Tuesday, February 3, 2026

The Lovecraftian Yahweh

What makes a being Lovecraftian?  It must be superhuman, alien (in the sense of unfamiliar or unrelatable rather than that of strictly extraterrestrial, with some of Lovecraft's literary entities being all three), and very threatening to humans by direct intentionality or due to incidental destruction.  If it is a being with a corporeal shell, a body, the more unusual that body is, the more Lovecraftian it is thematically as well.  Yahweh, the deity of the Bible, has no physical form, but he falls into all of the other categories.  Indeed, his incorporeality actually heightens his Lovecraftian nature to an extent by making him more metaphysically separated from people.  This deity who afflicts the world so heavily in Revelation that very large proportions of humanity are killed (9:15, 17:17-21), and who has the power to resurrect people for involuntary judgment before exiling them from partaking in existence (Revelation 20:11-15), is not necessarily recognized as Lovecraftian very often by his ideological supporters and foes alike, but the basic actions and capacities of Yahweh would establish that he absolutely is.

First, I will address why anyone who thinks a Lovecraftian deity must be evil is utterly wrong.  If there is no God (and there is by logical necessity an uncaused cause even if it is not the Judeo-Christian deity [1]), there is no morality.  At most, some people have feelings that make it seem to them as if some things are good or evil, and other people have very different moral feelings, and some might have none at all.  Nothing is good or evil because someone has an emotion that makes it seem this way, and no one could know any morality that does exist through feelings (conscience).  If there is a deity, but it has no moral nature, there is no morality.  There are still at most simply personal feelings and meaningless social norms.  If the uncaused cause has a moral nature that is completely contrary to what a given person would want to be good—remember, conscience is purely subjective and thus what one person is emotionally disturbed by might not at all offend another person—then human emotion still is meaningless and of no relevance to morality.  Either way, it is epistemologically of no consequence.

No matter what, there is no possible basis for it being valid to morally object to whatever God exists.  Either morality does not exist regardless of anyone's desperate feelings or it exists and has nothing to do with our feelings one way or another, in the sense that they prove nothing about morality's existence or nonexistence and would not be the reason why any actual moral obligations exist.  It does not matter if or how much Yahweh, therefore, toys with people or showers plagues upon them.  This means any true deity, which Yahweh is supposed to be, would be morally just or at least amoral no matter what they do.  However, the way Yahweh acts, which is consistent with all of these independent logical necessities, still makes Judeo-Christianity very much what some people would call Lovecraftian: God is a conscious force that can casually bring apocalyptic devastation (as in Exodus 10:1-24), that manages and is attended to by beings that are on their own cosmic horrors of a sort (Judges 13:2-22, Ezekiel 10:1-17) [2], and that will burn his enemies to ashes after eschatologically resurrecting them (Daniel 12:2, Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:11-15) [3].  Amidst all of this, it is his nature that dictates righteousness.

Yahweh, again, is very Lovecraftian.  He is a nonphysical being (Deuteronomy 4:15-20) that has power to bring about any logically possible thing and that demands worship at the expense of the very life of anyone who would worship any other being or natural body (Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 17:2-6).  He can order his human servants to exterminate entire communities of his mortal opponents (1 Samuel 15:1-3), something that could not possibly be evil for the aforementioned reasons if it truly corresponds to God's nature even though the Amalekites and many moderners might have felt otherwise.  He can bestow disease or health as he wishes (Deuteronomy 7:15), the non-sadistic (Ezekiel 33:11), morally upright equivalent of Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep in a sense.  On multiple levels, the Biblical Yahweh is thoroughly eldritch, albeit a very moralistic entity whose very character is the standard of morality to the terror of subjectivist or culturally relativistic fools; they are fools, of course, because such philosophies are false whether or not Christianity is true since they are logically impossible.

There are several reasons why Yahweh might not be thought of as a Lovecraftian type of being in spite of all these things.  Some people, even if they wildly, willfully misinterpret the Bible and still think of themselves as rational or as Christians, like to think of Yahweh as if he is on their side because he has such unconditionally extreme love for them that he would not "ever" burn them to a second death in hell, or that he would not turn his back on them, as he threatens to do even to sinners who were very righteous beforehand (Ezekiel 33:12-16), though these so-called Christians uncaringly disobey commands of the Torah that Jesus does not abolish whatsoever (Matthew 5:17-19).  Also, while Lovecraft's god Azathoth and his other supernatural or extraterrestrial beings are seemingly amoral, Yahweh's explicit moralistic bent is another major reason why some people do not think of Yahweh in connection with cosmic horror.  Moralism and nihilism, though, are not what determines if something pertains to many key elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, though Lovecraft's own stories are at best absurdist and at worst nihilistic.  The Bible does present God as a source of genuine cosmic horror for the wicked and as an entity with many qualities of a Lovecraftian being.




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