The God of Fear

By Dawn Blacksun

The three passages, Exodus 20:1-21, Matthew 5:17-48, and Galatians 3:1-29, describe a progression of the Law and people's understanding of it. This progression uses fear as a primary motivator to keep people following Yahweh. In Exodus 20, God gives the Hebrews a series of Ten Commandments to always abide by. They are given to test his followers, "in order that the fear of Him may remain with [them], so that [they] may not sin" (Ex 20:20). This sense of fear is a method that Yahweh uses throughout the three passages to keep his followers with him.

The first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus is that "You shall have no other gods before Me." (Ex 20:3). Why does Yahweh give this commandment first? He says about other gods, "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments." (Ex 20:5-6). He shows that he is a jealous and vengeful god, so make sure his followers follow his rules. He also divides people between those who hate him and those who love him. To love him is to keep his commandments. Therefore, if one does not keep his commandments, one hates him, and he will wreck his vengeance against him and his family to the fourth generation.

These commandments continue with not taking the Lord's name in vain (Ex 20:7), not working and not allowing one's family or anyone else around to work on the Sabbath (Ex 20:8-10), honoring one's parents (Ex 20:12), not to kill (Ex 20:13), not to commit adultery (Ex 20:14), not to steal (Ex 20:15), not to bear false witness (Ex 20:16), and not to covet one's neighbors' property, including his wife (Ex 20:17).

The role of the mediator between people and Yahweh is established in Exodus 20:19 when the people said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die." This places the priests, like Moses, in a very powerful position over the people as the ones who get to talk to God directly. All the other people must talk to the priest to get to God. This separation between God and his common followers enhances the fear with the people because they are prevented from becoming too familiar with the divine. It's like if they could talk to God directly, they would lose their fear of him and he would lose his power over them, like the wizard in the Wizard of Oz. At the end of delivering the commandments, "the people stood at a distance, while Moses approached the thick cloud where God was" (Ex 20:21).

Jesus increases the pressure to do Yahweh's bidding in Matthew 5: 17-48, otherwise known as a portion of the Sermon on the Mount. He says that "Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 5:19). This combines the use of fear with the use of reward, which enhances its power over people. The Sermon on the Mount, though, emphasizes the fear and punishment more than the enticement of reward.

Jesus says that it is not enough to not kill, but he says, " everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court " (Mt 5:22). Now followers can't feel the emotion of anger without sinning. Exodus 20:14 says, "You shall not commit adultery." Jesus goes on to say, " everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt 5:28). People can't admire each other's physiques anymore without committing a sin.

Followers of Jesus are also to aspire to be like God, but still know that they will fail at that. Matthew 5:34 says to "make no oath at all" but instead " let your statement be, 'Yes' or 'No'; anything beyond these is of evil" (Mt 5:37). People are not able to exact any change with their own power, so they should not promise to do anything. They are only to say Yes' or No' without connecting it with a higher power through an oath. This statement also divides between good and evil, or love and hate. If one says Yes' or No,' then one is good and therefore loves God. If one makes an oath, then one is acting in evil and therefore hates God (Cf. Ex 20:5-6).

Suffering is also necessary to be like God, because of human iniquities. Jesus says, "do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also" (Mt 5:39). He also says to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Mt 5:44). Followers are to suffer against other peoples' wronging them, as they are deserving of what they receive and are to love the people who wrong them, because "He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Mt 5:45). People are commanded by Jesus to " be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). This helps to ensure that people follow Jesus, as they are expected to be like God, but are unable to. Therefore, they must rely on the great atonement of Jesus' death and resurrection. This is a subtle and very powerful use of fear to drive people to do one's bidding.

Paul took a different approach to the Law in Galatians 3:1-29. His approach was that after becoming proficient at following the Law, people would be able to have adequate faith in Jesus in order to receive the Spirit. It is through faith, he says, that one can be saved.

The progression starts with Abraham. Galatians 3:6 states, "Even so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," demonstrating that Abraham received righteousness by faith in God. Paul also says, "Now that no one is justified by the Law before God is evident; for, The righteous man shall live by faith.'" (Gal 3:11).

