Summary: This guy Habakkuk asks God why he’s put these cruel jackass Babylonians in power. God says that the unrighteous will get judged in their own good time, and he has no intention of being nice about it. Then Habakkuk does this prayer about how totally awesome the LORD is.
Here are some things that, according to Habakkuk, make God angry: making your family rich with what you took by violence then having the temerity to try to make your own home safe from harm and danger (2.9), founding a city on crime and building it up on murder (2.12), making your neighbor stagger as if they were drunk (2.15), maybe cutting down the forests of Lebanon (2.17), murder and violence against the people of the world and its cities (2.17), worshipping idols (2.18), maybe the rivers and the sea (3.8), and probably that the wicked have a leader who has made God’s chosen people not free (3.13).
Here are the things that Habakkuk says that God does when he’s angry: killing those who are evil (2.4), forcing conquerors into debt and paying interest on that debt (2.7, and I guess that either the chosen people are only disallowed from collecting interest from each other or God knows they will never win a battle so it will be a nonissue), forcing conquerors to tremble in the presence of newly arrived enemies (2.7), being plundered (2.8), having all the work of conquered people (presumably slaves) going up in flames, being covered with shame instead of honor and made to drink and stagger (2.16), being cut down like the forests of Lebanon and terrified by animals (2.17), bringing lightning (3.4) and disease and death (3.5), forcing nations to tremble and shattering mountains and sinking hills into the ground (3.6), splitting the earth with lightning (3.9), causing rain and high winds (3.10), forcing the sun and moon to stand still (3.11), trampling nations (3.12), and striking down the leader of the wicked and his followers (3.13).
And now that we’re all clear on the causes and repercussions of God’s anger, I have to say I’m not impressed. I’m so not impressed that I can’t even see the point of including this book in the Bible (take that, Council of Nicaea!). Because really, applying the tiniest bit of thought or logic to God’s message just ends up ruining it. Of the things that make God angry, three were clearly done by the Israelites (2.9, 2.17, 2.18). Of his punishments, many of them (2.4, 2.7, 2.8, 3.12, 3.13) are just things that happen when you lose a war, and most of the rest are randomly occurring natural disasters.
And that’s really the thing about consigning events to the all-encompassing category of God’s anger. It’s totally arbitrary and you can do it however you want and no one will ever be able to prove you wrong. Don’t like the way your neighbor won’t lend you a knife? Neither does God! And see how his roof needs to be redone? There’s your proof!
It all comes back to the thing that I keep talking about in the Bible – people trying to come up with a higher authority to justify the attitudes they already have. Because there is no correlation between how often God-angering actions are taken and how often Godly punishments are handed out, but a lot of religious people don’t seem to think that way. And this isn’t just evident in the crazy preacher who’ll say God hated New Orleans because of all the gays, or the people who take the Bible as literal truth, or the Westboro Baptist nuts. The big place you see this, the really really monumentally huge one, is the concept of hell.
Let’s just think about the concept of hell here for a second: God, who loves you, has judged some crime of yours to be so severe that you will be tortured for all eternity. All eternity. Forever. The entire timeline of human existence will be a speck of nothingness compared to the time that you are tortured. And why? For what? What is accomplished by being tortured for such an unimaginably long time? Well, nothing. When we weak mortal fallible humans imprison someone, we don’t actually do it solely for punishment. In fact, out of all the reasons that we do put people in jail, pure punishment is at the bottom of the list. It’s not close to deterrence or rehabilitation, even as flawed as those systems are.
But rehabilitation and deterrence are completely impossible in hell. You’re dead; there is no purpose for making someone afraid of committing crimes, and if you really want someone to become a better person, then an infinite amount of torture is probably not the way to go (especially if you are, let’s say, all-powerful and all-knowing and an almighty deity and could make it happen by snapping your fingers, assuming you have fingers).
And when it comes to deterring people, you need to make them sure that, you know, you exist. And if you’ll recall that a lot of the things people go to hell for involve a lack of belief, that seems like it probably isn’t a well-thought-out plan. In fact, according to Christians, lack of belief is the one exact thing that you would go to hell for because you can theoretically be forgiven for anything else. So if it’s deterrence, it would almost entirely be administered to the only people who could not be deterred by that method. I think we can eliminate that one.
And then there’s removing these sinners from heavenly society for the sake of that society. But that doesn’t really make sense. We’re talking about heaven here, not some small town easily seduced by a charming stranger. You can’t change heaven, because there’s no reason that God would create a heaven that would change.
So what’s left? Punishment. And why punish? Because you’re angry. Punishment in itself doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world. You don’t make a kid sit in the corner after breaking something because you’re feeling spiteful or angry; you do it so he’ll learn not to shatter some glass. And of course we’re just like children to God (or maybe pets), so why punish us for no reason? We’ll never learn, we’ll never change, no one will avoid being corrupted, and all you’re doing is exposing someone to pointless suffering.
The whole concept is ridiculous. Just like the notion of God’s anger.
