To understand the ability of mankind to come up with the idea of a God who tortures His creatures without mercy nor end, it is important to understand the ground into which this seed of thought was planted and nurtured.

The fertile ground of such a diabolical understanding is the natural blindness of man’s mind, a blindness persists unless the Holy Spirit brings light and truth to the soul. Numerous passages of Sacred Scripture describe man as spiritually blind, his understanding in darkness, and that state being our natural state due to the effect of the Fall in the Garden:

Proverbs 2:12  To deliver thee from the way of the evil man, from the man that speaketh froward things;  13 Who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness;

Proverbs 4:19 The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.

Matthew 6:23  But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

1John 2:11 But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because thatdarkness hath blinded his eyes.

John 12:35 Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Ephesians 4:17-19  This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: 19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness

Are you seeing the common theme here? Darkness is the condition in which men stumble about in this world, not knowing the light of truth. C.S. Lewis nicely described this condition  in his book, THE LAST BATTLE:

“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you—will you—do something for these poor Dwarfs?”

“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the Stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.” But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.”

This is our natural state. Surrounded by the good things of God – the beauty of sunsets, the pleasure of taste and smell, the glories of creation, of sight and feeling – rather than understanding that only an all-good and all-loving God could create such things, in their darkness men came to think of God as fierce, implacable, angry, hard to please, and desiring human sacrifice. It is not long in the history of mankind that we find the most abominable of practices recorded in order to please this false narrative. In fear of failing crops, of lack of rain, or just the general displeasure a powerful and fearful deity, men and women override normal natural affection and throw their infant children into the fires of the false god, Baal. And we know from archeological records that such sacrifices were not restricted to the people of Israel. The spiritual darkness and moral blindness is widespread and complete over the face of the whole earth.

What but an utter darkness of intellect and spirit would make human beings do such a horrible thing? Why, it is the very same dark blindness which makes some religious leaders today state that in supporting abortion, they are “doing the work of the Lord,” as if the god they profess to serve is a bloodthirsty fiend of the lowest moral degradation,  pleased when innocent children are ripped apart in his name in the most heinous fashion imagineable. This is nothing less than utter spritual darkness at work – and as Lewis intimated, a darkness which these blind leaders have chosen for themselves in choosing to reject the light of conscience, scripture, and the pleadings of those who see such action as the evil it is.

But let me not stop here, lest you be unconvinced. If mankind by nature had clear understanding of that light showing the difference between good and evil, why would it be necessary for God to go into such great detail in the Old Testament to explain to the Hebrew nation – and by extension, all mankind – that having sex with your family members is wrong, that sex with animals is wrong, that stealing your neighbors goods is wrong, that murdering another person is wrong? In this day and age, influenced by two milenia of Christian teaching, we understand that these behaviors are an abominable desecration of what we were created to be. The need to give such prohibitions in detail to people who readily behaved in such a manner shows utterly blind humanity was. And even then, the pages of Sacred Scripture are filled with people, who, like Lewis’s dwarves, chose to ignore these commands and do what their warped passions commanded them to do, going deeper and deeper into blindness of soul.

This blindness has not only caused mankind to not know the good, but to fail to uderstand God properly. As mankind groped about in spiritual blindness for understanding, we have invented all manner of strange and bizarre gods, along with equally bizarre rituals to appease our ideas of god. In addition, Satan – that liar of old – put in man’s mind that God is harsh, evil, to be feared, and above all, intent upon doing evil to man in His desire for revenge for our sins. This is the picture of the pagan gods we find in historic literature. They are creations of the evil one, put into the darkened minds of men and demanding horrific worship to appease gods anger.

Can you see now that in such darkness, it is but a small step from throwing your child into the fire of a false god to describing eternity as a place of grim, eternal torture by a displeased deity who will have his revenge? A god whom you have imagined demands human blood is a god who will have it in the next life also, unless you are very, very sure you have done all you can to make Him happy and appease His wrath. What man has done here is to recast God in man’s image – the image of violence, wrath, and selfishness which I described in Part One of this series.

This is the “god” of the pagans, the false god of darkened imagination, and under Augustine, this idea of God as bloodthirsty and wrathful was laid over the God who in the greatest act of love came to die to redeem mankind.

This now would become the god of the Western Church, a church blinded by the desire for universal rule and power over others.

In PART THREE of this series, we will look at where Augustine’s musings on theology went off the rails