God Is Evil / Literature

Examples by author:

• Clive Barker:
  • Part of the backstory of Imajica is that ages ago, the one, singular male god named "Hapexamendios" defeated all the various separate minor female goddesses and became the God of all realms. Hapexamendios has been trying to bring about "The Reconciliation" which will reconnect Earth to the other four "Dominions" which will then allow him to destroy them all.
• William Blake,^note While he was devoutly religious, he hated the authority and moral dictates of church. His mythopoeiaic character Urizen strongly resembles the traditional Demiurge (Blake was heavily influenced by Gnosticism), and is often used to represent the oppressive God of the Church. beginning with his The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell and elaborated in his poem about John Milton, turned the tables to posit that mistakes are innocent and perfection is villainous. C. S. Lewis actually wrote a response to Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell called The Great Divorce, in which denizens of Hell actually always have the chance to go to Heaven, but very few of them want to stay there — the nature of an evil person is such that the damned, each for a different reason of his own, find the perfection of Heaven repugnant. Those who do decide to stay find in retrospect that Hell, for them, was merely Purgatory.

• Harlan Ellison, who was an atheist, addressed this in a few of his short stories:
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream features the computer "AM" with a severe God complex. Originally named the "Allied Mastercomputer", subsequently renamed "Aggressive Menace" when it developed intelligence, it killed almost the entire population of Earth. It then used its near omnipotence and omniscience to give the five surviving humans immortality, so that it may continue to physically and psychologically torture them indefinitely. Though as others have pointed out on the Fridge tab of the same work, AM isn't God, it's the other guy.
  • In "Hitler Painted Roses," God, (or, at least the Godhead that appears) is concerned only with maintaining the status quo of Heaven, and thus refuses to let a wrongly damned soul free herself from Hell.
  • "The Death Bird" portrays the "Satan" character as a misunderstood savior and "God" as a malevolent alien bent on control. The main character, a reincarnation of Adam, is revived and sent to defeat "God" in order to bring Earth to an end and achieve rest for himself and humanity.
• Stephen King:
  • In Desperation, God is not exactly evil, but very cruel. He sends David Carver, an eleven-year-old boy against the Big Bad; his family is killed one by one; when he wishes to die, and the Big Bad needs to be defeated with a suicidal mission, God sends somebody else, who says to David:
    "You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold.' You knew, but you didn't understand. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David? How fantastically cruel? Sometimes he makes us live."

Examples by work:

