A Precis on Sadotheism
Is God a sadist?
The most viable theological model would have God as a sadist. Abrahamic theologies, as well as many easterly systems, have been excessively fixated on the notion that God must necessarily be good. This notion faces something of a challenge when we observe the world of human affairs. Though dualist philosophical systems, most notably Christianity post-Augustine, may use the notion of human choice to account for evil and to defend God’s goodness, these arguments remain unsatisfying. Over and above all the human evil throughout history and at present in wartorn states and on the Dark Web, we have consistently witnessed natural disasters of terrifying scope. And so, any half-sentient person finds themselves wondering how any half-decent God could leave such horrors unattended. A certain strain of philosophers have ventured into the consideration that God may be evil and have developed varied notions of dystheism, maltheism, and misotheism. But these are inherently unsatisfying to begin with and seem more to be the un-nuanced polemics of enfeebled malcontents rather than rigorous theologies (cf. Tim Maroney; Phillip Mainlander). God does not have to be good or evil. A sadist, after all, may be perfectly amoral, driven single-mindedly by self-gratification. If we wish to still have a theism that is empirically viable, then a sadist God is our most tenable non-agnostic, non-atheistic position.
The evidence for God’s sadistic streak is legion, and we needn’t belabor our recounting of the innumerable atrocities that take place daily in our world. In this creation of His (one hopes it is forgivable if we imagine this sort of God as a “He”), there are beheadings and flayings and dismemberments by the minute. These horrors happened in the remote past, but they have also happened in the time the reader has taken to get to this point in this essay (with the possible exception of flaying).
There are tortures, some of which end in deaths, and others which end in permanent maiming, both physical and mental. Mexican cartel thugs stitch rivals’ faces onto soccer balls and kick them around. Homicides happen at a manic clip. All across the globe, children are among the victims. As if that weren’t enough, God endowed his creation with the capacity to engineer devices that record all of the above photorealistically. Said capacities have given us the ability to share materials most vile in a millisecond. And so now we have the Dark Web, with its crush films and its red rooms alongside its more run-of-the-mill hitmen-for-hire. Beyond these individual horrors, there are mass shootings and serial killings and wars. There are holocausts, where the individual suffering can only be parsed by sublimating it into a statistic. And while these depressingly repetitive atrocities may be, arguably, the outgrowth of human wills, individual and collective, they occur in concert with atrocities wrought from negligence and natural disaster. Fatal car wrecks are statistically inevitable, but this formulaic predictability does nothing to temper the pain of surviving family members. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes score triple-figure kills in a matter of minutes or hours. And over and beyond that, many of us who survive or are unharmed nonetheless have to face constantly the fact that the meatgrinder is whirring on as we go about the good, the bad, and the boring components of our daily lives.
Taken together, it’s enough to make one doubt the existence of God, and indeed many do. But many do not. So one is tempted to ask of the religious: Does God look on with interest? Mustn’t divine ignorance, Lovecraftian or otherwise, be the best case scenario? And then there is the obvious, perennial question: if God is good and all-powerful, why doesn’t he intervene? We have no evidence to suggest that the aforementioned horrors leave God in any way perturbed. Thanks to the speed of media, we see that atrocities happen with such regularity around the world that it’s no stretch to suggest God might even enjoy them.
We could aver that God does enjoy these atrocities and then conclude that God is evil and be done with our investigation. This is a fairly banal solution to the problem of evil, almost churlish in its lack of subtlety. This maltheist position is a simple inversion of the theist assumption that God has to be good. As such, maltheists play with the same moral categories and moral assumptions as theists. But God isn’t necessarily a moral being. He may be driven solely by desire. A torturer can know what he likes without knowing of evil or good. Moreover, God gives the impression of having a deeper and more layered understanding of pain than a maltheist might presume. As such, God is more tenably an amoral sadist who metes out pain (as well as some pleasure) for his own gratification, irrespective of the moral categories of “good” and “evil.” This is why our world brims with atrocity.
