narrators. Do we know God is not one of them?

We can find some truly awful protagonists throughout literature.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita*, for example, Humbert Humbert is clearly a jealous and manipulative pedophile, but he sees himself as being both a romantic lover and a caring father figure to his preteen victim, even as she cries while he rapes her.

Or consider Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho*, in which the narrator and protagonist Patrick Bateman is a sadistic psychopath who describes torturing and killing people as casually as others talk about going to the gym, while he obsesses over arbitrary standards of appearance.

What if God is one of those? Are we sure he’s not?

He expects to be seen as a loving, caring father figure, even as he lies, manipulates, and quite casually tortures and kills people to get his way — using entirely arbitrary rules to rationalize mass murder.

That’s a lot, I know. But if you can keep an open mind as you read on, I’ll make the case.

Can we trust the narrator?

The Book of Genesis opens with the story of how God first created the heavens and the earth, and then later, man and woman—in his own likeness. But how credible is that narrative? Even by the book’s own light, should we believe it?

Obviously, there was no one there to witness the creation, and so we just have to take the omniscient narrator’s word for it. Right?

Now, even though the Book of Genesis is not written in the first person, like the examples above, I consider God its narrator, in part because there’s a tradition of considering the Bible as having been written by humans channeling God in some way, and in part because its narrator is omniscient in a way that only really God can be in this context.

That last point is important. It’s worth noting that the only possible source for the story, if this version is true, would be God himself. If you were a detective, trying to tease out the truth about what happened, and your only source has literally everything to gain — domination of this world and the next, in this case — by getting you to believe their version of events, you should be very skeptical.

Our suspicions should be roused when someone claims to have created everything — including other beings very much like himself, from clay and bones no less — with nothing but their word to show for it. This whole story is very long on amazing claims and equally short on evidence.

But do we have any evidence that he’s not telling the whole truth? Well, the story itself is full of contradictions and unexplained details.

Among the more obvious ones: According to the story, Cain was the third person to ever exist (not counting god). Yet, he not only found a wife, but when he was exiled, he worried that he would be killed by others. Who? Why is this the first we hear about these people? Where did they come from, and why would they kill him?

You don’t need to answer, just acknowledge that it is natural to have questions. And with this newfound seed of skepticism, let’s go back to the story of Adam and Eve, where we see the first signs that God isn’t necessarily the moral being we’re usually told that he is.

Is God good?

At first, Adam and Eve were innocent, and didn’t even know good from evil. They walked freely about the Garden of Eden, but God had given them a few rules. For one thing, they should not eat of the tree at the center of the garden, The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because “for when you eat from it you will certainly die”.

Those of us who know how this turns out, however, know that that is a lie.

Soon enough, Eve and Adam both eat the fruit from the tree, but neither one dies. On the contrary, they become smarter, and capable of making better moral decisions. And when they do, God, by his own admission, feels threatened — worried that Adam and Eve will become too much like himself.

He becomes furious, and inflicts crippling punishments on Adam, Eve, the serpent, and all of their descendants for the rest of humanity’s (and serpentity’s) existence: Excruciating pain, hard labor, exile …

In Genesis, this is laid out quite matter-of-factly, but it is hard to overstate how extremely unreasonable God’s reaction is. Remember: Eve and Adam could not possibly understand that what they did was wrong, as they did not know the difference between right and wrong before eating the apple.

Who’s the good guy?

It’s also worth noticing that the only negative consequences of their actions were from God’s punishment.

Without God’s reaction, eating the apple would only have opened Adam and Eve’s eyes to the difference between good and evil, knowledge of which is self-evidently good if you want good to prevail. God’s rule that Adam and Even didn’t eat from the tree, was arbitrary all along, and only served to keep them amoral and naked.

God, on the other hand, did know the difference between right and wrong, and yet he used fear and lies to manipulate Adam and Eve. He wanted to prevent them from becoming moral beings, and when he got caught in his scheming, he went into a rage, and took it out on literally everyone else.

This is awful, abusive behavior, even before we consider that God is supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful. And it is only made worse if it is true that he must have foreseen it and could have prevented it from happening.

Surprisingly, the best candidate for a “good guy” in this story is not the deceitful, unreasonable God, nor Eve or Adam, who were ignorant and unable of fully understanding what they were doing. It is the serpent, who told the truth at enormous personal cost, and so allowed Eve and Adam to live morally good lives.