This could be interpreted as people can now ignore the Law if they have faith, but that would be an interpretation not intended by the author. He states, "Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith" (Gal 3:24). This shows that one must follow the Law in order to have faith. True faith cannot be obtained without being fluent in the Law in both knowledge and practice. After one becomes One with the Law, one transcends it by faith and then is eligible to receive the Spirit. This transcending of the Law takes place because of the great atonement of Christ's death and resurrection. One must believe completely in one's redemption from iniquity and shortcoming in following the Law in order to be saved.

The use of fear in Galatians is even subtler than in Matthew. Paul doesn't use any direct curses as Exodus and Matthew do, but instead uses enticement and charisma to control the people. He puts out the carrot of receiving the Spirit out and then illustrates how easy it is to attain it. He almost hides the difficulty by not talking much about how much to follow the Law and how to attain faith to transcend it. This can be dangerous, in that it leads people to believe that if they think happy thoughts about Jesus, up there with the clouds and the angels, that they will be saved. They don't remember that following the Law in spirit is an essential part of the deal. If it wasn't, then the Old Testament and Matthew's Sermon on the Mount would not be included in canonical scripture.

Exodus 20:1-21, Matthew 5:17-48, and Galatians 3:1-29 all illustrate a progression in how to act in order to become righteous, or one with Yahweh. Exodus commands people to not do certain things, as one tells children not to do things. Then Matthew tells the people that what they did as spiritual children is not enough now. It's time to grow up and follow the Law in their heart instead of only with their actions. Galatians finishes off the progression by demonstrating that after one has followed the commandments in Exodus and lived with love in their hearts as stated in Matthew, that they can receive the Spirit by having complete faith in their heart in Jesus. The thread that holds all this together, though, is fear. The use of fear is obvious in the beginning and becomes more subtle in each passage, as people would lose their fear as they grew used to each stage. The more subtle the fear, the more powerful it becomes and Yahweh must use the power of fear to hold onto his people because he is a jealous god.

Originally published at http://www.eocto.net/showarticle.php?articleid=106
Used with permission.

[Pagan Institute is proud to present this little gem which is sure to become a Pagan classic! cl, ed.]

The God That Couldn’t Be
By Ian Elliott

The difference between a very great height and an infinite height is that the former is barely conceivable, while the latter is inconceivable. This is the main reason why monotheism, which posits an infinite God who lives outside the universe in no place at all, who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, leads naturally to atheism. Such a God, unlike the Gods and Goddesses of the old nature religions, cannot be imagined and therefore must always lie outside the mental reach of human beings. To support a religion based on such a phantasm, it was necessary to have an all-powerful and highly visible Church controlling all human thought and activity. Once the dictatorship of the Church receded, its chimerical God was left without ballast, ascended into the atmosphere like a runaway balloon, and eventually disappeared. With this, the modern secular society was born and people became practical atheists, however much they affected religious beliefs on Sunday.

The attempts to understand the attributes of this vanished God have always ended in paradox. This was taken as a proof of his existence, since obviously he was beyond human comprehension. Thus the Church, which has always loved having things both ways, could preach the reasonableness of the Christian creed up to the point where it made no sense, and then fall back on mysticism and mystification to silence any argument.

We are fortunate to be living in a time in history when writers like the late Bertrand Russell could deliver lectures like “Why I am Not a Christian” without being hanged or burned at the stake. Leaving aside his remarks about Christ, I would like to summarize his objections to the doctrines of the One God and the arguments traditionally raised in their defense, showing along the way how polytheistic conceptions of the divine meet those objections.

One of the essentials of being a Christian, Russell states, is a belief in the existence of God, and the Catholic Church has laid it down “that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason.” [1] The Church set up a number of arguments to prove this God’s existence, and Russell examines the major ones:

(1) The First Cause Argument.

“It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.”

Russell points out, referring to the philosopher John Stuart Mill, that if everything has a cause, God must have a cause.