But good things do happen in the world, some readers and religious types will doubtlessly rebut. They will cite personal successes with careers or relationships. They will cite miraculous recoveries from illness and discoveries in medicine. They will cite the times people came together to do good (which we’ll address later). They will point to the happiness of certain families (usually middle-class or higher). The feelings associated with these experiences cannot be denied. They are real, and they bring pleasure. The truly optimistic may even cite nebulous individual feelings of “God’s presence,” drawing on personal anecdotes of divine intervention or of prayers being answered or of communing with some transcendent presence. While we may or may not question the veracity of the divine presence in any given experience, the pleasurable feelings associated with these experiences are also real. Pleasurable things do happen in the world, and this is part of the sadist God’s clockwork.
As per the principles of operant conditioning, if you punish an organism on a fixed and therefore predictable schedule, it will affect the intensity of the response. As the organism comes to foresee its fate, it becomes habituated to its punishment. Put plainly, the organism becomes resigned to suffering. This diminishes the psychological impact of introducing a punishment, such as torture or tragedy. If it’s all bad, all the time, the bad things lose some of their bite. In order to be truly psychologically deflating, then, the tortures have to be inconsistent. If we expect the cat-o-nine-tails, then the torture is no longer the sting of the knots and the lacerations they bring up, but rather the drudgery of being routinely whipped. To maximize the effect of the horror, God necessarily has to mix in some pleasurable things now and again. Sure, we may meet from time to time people we connect with. We may sometimes enjoy success in our business, athletic, and creative endeavors. We may even have long stretches of success in all fields. But the joy serves only to make the hurt that much more devastating and surprising to the victims. This variant schedule of reward and torture is all part of God’s plan. By way of the non-fixed schedule of punishments, God can get maximum pleasure from watching our pain, basking in divine schadenfreude or, perhaps more accurately (to borrow a phrase from internet culture), his celestial “lulz.”
So what is left for humanity? Should we all just give up, knowing that God is hell-bent on heaven-sent suffering? Should we accept our victimhood? Should we submit ourselves to the inevitability that salvation and deliverance are things we can’t have and/or shouldn’t want? The answer to all the above is “not necessarily.” The situation is not hopeless, and there are calculated trajectories humans may take going forward, some of which are encouraging.
We can live in congruence with God in one of two ways. We can, of course, embrace our sadism and live like God. Serial killers, dictators, and some high-level corporate types have unconsciously come to live by this divine standard already. They are the elect, apparently. By some sort of unspeakably horrendous Zen, they resonate with the divine. Mass shooters and terrorists, meanwhile, act in service of this God, having been driven to these extremes by the suffering in their own personal lives. They are carrying out God’s work. All of the above are embodying the divine and transforming their own pain, to some degree. But we are not advocating here for committing sadistic acts. These assorted psychopaths and sociopaths come by their godliness naturally, and to contrive to aim toward the level of sadism they exude everyday is not only well into the territory of evil, but also doomed to fail. Anyone who does as much will end up in prison, back in the role of the tortured. Just because God is a sadist doesn’t mean that sadism is now good. Sadism is rooted in cruelty and scopophilia, and these qualities are difficult to reconcile with any definition of “the good.”
The second way to live in congruence with God is to become a masochist. We can resign ourselves to our tortures and our sufferings and perhaps even learn to enjoy them. We can continue seeking escape from our pain through new products and new relationships, winning temporary pleasures that will pave the way for more pain later on. We can spiral into psychoses as we acknowledge the latest earthquake or spree-killing as “God’s will” or “what’s best.” Our ever-gaining derangement will likely make God happier. We can choose to become masochists in the more traditional, fetishistic sense, learning to love the whip when wielded by a human hand so that we might prepare ourselves for the cosmic whip wielded by God. Perhaps we might even dedicate our entire lives to compounding our personal sufferings to please God. Ascetics and monastics throughout the history of religions have entertained an idea similar to this. The Desert Fathers, for instance, with their extreme fasting and their hairshirts, may have been giving legitimate pleasure to God, but for reasons they could never have fathomed. Jains and Buddhists such as Mahavira and the Buddha, who denied themselves food and water for inordinate periods of time, may have very well been giving pleasure to a God they didn’t even believe in. Of course, if God prefers to be in control of the punishment, then asceticism is moot or perhaps even heretical. Nonetheless, we can speculate that Mahavira’s self-starvation to the point of death ultimately disappointed God, as it left Him with one less locus of torture. This exception aside, our masochism most likely pleases God and ensures that the cycle of suffering continues or even accelerates.
