Psychologically-ill God-figure of Christianity

[Myrkhoos]

You know, a lot of my questions and doubts started to gain weight about the image of God  when I started researching into psychotherapy( I say image of God because even hardline Christians will admit that God is inexpressible, so any thing you say about him is just an image, be it in words, pictures, scuptures, music, choreography, etc, so rationally speaking, we can only talk about the image of God. ) I am not saying anything yet about God as an experience.

 

To me some issues started to come to light about this. First the love/power thing. God want to appear as loving kind, caring, but all He really wants is for you to completely obey him. This looks like people who have the helper syndrom, where a lot of the help is actually a way to instill control.

 

He says he wants for humans to love him, but he makes them incapable of understanding his will, unable to see Him, unable to follow his commands properly. and if they disobey Hell awaits them. So then the sacrifice of Christ is the only solution to this game he let happen in the first place.

 

It looks like this God image plays a lot of mind games. Adam and Eve eat an apple, and they and their descendants suffer for at at least thousands of year torture and the solution to this was His son having a human birth and obeying (power again) and suffering torture and death. The death and suffering of Christ  somehow tramples death ( the easter hymn in the Christian Orthodox tradition) . It just seems so complicated. I mean Adam and eve ate a fruit, ok maybe it was a metaphor, listening to wring advice because they were naive. So if you make a mistake you are so pitiful you cannot even make it right, God has to come down and make it right. You are helpless and in the same time responsible for any suffering. The same abusers make victims feel. I, having studied screenwriting, wrote short script about this. A couple of boys kidnap a girl and play mind games with her before they attempt to rape her, blaming her for tempting them and so it is her responsability to please them sexually now.

 

May you could say more things about these issues. 

 

I am not saying that this God image is in accord to a "real" God person, but this is what seems to stem from the offical teachings of Christianity.

 

I repeat, the thing that strikes the most right now is the relationship between power and love, as God is depicted, quite interestingly, BOTH as Creator and Saviour and as Judge and Punisher. Both as the creator of freedom, and as the ultimate power who is above and beyond anything a creature can do to Him  nd even using their actions for HIS plan ( see the crucifiction of Christ as being the plan of God, being carried out by a faction of the Jews)

 

Again the idea of a scape goat, of externilazing guilt you cand find it clearly in the idea that God's sacrifice cleans us off all our personal sin and guilt and shame. So the God image seems to be both as a cause of a great unhealthy guilt - the unreacheable standard of Christ, the fact that WE have killed him with our sins, he suffers for us, and as  an unhealthy solution for this guilt - externalising it. 

 

Complicated, unclear, unhealthy and complicated inner relationship between power and affection are one of the hallmarks of an underdevelopped or traumatised psyche. 

 

And if people want to be in THIS image of God, well then... I think one can see clearly the consequences. I suspect you seem them in yourselves and in others.

 

I have to hand to theologians. They really WHY they were so adamant about dogmas, and even suffered and died in theological disputes. The image of God one holds is what will form him  and his life and his spiritual works and journey.

[Aries256]

The bible god is more akin to a bipolar woman pmsing. Maybe if someone were to slip bible god a midol......