Diagnosing God: The Dark Tetrad
Defining Evil
Is God good?
Most modern-day Christians would likely say that he is, but what is good?
This question has been the subject of much debate, but I believe most humans would agree that to be good, something must have a positive effect on its environment while also not being so bad that the bad outweighs the good.
The amount of badness that disqualifies something from being good is subjective, and I won’t attempt to decide for my readers what that ratio should be.
What I will do is explain in psychological terms what bad is and if any of those characteristics apply to God. Then you, my inquisitive readers, can decide for yourselves where on the spectrum of good to evil God lies.
What is Bad?
The Dark Tetrad consists of four related traits which human psychologists consider to be destructive and harmful to those with these traits and others around them. There is considerable overlap between them, and many who study these traits believe them to be different expressions of a “dark core” at the center of some humans’ personalities.
One area of overlap shared between all four is the desire for power — specifically, power over other humans. Another is impaired affective and compassionate empathy.
The traits that make up the Dark Tetrad are as follows:
Psychopathy is, at its core, shallow affect or emotionality — particularly empathy. This presents as near-constant feelings of boredom or emptiness that highly psychopathic humans seek to alleviate with sensation-seeking behaviors such as drug use, gambling, fighting, or criminal conduct. They tend to gravitate towards positions of power and influence because they see themselves as better and more suitable for those positions than humans with — in their minds — weaker wills. Additionally, their lack of empathy and single-minded focus allow them to crush any who oppose them without remorse. The world through the eyes of a psychopathic human is a hostile battleground where only the strong survive.
Narcissism is similar to psychopathy in that humans who are highly narcissistic lack empathy, but they’re also more emotional and volatile than psychopathic humans and use other humans to regulate their self-esteem. They are also attracted to power and influence, but for the admiration, attention, and sense of self-importance they provide. Put simply, narcissism is the belief that one is special or more deserving of admiration and attention than others paired with an intense desire for attention and admiration. To a narcissistic human, the world’s a stage, and they are the star.
Machiavellianism is very easy to confuse with psychopathy, but one can think of it as psychopathy’s more intelligent and patient counterpart. Machiavellian-minded humans consider emotion to be a foreign language, lack empathy, think strategically, and plan obsessively to achieve whatever goals they have in mind. To the disciples of strategy, the world is a chessboard, and people are the pieces they move around and sacrifice until victory is theirs.
Sadism is a common enough word that I’d imagine most of my readers can guess what this trait is about. Sadists enjoy inflicting pain — physical or psychological — or witnessing others in pain via violent movies or sports such as MMA. To truly appreciate the mental anguish of others, one must be able to recognize and understand it. This leads me to believe that sadism is some kind of twisted expression of empathy. To a sadist, the tragedies that frequently claim the lives of countless humans are a constant source of entertainment.
So Where Does God Fit In?
Surely billions of humans wouldn’t worship a God who displayed any of these obviously harmful traits, right?
Honestly, it isn’t at all clear to this alien whether Christians love or fear this god of theirs. He certainly seems to exhibit behavior that indicates a severe level of personality pathology, and this love-and-fear dynamic also seems to mirror the dynamics reported in highly abusive relationships.
Luckily for us, there is an entire book about Him with which we can attempt to get a better idea of how Dark He is.
Assessment
Obviously, it will be difficult to adapt diagnostic tools developed for humans to assess a god, but I’ll do my best.
Instead of the numeric scores that would be given to human subjects, I’ll give a general low-to-high rating for each of the four traits based on their corresponding items on The Dirty Dozen (Jonason) and CAST (Buckels) and explain some of the reasoning behind my thinking with examples.
Psychopathy
To give you a better idea of the types of statements used to measure these traits, a couple of examples of items that measure psychopathy are “I tend to be callous or insensitive” and “I tend to not be too concerned with morality or the morality of my actions.”
It is my opinion that both of these apply to the Christian god. If flooding the earth to kill almost the entire population of humans and animals (Genesis 6:13) isn’t callous, this alien needs a new dictionary.
Regarding the second item, God is very concerned with morality, but not with how it applies to Him.
He is above morality.
He feels entitled to play with His toys in whatever manner He desires, but those toys must always follow His rules lest they be discarded or worse.
Score for psychopathy: high.
Narcissism
Some examples of items that measure narcissism are “I want others to admire me” and “I want others to pay attention to me.”
God demands worship from his creations under threat of eternal torture, and in some interpretations of His Word, that’s the only criteria that determines admission to Heaven.
The first four of the Ten Commandments demand that humans have no gods other than the God, forbid worshiping idols, condemn taking His name in vain, and require keeping His holy day holy (Exodus 20), so we know where His priorities lie.
Humans were created to worship Him (Colossians 1:16); it doesn’t really get more narcissistic than that.
Score for narcissism: (very) high.
Machiavellianism
Now this is where things start to get interesting.
Examples of items that measure Machiavellianism would be “I have used deceit or lied to get my way” and “I tend to manipulate others to get my way.”
Proverbs 30:5 and Psalms 12:6 both claim that God never lies.
This sounds like just the type of thing a liar would claim, but I can’t find any hard evidence to refute it (the closest would be that God may cause others to lie or to believe lies [1 Kings 22:23, 2 Thessalonians 2:11]).
So, for the purposes of this little exercise, let’s assume God is always truthful or that God’s Word defines truth.
With regards to manipulation, God has no need to manipulate humans because His Word is truth. He does, however, manipulate humans via threat of punishment as alluded to above. This isn’t the type of manipulation that Machiavellians use though.
