Barker Dan - God: the most unpleasant character in all fiction

Next time you find yourself in a hotel, look in the bedside drawer. You know what youll findits so predictable, you need scarcely bother to check. Yes, its the Gideon Bible. According to the Gideons own website, they have distributed nearly two billion bibles, free of charge around the world, since their founding in 1908. They claim to hand out bibles at a rate of two every second. Using a minimal estimate of the cost of production and distribution of a typical hardback book, the 81 million Gideon Bibles distributed in 2013 must have cost about $300 million, or about $1,000 for each of the 300,000 members of The Gideons International. Tax-deductible, no doubt, but still we have here a very considerable outlay in cash and dedication. Why do they do it?

They do it, in their own words, to make it possible for others to learn about the love of God by giving them access to his word. Yet, if that really is their aim, I cant help wondering how many of these loyal Gideons have actually read the bible. Even a cursory look at the bible should be enough to convince a reasonable person that its the very last document you should thrust in front of someone if you want to convince them of the love of God. If you happen to be a member of the Gideons, I challenge you to read Dan Barkers book and then ask yourself why you dont instantly resign. Indeed, I cant help wondering whether a good many of those 300,000 Gideon subscribers are actually undercover atheists who have calculated that the best possible way to turn people against Abrahamic religion would be to expose them to the bible. Fortunately, from the point of view of the Gideons stated aim, I suspect that very few of their bibles are ever actually opened.

Dan Barkers book had its origin, as his Introduction explains, in a single sentence of my own The God Delusion: the opening sentence of Chapter 2. It says that the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction and goes on to list nineteen character-traits which, if they were all combined in a single fictional villain, would strain the readers credulity to the point of ridicule. Certifiable psychopaths apart, no real human individual is quite so irredeemably nasty as to combine all of the following: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

The sentence has been controversial. I suspect that it is single-handedly responsible for The God Delusions reputation for stridency, for the rest of the book is far from strident. This is the sentence that led the British Chief Rabbi to accuse me of anti-Semitisman accusation he graciously withdrew on further reflection. Apparently he had focused on the phrase God of the Old Testament and took it to mean as opposed to the God of the New Testament. He took this to mean the Jewish God as opposed to the Christian God, a comparison which revived cultural memories of pogroms and persecutions. Of course that was not my intention. Indeed I gave reasons, elsewhere in The God Delusion, for regarding the God of the New Testament as almost equally bad. Theres little in the Old Testament to match the horror of St. Pauls version of the ancient principle of the scapegoat: the Creator of the Universe and Inventor of the Laws of Physics couldnt think of a better way to forgive our sins (especially the sin of Adam, who never existed and therefore never sinned) than to have himself hideously tortured and executed in human form as vicarious punishment. As Pauls Epistle to the Hebrews (9:22) puts it, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. To be fair, Pauls authorship of this epistle is disputable, but it is fully in the spirit of his often-expressed doctrine of atonement.

From the day I wrote it, I always knew that every one of my list of nineteen nasty attributes could be fully substantiated in the bible, but I didnt know quite how richly and thoroughly every one of them could be documented. It occurred to me that it would be an amusing exercise to make a picture with nineteen hyperlinks, each clicking through to a verse, or set of verses, from the bible. I soon realised that my biblical knowledge was inadequate to the task of assembling all the verses, and indeed that they were numerous enough to fill a book. A book! Now, there was an idea. Not a book that I could write. But I knew just the man who could. Dan Barker, of course. Fortunately he jumped at the idea, and this volume is the splendid result.

Dan knows his bible inside out. Hes preached from it, thrust it in the face of countless victims of the doorstepping young pastor he once was. He has now seen the light in a big way, and I know nobody better qualified to assemble this remarkable anthology of sheer, unadulterated nastiness.

What will the apologists say in response? The bible was never meant to be taken literally. Wasnt it? Did the generations upon generations of scribes faithfully reproducing the story of Adam and Eve and the talking snake not take it literally? Really? Were the pious generations of churchgoers, through the Dark and Middle Ages, theologically sophisticated to realise it was all a metaphor? Really? When the peasants mustered to defy Richard II and sang When Adam delved and Ev span / Who was then the gentleman? did they mutter apophatically under their breath that, of course, it was never meant to be taken literally? Dont be so ridiculous. Even today, more than forty percent of Americans think the world began exactly in the way Genesis describes, less than ten thousand years ago. The pretence by sophisticated theologians that the typical Christian in the pew doesnt take the bible literally is nothing short of dishonest.