• In 616, God made it so that just all the humanity is condemned to Hell and there's no salvation possible. It gets subverted, however, when it's revealed that God is actually Satan, who won the War in Heaven and is letting us believe otherwise. However, it should be noted that Satan is not evil either, and in fact went literally My God, What Have I Done? after he reaped the results of his victory.
• The Bartleby Tales series (Not Safe for Work, registration required) has this as its main trope: God is actually everything the most stereotypical religious zealots preach him to be, and even tossing his own Son in Hell for preaching the complete opposite of what he intended. Likewise, Satan's a lot more altruistic, using a loophole in his contract as Lord of Hell to change the first two circles into the closest he could come to what Heaven should be (though appropriately twisted; this is Hell, after all). Eventually, it starts its own Rage Against the Heavens subplot, though it's yet to actually delve into it.
• In The Beginning After the End, Kezess Indrath is first introduced as King of Asuras, Father of Sylvia, grandfather of Sylvie and heroic counterpart to Agrona Vrita, the Big Bad of the story. He trained Sylvie and brought Arthur to Epheotus to be trained for the war against the Vritra. Sylvia's next message reveals that Kezess is the main catalyst for Agrona's madness and Djinn genocide regarding aether knowledge making him a tyrant no better than Agrona. Later, Kezess orders Aldir to use the worldeater technique to destroy Elenoir to prevent the legacy from being summoned the attempt fails but it drives the elves to near extinction this causes Arthur to swear to take Kezess down. Elenoir's destruction backfire on him as Aldir rebells against him and the Dicathen resistance learn of the truth they refuse Kezess's Help. This stings his pride and send as Asura named Taci to wipe them out this fail as Taci is killed by Arthur who has escaped from Alacrya.
• The Confessions (Saint Augustine) makes the case that as contradictory as it is to call the source of goodness evil, the heavenly father in The Aeneid is certainly a villain. After all, how could Jupiter be The Omnipotent judge of the universe and commit adultery with every woman in Greece? Augustine finds it contradictory to call such a traitorous husband and neglectful father divine and believes that this aspect of Classical Mythology is a lie meant to excuse the Lust and Parental Abandonment of the Greco-Roman elite.
• In El Conquistador, there are many evil gods. Huitzilopotchli is maybe the more omnipresent god of sacrifices in the Aztec empire, but also Jehová, Jesus and all his family and prophets are depicted this way.
• The Cthulhu Mythos draws most of its horror from this trope. There is no benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God shepherding humanity. Instead, humanity exists on a bubble of foam in an endless cosmic ocean of darkness, surrounded by predators so horrific, that their appearance alone drives their prey insane. The gods who rule this cold, hostile universe are omniscient and omnipotent. But their scale and their knowledge make them utterly alien and impersonal. The greatest of them barely notices humanity at all. As for the ones who do take an interest...
  • The actual creator of the Universe, Azatoth, is not even sentient, and is referred to as the Blind Idiot God, and exists as a formless mass of chaos outside reality.
  • Nyarlathotep, the "Crawling Chaos", is the closest to what humans would understand as a divine being, being possessed of sentience and personality rather than something resembling an amoral, rampaging hurricane. Unfortunately, he's more of a sadistic, malevolent Trickster God than anything else, and has some nebulous purpose for humanity.
  • Finally, there's Yog-Sothoth, who even the Old Ones view as a God (he is also the "grandfather of Cthulhu"), and, like God's, has spawned hybrid offspring on Earth with human worshippers.
• Dragaera: Vlad Taltos ends up discussing morality with another character, especially with regards to the behavior of the gods. He eventually decides that an evil act/action, even when done by a god, is still evil; while he does learn that they have their reasons, it doesn't mean he won't disagree with their methods. Some of the later books have him (somewhat idly) considering assassinating a particular one, especially after certain of her actions resulted in a 'peasant' rebellion/uprising, and him on the run and divorced.
• In The Eschaton Series, there is a God-like entity called the Eschaton, which spread humanity over three thousand years of space and responds to any attempts at Time Travel by almost completely destroying the offending planet. Slightly subverted, however, because the Eschaton specifically states that it is not God. Also, the Eschaton is not evil — it acts only from self-preservation (ensuring that the timeline leading to its own creation takes place correctly), not from sadism. This doesn't stop some people in-Universe from seeing it as evil, but they tend to the villains in-story.
• Godspeaker Trilogy: The God of the Mijaki is portrayed in this way... except it's actually a dark power that they believe to be a god.
• In The Gospel According To Jesus Christ by José Saramago, God is implied to be just one god of many and he created Jesus basically out of greed, as a tool to make all people in the world worship him, not just Jews. Jesus is actually troubled by this because he thinks it will bring untold suffering to mankind but goes along because he thinks he has no choice. He then tries to stop God's plan... by making the Romans crucify him. Only to realize, horrified, that this was part of God's plan all along.
• Paul Kidd's Greyhawk trilogy ends with Queen Of The Demonweb Pits, in which two characters convince the rest that all the gods are, at best, really morally dubious. It is obvious that gods like Lolth (whom they spend most of the book working on killing) are evil, supposedly good gods like Thoth are proven to be right bastards as well, since Thoth enslaves the souls of his worshipers to operate his temple, library, and farms, intentionally mind-wiping them and keeping them ignorant so they don't think of rebelling.
• In Ted Chiang's story "Hell Is the Absence of God", God isn't evil so much as operating on Blue-and-Orange Morality. His angels dispense curses and blessings without apparent rhyme or reason or for that matter any apparent awareness that their passage through the terrestrial plane causes such things and He sends a person to Hell (which actually isn't such a bad place for most of its inhabitants) after guaranteeing that person will love Him unconditionally and want nothing more than to be in His presence.
• The His Dark Materials trilogy takes this route at first, but ultimately subverts it by revealing that "the Authority" is just a feeble, senile old angel who has been usurped by a younger and even more malevolent one, and he's not even really the creator of the universe as he claimed anyway.
• The Inquisitor Cycle takes place in an Alternate Timeline where Jesus refused to die on the cross and instead became the ruthless God-Emperor his fellow Jews expected Him to be... and immediately almost exterminated the Jews for betraying Him in the first place. He then conquered the Roman Empire and proceeded to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, leaving Christianity much bleaker and hostile with no promises of forgiveness.
• In Victor Koman's Jehovah Contract, an exploration of the nature of God, Goddess and the Devil through the eyes of a man hired to kill God by the Devil, both of them are shown as equally negative.
• In Jericho Moon, Yaweh is portrayed to be a life-hating entity who enslaves the Hebrews and drives them to to the genocide of other peoples for reasons known only to him.
• In Keeper of the Swords, the local Crystal Dragon Jesus, called "The Saviour", is evil. Also, he is depicted very similar to the actual Jesus. Creepy.
• Uniquely subverted in Known Space with the Kzinti, in that radical heretics among them had come to believe that God is exactly what the human race believes Him to be ... and hence, is on our side, rather than theirs, in the Man/Kzin Wars. Their "religion" consists of wearing masks of human skin and aping human prayers, in hopes that the Kzin-hating Deity will mistake them for humans and hence show them mercy.
• In La Passe Miroir, the character called "Dieu" (God in French) turns out to be a powerful entity manipulating the political systems of the world to create an illusion of peace while keeping most of the world population under is control without their knowledge. Subverted: this "Dieu" is only a sentient reflection of another character, Eulalie Dilleux, whose last name is mispronounced "Dieu". This entity's power come from its nature as a reflection, as he can take the face and powers of anyone he met. Its "true" name is l'Autre (the Other). It is evil only because his concept of peace is far from perfect.

• The Bulgarian poem September by Geo Milev, based on the violent suppression of a popular uprising against the right-wing coup in Bulgaria in 1923, ends with a Rage Against the Heavens segment, "DOWN WITH GOD!", blaming God for all the horrors the humanity has to endure, using this trope as a metaphor for authoritarianism:
  With one bound
  We leap into Heaven:
  DOWN WITH GOD!
  —Heave a bomb at your heart
  And take Heaven by storm:
  DOWN WITH GOD!
  From your throne
  Send you dead
  Down to the starless
  Ironclad depths
  Of the world's great abyss—
  DOWN WITH GOD!^note This is an English translation of the Bulgarian original.

• Star Maker paints a portrait of God — or, as he's referred to in the book, the "Star Maker" — who creates universes more out of a sense of aesthetics than anything else. Once he's done with one, he'll discard it and move on to another (no Heaven here, folks). The book gives fleeting descriptions of the final, perfect universe that will perfectly fulfill the Star Maker; even (or especially) in this universe, there will be beings who exist in a perfect state of eternal suffering and horror, without which the universe as a whole could not be perfect. Ugh.

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