“If there can be anything without a cause, it might just as well be the world as well as God… There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not always have existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all.” [3]

Since Russell delivered that lecture (at Battersea Town Hall, March 26, 1927), we have had George Gamow and the Big Bang theory, and Christians like to point to the Big Bang as evidence that the universe had a definite beginning. But in the first place, there is astronomical evidence now that certain remote parts of the universe are older than the estimated date of the Big Bang, and the only way to make sense of this, so far as I can see, is to posit a number of Bangs, none of which had full cosmic scope. In the second place, assuming there was only one Big Bang, the argument of the Christians -- that there must have been something before it to make it explode -- does not fit the facts, since time, as a function of space and mass, would have come into existence at the same first moment as the Bang itself. Therefore, if there was only one Big Bang, nothing preceded it, and Russell’s first alternative holds, namely, that the world came into existence without any cause.

Now, robust Paganism, by which I mean Pagan religion without any compromising admixture of Abrahamic or Zoroastrian doctrine, really holds that the Universe is eternal and had no Creator. Pagan creation myths all involve the ordering of matter out of a primal state of chaos. There is no creation of everything out of nothing, only a structuring of some things out of pre-existent ‘stuff’. These creation myths all presuppose the pre-existence of matter and therefore of the material world, and therefore robust Paganism begins with the world, not with some transcendent Creator. When it says that in the beginning Gods were born from chaos and then shaped that chaos into a world, it does not mean an absolute beginning, since chaos and all it contains were there first. What it really means is “in the beginning of this cycle,” because all robust Pagan religions posited a theory of endless cycles of creation and dissolution. The Gods arise, they build a world out of whatever is lying around, they maintain it and uphold it as long as they can, and eventually it unravels and returns to chaos again; then, after long ages perhaps, the whole thing starts over. This view is quite in keeping with the theory that there are a number of Bangs that occur at different times and in different parts of the universe, and they release matter and energy from a state of condensation, perhaps due to the collapse of black holes. But if future evidence runs against this model and we are left with a universe that had a definite beginning but no foreseeable end, this still leaves us with the world in the beginning as the cause of itself and whatever beings arise from it. The ancient Greeks called this original progenetrix the Goddess Night, and considering the known facts the name does not seem inappropriate.

2) The Natural-Law Argument.
This argument was popular in the eighteenth century. “People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so.” [4] Russell begins by pointing out that we now know that what appears to be uniform behavior on the part of matter and energy is really a matter of statistical averages drawn from observations of the movements of atoms, but he admits that that objection is based on the scientific view then current, which might change in time. He goes on to the real heart of the matter when he points out that the whole Natural-Law Argument is based on a false analogy between the voluntary obedience of humans to human laws and descriptions of how things in the universe happen. Since by natural laws we simply mean descriptions of how things in fact behave, there is no reason to suppose that there is someone who told them to behave in that way. But supposing there were, “you are then faced with the question, ‘Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?’ If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say…that there [was]… a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore…you have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver.” [5]

(3) The Argument from Design.
“You all know the argument from design,” says Russell. “Everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world were ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it.” [1] Russell begins by pointing out that the theory of evolution suggests that instead of circumstances adapting themselves to the needs of living things, living things, over time, adapt to circumstances. But then he moves on to his main argument, which is that any honest appraisal of the universe must show any claim that omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence designed the world to be nonsense. “Do you think,” he says, ”that if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan and the Fascists?”

He goes on to point out that science tells us that human life, and life in general, is a stage in the decay of the solar system, and that the moon shows us towards what the whole process is tending - a dead, cold world.

In Pagan [6] Russell begins by pointing out that the theory of evolution suggests that instead of circumstances adapting themselves to the needs of living things, living things, over time, adapt to circumstances. But then he moves on to his main argument, which is that any honest appraisal of the universe must show any claim that omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence designed the world to be nonsense. “Do you think,” he says, ”that if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan and the Fascists?”