Unfortunately, serpents don’t write holy texts, so we will never know hisss side of the story.

Unreasonable reactions

Unfortunately, this chapter is not the only place in Genesis where God’s behavior deserves a second look.

There’s the part where he sends a flood to drown almost every single person, and almost every single animal, because people were wicked. Wicked how, you ask? That’s not exactly clear. The text doesn’t provide a lot of examples or details, just a word salad about someone marrying whomever they want (gasp!), and about giants walking the earth. Also, we can’t check, because God looked inside everyone’s heart, and we should just trust him when he tells us what he saw there.

We’re only getting God’s very sparse, own version of critical facts leading up to the flood and Noah’s Ark, but even those warrant asking some questions: Was that really a reasonable reaction? Killing not just all the sinners, but their newborn children, and even their pets and cattle, without bothering to clearly articulate why they all have to die. Killing not just people, but otters and ostriches and baby hedgehogs — not quickly and painlessly in their sleep, but in a dramatic, global cataclysm that lasts for weeks. Entirely indifferent to the massive, unnecessary suffering he is causing — unless the suffering is the point…?

If we apply even the barest minimum of critical thinking, that doesn’t seem like the firm authority of a loving, forgiving father figure. It’s a lot more like the twisted, murderous logic of a bitter incel turned mass-shooter, or the uncontrolled rage of a drunken, abusive husband and father who takes his misery out on his family.

It doesn’t help that when he’s done, he makes some feeble, unsubstantial gesture, promising to never do it again, like abusers so often do.

Thanks for the rainbow, you genocidal *$@!! I always preferred the occasional stupid light trick to friends, society, and forrests teeming with life, anyway.

It makes you wonder, how would other gods describe Jehova’s behavior? What would the divine psychological evaluation read? The cosmic police report?

The list goes on

The Book of Genesis alone, not to mention the rest of the Bible, is full of examples of God acting in ways that undermine the idea that he is entirely good.

When people find a project to collaborate on — the Tower of Babel — God is threatened by their capabilities, and decide to sabotage their efforts and make it nearly impossible for them to collaborate on anything ever again.

There’s the time when God tells Abraham to kill his own son, seemingly for no better reason than to just see if he would go through with it. Psych! If you have someone in your life that treats you like that — testing your loyalty, pitting you against your loved ones, egging you on to murder innocent people — get out of that situation as fast as you can!

And it’s not just Genesis. In Exodus, it’s a pretty important plot point when God murdered all the first-born children in Egypt, so as to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. They way it’s described in the book, we’re made to think that this was the last option, after he had exhausted all other avenues.

But was it really? Let’s think this through again. Is large-scale baby-killing really the natural next level of escalation if stinky water, frogs, gnats, flies, and locusts won’t do the trick? If he had to kill, couldn’t God have killed the Pharaoh’s army instead, or the palace guards? Maybe he could have twisted Pharaoh’s arm some other way (like maybe literally)? Or maybe God simply could have appeared as a burning bush to Pharaoh, as he did to Moses, and they could have all sat down in a trilateral meeting and found a good resolution?

Perspectives and motivations

When we read a book like American Psycho or Lolita, it is obvious that we should not take those texts as moral instructions, or accept the narrator’s account and interpretation of events uncritically. Reading the mundane passages and descriptions before and between the most shocking acts or events, it may be challenging to keep in mind that we’re only getting one, skewed perspective, designed to shape our understanding. But, at least in these two cases, the authors expect us to recognize evil in the moment. Part of the point of the book is to show us the perverted perspective of the protagonist.

We can never, however, be entirely sure what kind of book we’re reading, or exactly what motivations the author had in writing it. The only thing we can be sure of, is that they want to affect us in some way. (Otherwise, why write anything at all?) And so we should bring the same critical judgement to everything we read, as we do to American Psycho, and when something violates every moral principle you hold, you don’t have to accept it as good or normal — even if it is presented as such.

So, I return to my question: Do we really know that the God of Genesis is the good guy? Despite the lies, murder, torturous punishments, genocidal rage … Because if the devil wanted to fool us, he could do a lot worse than making us believe in a God like that, right?

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*) These books are both really good, if disturbing, and I can recommend them. These links are affiliate links, meaning that if you click through and make a purchase, I may get a commission on the sale.