God’s passive aggressive behaviour
About a game of “what if” played by Christopher “God is Not Great” Hitchens, Skeptico writes:
Jesus’s dying on the cross wasn’t an act of generosity. On the contrary, it was totally self serving –- nothing but a piece of passive aggressive manipulative bullying. God had simply set himself up so he could play victim [(“Oh boo hoo, I died on the cross for you, the least you could do is love me and praise me your whole life.”)] for the rest of eternity. What a wimp.
And it’s actually worse than that. The reward god has for us if we believe in him and praise him our whole lives, is that he won’t send us to burn in the hell that he created for us. […] That would be like me setting up a torture chamber in my basement and expecting people to think I was generous for agreeing not to lock them up there and torture them for the rest of their lives (as long as they worship me). That wouldn’t be considered an act of kindness. I would rightly be considered a psychopath for even setting up the torture chamber in the first place.
So to recap on god’s generosity at Easter: to save us from an eternity of torture in hell that he (god) created and had decided to send us to, based on rules he (god) made up all by himself, he (god) suffered torture (that he planned) on the cross, so that now as long as you worship him, he won’t send you to the hell that he can freely choose not to send you to anyway. And this, we are expected to believe, is act of kindness.
(Emphasis in the original.)
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