Fatherism

Was the biblical god a good father?

Regard the biblical God as a father of humanity, while nature is the mother… let’s say that the creation of Adam and Eve from mud is just the way of god having sex with nature to make human babies.

First of all god created humans as lesser beings, he has much more powers than his kids… why?! Any good parent would like to have the best offspring ever, even smarter than he is and healthier than he is, to have better chances and experiences in life than his… that’s the good father. But god had the chance to create his babies from scratch and yet he made them lesser beings! Then god made a nice home for his children with a good caring nature (the mother) but he monopolized one tree he wanted to eat from, no children allowed! Why?! Any good parent won’t buy a box of chocolates or a punch of apples and forbid its children from having even one piece of chocolate from it! But no, these are not ordinary fruits… this is the tree of knowledge!

Knowledge is for god only, humans are not allowed to know… to distinguish between good and evil?! Again any good parent would pay anything to educate his children and make them learn in the best way possible… but not god. And the thing is you don’t forbid your children furiously from doing something without expecting them to do exactly the opposite thing, it’s called reverse psychology. So god forbids Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge, releasing god’s enemy (Satan) on them to persuade Eve to eat from the forbidden tree… what do you expect from children don’t even know the difference between good and evil?!

After they ate from the tree, he had gone mad… kicked them out from the house (the fenced garden) to the wild, cursed them, put a warrior angel with a sword in order to prevent them from eating from the tree of life and live forever… then he cursed nature and promised them they would suffer! Overreacting, don’t you think?! Even for a myth. But the thing is these divine religions are actually promoting for a special value system and a significant way of thinking… all these theistic religions you can call as “Fatherist” ideologies.

Paul C. Vitz (born in 1935) is a catholic Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University, whose work focuses on the relationship between psychology and Christianity. Vitz analysed atheism and believes there is a link between fatherlessness and anti-theism, as he proposes in his book “Faith of the Fatherless, the Psychology of Atheism” (1999). He says that believers always have strong and loving fathers while atheists always have weak, unloving, or absent fathers. Thus, he says, philosophers, professors, and political tyrants who denounce God do so in order to relive traumatic childhood experiences and to subconsciously seek out help rather than to explore any sort of valid or respectable reasoning process.

So there is no objective empirical truth about the topic according to Vitz, it’s only a matter of psychology not mentality or evidence! But regardless god is a real thing or not, this psychoanalyzing of atheism may actually explain the psychology of theism instead as a subjective attitude to an objective case. Maybe having an unloving or absent father accidentally prepares atheists to accept the fact of the fatherless universe, maybe having a loving caring fathers deludes people and prevent them from seeing that simple truth… “Mother Nature is a Single Mom”.

But let’s assume it’s not an objective case at all, it’s all psychological and subjective… what makes “Fatherism” as inspired from the bible better than the “Fatherlessness”?! God is not a good father whatsoever, he is too selfish, stubborn, sadistic and a control freak to be the father of the year… so he would never be a good inspiration to human fathers. Maybe if you want fatherism (theism) that much you shall design a better model of father to inspire fathers. Also why would you call Atheism as “fatherlessness” instead of calling it “Motherism” for example?! Naturalism or even fatherlessness can easily be considered as Motherism because the absence of the one means the presence of the other according to that analysis.

And why fathers shall have the biblical god’s kind of authority on their wives and their children anyway?! Nature in the bible that represent the good wife is so obedient that it work just by command! “Let there be light,” and there was light… and god saw that the light was good. “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” That lazy stupid husband is just giving orders to his good wife (nature) and when she gets everything done he delights as if it’s his own work!! No it’s not Motherism or fatherlessness if we rejected the Christian fatherism or the religious fatherism or even favoritism to fatherness in principle… it’s called fairness.

And finally why anyone shall choose between Fatherism or Motherism anyway (psychologically speaking)?! Why choose according to everyone’s experience with a good/bad father and a good/bad mother… then argue about it like it’s an objective case to him or her?! Maybe a philosophy about equilibrium or balance between Fatherism and Motherism would be a good inspiration to people… regardless how good or bad our moms and dads. Call it Yin and Yang, call it Daoism, call it whatever but favoring one “ism” over the other can never be good psychologically… even if we favor one parent over the other in real life.

Now back to some rationality and objectivity, these fatherist religions are not just spreading instability by denying motherism (naturalism) but they are also false logically and empirically. So do preserving the authority of the reckless religious fathers deserves to deny the objective knowledge and the empirical understanding of the world?! I don’t think so.