ola sigurdsoncould expect, of several kinds. One of the most repeated objections
against religion has to do with monotheism. A recent example of a
quite violent (in tone) critique of monotheism and its conception of
God could be taken from the British scientist Richard Dawkin’s
bestseller The God Delusion (2006) where Dawkins, speaking of the
God of the Old Testament, claims that this God is
arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud
of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-
thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully.^1In other words, not a very nice person, as one perhaps would put it,
wishing to be polite. Besides the theological problem with Dawkin’s
portrayal of God as “a being”, which goes against the grain of almost
all pre-modern, modern, and post-modern concepts of God with their
emphasis that God does not fit into any category and therefore
transcends any finite categorization of any kind, I think the quote
from Dawkin’s book illustrates a contemporary fear that a divine bully
bullies his followers on earth to bully their fellow human beings into
accepting, without question, the absolute will of the divine monarch.
This means that not only are the critical faculties of human thinking
in peril, but also in peril are deeply held liberal-democratic values such
as freedom, tolerance, and human rights. Religion, and especially
monotheism, is a threat to a democratic politics, since its followers are
bound to a revelation that gives no room for negotiation.
Dawkin’s version of this fear takes a quite crude form. Among
historians, philosophers, and theologians it is well known that the
origin and growth of democratic values such as human rights are not
just a development against religion, but that the roots of these values
also lie within different traditions of religion itself. The idea of human
rights, for example, could be understood as a secularized version of the
biblical and theological notion of the human being as a being created
in the image of God, and already has its beginning in the medieval
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany, 2006, 31.