Machiavellian manipulation is covert, clever and — ideally — isn’t attributable to the manipulator. Manipulation via threat is more typical of the other three Dark Tetrad traits.
Score for Machiavellianism: low.
Sadism
Sadism is about power and pain, plain and simple.
Examples of items that measure sadism are “I enjoy making jokes at the expense of others” (verbal sadism), “I sometimes replay my favorite scenes from gory slasher films” (vicarious sadism), and “I have the right to push certain people around” (direct sadism.)
From what I can find, God does not overtly mock or make jokes at the expense of others. The closest examples mostly involve God rebuking worshippers of idols by pointing out that they are worshiping objects made of wood — wood that is otherwise used as a source of heat (Isaiah 44:18–19.)
This doesn’t exactly rise to the level of sadistic cruelty and actually points back to narcissism because He doesn't like when humans worship anything other than Him.
An argument could be made that God also doesn’t engage in vicarious sadism because every happening has already been foreseen and set into motion by Him.
For both verbal and vicarious sadism, my theory is that God is above such things.
Imagine a human standing near an anthill screaming hateful insults towards the ants.
Ridiculous.
Now imagine a human standing near an anthill. With him is an exterminator. As the exterminator sprays the anthill with his insecticide, the human cackles with sadistic glee as his enemies perish in agony.
Equally ridiculous.
That leaves us with direct sadism.
Because everything that has ever or will ever happen is a part of God’s plan, every act of cruelty is as well. Furthermore, God frequently brings death or destruction to those who defy Him and even to those who are, in his words, blameless and upright. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil,” (Job 1:8.)
I’d like to spend a while dissecting the story of Job, because it’s a great example of God’s divine sadism.
The story begins with the introduction of Job, a wealthy and devout servant of God. Satan — claiming to have been roaming around the area — appears, and God begins bragging about how amazing of a servant Job is, implying that God must be really great to have a servant as devout as Job.
Satan claims that Job is only devout because he is rich and that, if he had nothing, he would curse God (bad idea.)
God then decides to destroy everything Job has and slaughter his entire family save for his wife just to stick it to Satan. (Satan is just jealous because his servants are all ugly and can’t play the harp.) He doesn’t do this Himself though; He has Satan do it because it wouldn’t look so good if He did it.
Satan proceeds to ruin Job’s life at the behest of God, but this isn’t enough to shake Job’s faith. God then gives the go-ahead for more torture, and Satan obliges by afflicting Job with sores and infections. Gross, but not really an effective escalation as far as torture goes.
Some of Job’s friends then stop by to talk to him, but he’s so consumed with mourning that he doesn’t speak to them for days. When he finally feels like chatting, they insist he has done something wrong to deserve such severe punishment. One of his friends, Elihu, points out that God only communicates via “terrifying visions and physical pain” in order to convince humans of His love and set them back on the right path (Job 33:12–28.)
God eventually interrupts and starts asking Job a ton of questions that reinforce the idea that He is all-knowing and powerful — imagine a human very sarcastically asking an ant what it thinks it’s chances would be in a fight to the death against even a single feral cat— and that trying to decipher His will is a futile endeavor for the human mind (Job 38–41.) (Yep, four entire chapters.)
(Oh, by the way, forty or so chapters — including that last part — of The Book of Job are just a continuous poem. My theory is that this story somehow doesn't sound crazy to humans when read that way.)
God then considers smiting Job’s friends for their blasphemy but changes his mind, deciding that the ritual sacrifice of no less than fourteen living beings will quench his divine rage.
The story ends with God repairing all the damage He and Satan caused by giving Job double the wealth he had previously and replacing his dead children with some new children. (That can’t be how human parenting works, right?)
To anyone not thoroughly indoctrinated, this is utter insanity; only a Ted Bundy-level psychopath could think replacing someone’s children with new children would resolve the earth-shattering trauma of losing ten children.
Now I will remind my readers why all of this came to be: God wanted to win a bet with Satan. It is for this reason alone that Job’s life was torn apart and grotesquely stitched back together. God — supposedly all-powerful and wise — relentlessly tortured one of his most devout followers because he felt like it.
Score for sadism: (sky) high.
What Does All of This Mean?
The Christian God scores high or off-the-scale on every trait other than the one most closely associated with patience, intelligence, and planning.
Up to this point, I have assumed that this God is a supernatural entity.
It is possible that this God created humans in His image, but it is also possible — and, in my opinion, more likely — that God was created in the image of a group of humans with certain shared traits.
If God was actually created in the image of man, these men were very clearly Dark in the ways described above. They also created a religion purpose-built to convince other humans that their highly pathological traits were actually divine traits.
This is the mark of true Machiavellianism: on the surface, “God” appears to be everything but cunning and deceptive, and that appearance is the deception.
In summary, it is this alien’s opinion that the Christian God is a highly psychopathic, narcissistic sadist; however, the humans who invented Him were Machiavellians who used religion to dominate their illiterate and uneducated subjects.
References
Biblica, Inc. (2011). Holy Bible, New International Version. https://www.biblegateway.com/
Buckels, E. E. (2023). Multifaceted assessment of sadistic tendencies. In Shining light on the dark side of personality: Measurement properties and theoretical advances (pp. 194–204). Hogrefe. https://www.erinbuckels.com/project/comprehensive-assessment-of-sadistic-tendencies-cast-12/
Jonason, P. K., & Webster, G. D. (2010). The dirty dozen: A concise measure of the dark triad. Psychological Assessment, 22(2), 420–432. APA PsycArticles.