But there is an additional option, and it involves moving out of congruence with God and out of the binary of pain and pleasure toward the articulation of a notion of “good.” We can inch toward this notion of “good” without God. This is a movement not unlike Camus’ metaphysical rebellion against God. While a true “brotherhood of man” [sic] seems unlikely, given all those who resonate with God within our ranks, the non-sociopathic among us can at least come to embrace the idea that we humans are responsible for our own wellbeing and deliverance. That is to say, we the non-elect will make every effort to ensure the betterment of ourselves and others. Individually or collectively, we cannot look to God. This sort of reorientation is akin to Richard Rubinstein’s “After Auschwitz” theology that advocated for Jews moving on “without god” (although in our present scenario God is not dead to us, but rather alive and kicking us all while we’re down). It is our responsibility to turn the other cheek, looking away from God and refocusing our gaze toward the future of humanity. We will not simply wait around for divine grace. Whatever good God gives us is simply a setup for further torture. With that in mind, we humans should learn to take joy in working hard to build things in collaboration, rather than simply banking on blessings brought forth with a divine lightning bolt. After all, the lightning bolt of pain will always come harder and heavier in due time. In this dispensation, anything we build together will be truly ours as humans rather than some fleeting, individualized gain. Of course, we will never be fully unified as humans, as there will always be sadists built in the godly mold, but we will nonetheless do what we can to come together and to actively work against becoming masochists. God can do his thing, but we’ll do ours, trying to make things work regardless of God’s perversions, trying to inject some abiding good into a world of near-constant brutality. The good toward which we aim should not be the little individual successes of better jobs and better fortunes for our miniscule circles of family and friends but rather long-term good that will pay widespread societal dividends in the future.
This will make way for a true humanism that works in spite of God. Like the squirrely kid with the magnifying glass frying ants in the corner of the school yard, we will leave God by himself with his relatively small cadre of like-minded friends (that is, the spree killers and the CEOs). We will accept that acts of God will happen and that it is our responsibility to make our society better without Him and in opposition to Him. So while he is eagerly setting up his next Malthusian check, be it famine or fire or storm, we can be striving to provide food for all our citizens, to curb climate change, and to build better housing for those pushed to the margins. Moreover, it would help if we did less to glorify those who act in a godly spirit, not only the serial killers and the dictators and the CEOs but also those athletes, prizefighters, and male porn stars who win glory in arenas where low-level domination and sadism and its attendant scopophilia have proven highly lucrative. More broadly, we might also consider taking less pleasure in what we watch, contra God. And we should also reevaluate and reorient those hazy individual feelings of exultation we might previously have taken to be God. If God is indeed capable of acting within us, this is not a good thing, and probably a feeling only truly realized by murderers. Instead, we should try to evoke comparable numinous feelings from helping out others, especially those who’ve been kicked while already down. Altogether, these efforts might temper some of God’s perverse pleasures.
All told, the societal acceptance of God as a sadist is a utopian vision. It would be nigh impossible to get members of various theist religions to drop their shared notion of a benevolent God and to join together with one another. Their very clannishness is tied up in this idea that their God is uniquely good and that they, in fine Feuerbachian form, embody that good most saliently. In their stubbornness vis-a-vis divine goodness, they will maintain the cavernous faultlines between faiths and thereby ensure that the wars and the genocides based on these identitarian lines will continue unabated. If this clannishness doesn’t drive devotees to a righteous sadism (and for some it will), it will at least have them implicated in atrocities, as either victim or perpetrator, and these will ultimately serve the true divine purpose. And God, as such, will continue to watch with glee as the brutality plays out. It is a profound act of the human will, then, to look past these boundaries and to say that God is perverse, no matter how you slice it. And for the religious theists, no matter their affiliation, they will go on convincing themselves that they are being rewarded when they are in fact being set up for further punishment for generations and generations to come. Indeed, the violent zealots are serving God, but not in a way that anyone should want to.