None of this is a problem for Paganism. Again, those who are satisfied with purely mechanistic explanations can simply accept what science tells us about the world and no more. But many of us cannot escape the conviction that there is some element of design in the world, and for us it would seem that only Pagan religion fits the facts, for the Gods of Paganism are neither omniscient, nor omnipotent, nor wholly benevolent. There is much in the world, for instance in ecology, to suggest an admirable degree of design; but also much that goes awry. Humans and viruses, for instance, seem to represent a design that is at cross-purposes with itself; and this suggests that if design is present, there may well be more than one designer, and their plans may not always agree. To take the most obvious example of poor design, seventy or eighty years of corporeal existence seem hardly adequate for the development of human knowledge and skill; and even granting rebirth, without remembering previous lives we are forced to learn things over and over again. Here again, we seem to have only two choices: accepting pure materialism, or a conception of the divine that fits the facts. If we face the world honestly yet have also seen spirits, only Pagan conceptions of the divine will serve: the world is just as good as the Gods can make it at this stage in their own evolution, given local conditions and the material that lies at hand. Instead of scrambling for explanations to save face for a perfect God, the Pagan can calmly face the facts of the world as it is, bow his head to fate, and hope for better conditions in the world of spirit or at the beginning of the next cycle.

(4) The Moral Arguments for Deity. The philosopher Immanuel Kant devised a moral argument for the existence of God which was popular during the nineteenth century. One form of the argument “is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed.” [7] “If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong,” Russell continues, “then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat [will] or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.” [8] But if you want to say that God is good, Russell says, then right and wrong must have some meaning independent of God’s fiat, and this means that there is something prior to God that determines the difference between right and wrong.

A As far as the Biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is concerned, there can be no doubt that the Hebrews want to say that only God’s fiat determines whether an act is good or evil. Yet only the most determined dogmatist can fail to be revolted at Abraham’s compliance with his God’s wishes (the fact that God relents at the last moment is immaterial) in his readiness to cut an innocent child’s throat. We feel in our hearts that good and evil must be prior to any God’s will, and this is in fact the Pagan position. Zeus abhors Ares for being a bloodthirsty madman and prizes Athena for her reason and prudence. Poseidon balks at obeying Zeus but subsides when the Erinyes remind him that they always stand at the side of the elder brother. Thus, a moral law precedes the Gods and they stand or fall, ultimately, according to whether they obey or flout it. This moral law, like the natural processes mentioned earlier, must somehow be inherent in the Universe, for it cannot proceed from the will of any God, as we have seen. These are simply the rules of the cosmic house we live in; they come with the territory.

(5) The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice. This final argument for God’s existence struck Russell as very curious: “that the existence of God is necessary to bring justice into the world.” [9]

“In this part of the universe that we know there is great injustice…if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth.” [10] On this basis, Christians wish to believe in a heaven and hell so that justice can finally be done in the world. Suppose, says Russell, we were to open a crate of oranges and find a few bad oranges on top. We would not reason that the rest of the oranges must be good to make up for the bad ones; on the contrary, we would think it likely to find more bad oranges as we worked our way farther down.

The Pagan answer to injustice is to work to right it.

If there are bad oranges in the crate, throw them out, keep the good ones, and go harvest more. Pagans take the world as they find it and seek to make it better. They do not wallow in compensatory fantasies. The Gods have charge of this world and labor to improve it. The labor gets harder as a world cycle draws to a close, and at its end the Gods go down to defeat fighting. After an age of darkness, another cycle begins, but now there are more mature spirits than before, and the new world that arises is better than the last one. This is so if, and only if, we make it so. Nothing is provided us by some transcendental being beyond the heavens. Everything is up to us.

Bibliography

RUSSELL, Bertrand, Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.

[1] Russell, p. 5.
[2] Ibid., p. 6.
[3] Ibid., p. 7.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., pp. 8-9.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 12.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, p. 13.
[10] Ibid.

Used with permission.

The God of Fear

[Pagan Institute is proud to present this little gem which is sure to become a Pagan classic! cl, ed.] The God That Couldn’t Be By Ian Elliott

[Pagan Institute is proud to present this little gem which is sure to become a Pagan classic! cl, ed.]

The God That Couldn’t Be
By Ian Elliott