Misotheism is the "hatred of God" or "hatred of the gods" (from the Greek adjective () "hating the gods" or "God-hating" – a compound of, , "hatred" and, , "god").
A related concept is dystheism (, "bad god"), the belief that a god is not wholly good, but rather, is also capable of evil. In polytheistic belief systems, trickster gods often have a dystheistic nature. One example is Eshu, a trickster god from Yoruba religion who deliberately fostered violence between groups of people for his own deeds, saying that "causing ire is my greatest happiness." Many polytheistic deities since prehistory have been assumed to be neither good nor evil (or to have both qualities). Likewise, the concept of the demiurge in some versions of ancient Gnosticism is often portrayed as a generally evil entity. In conceptions of God as the summum bonum (the highest good), the proposition of God not being wholly good would be an oxymoron. Nevertheless, in monotheism, the sentiment may arise in the context of theodicy (the problem of evil, the Euthyphro dilemma) or as a rejection or criticism of particular depictions or attributions of the monotheistic god in certain belief systems (as expressed by Thomas Paine, a deist). A famous literary expression of misotheistic sentiment is Goethe's Prometheus, composed in the 1770s.
A historical proposition close to dystheism is the , "evil demon" () of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, which has been interpreted by Protestant critics as the blasphemous proposition that God exhibits malevolent intent. But Richard Kennington states that Descartes never declared his "evil genius" to be omnipotent, but merely no less powerful than he is deceitful, and thus not explicitly an equivalent to God, the singular omnipotent deity.
Thus, Hrafnkell, protagonist of the eponymous Hrafnkels saga set in the 10th century, as his temple to Freyr is burnt and he is enslaved, states that "I think it is folly to have faith in gods", never performing another blót (sacrifice), a position described in the sagas as , "godless". Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology observes that:
Terminology Misotheism first appears in the Chambers Dictionary in 1907.New English Dictionary, under miso-; also explicitly in 1913, . The Greek () is found in Aeschylus (Agamemnon 1090). The English word appears as a nonce-coinage, used by Thomas De Quincey in 1846."On Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement" (1846). It is comparable to the original meaning of Greek of "rejecting the gods, rejected by the gods, godforsaken". The term's formation from miso- connotes a decidedly negative attitude (hatred) towards the gods, rather than one which is content to only oppose a specific set of their properties. Bernard Schweizer (2002) stated "that the English vocabulary seems to lack a suitable word for outright hatred of God... [even though] history records a number of outspoken misotheists", believing "misotheism" to be his original coinage. Applying the term to the work of Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), Schweizer clarifies that he does not mean the term to carry the negative connotations of misanthropy: "To me, the word connotes a heroic stance of humanistic affirmation and the courage to defy the powers that rule the universe."Bernard Schweizer, 'Religious Subversion in His Dark Materials in: Millicent Lenz, Carole Scott (eds.) His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays On Philip Pullman's Trilogy (2005), p. 172, note 3. Dystheism is the belief that God exists but is not wholly good, or that he might even be evil. The opposite concept is eutheism, the belief that God exists and is wholly good. Eutheism and dystheism are straightforward Greek formations from eu- and dys- + theism, paralleling atheism; in the sense of "godless, ungodly" appearing e.g. in Aeschylus (Agamemnon 1590). The terms are nonce coinages, used by University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor Robert C. Koons in a 1998 lecture. According to Koons, "eutheism is the thesis that God exists and is wholly good, [... while] dystheism is the thesis that God exists but is not wholly good." However, many proponents of dystheistic ideas (including Elie Wiesel and David Blumenthal) do not offer those ideas in the spirit of hating God.Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute. pp. 11-12. Their work notes God's apparent evil or at least indifferent disinterest in the welfare of humanity, but does not express hatred towards him because of it. A notable usage of the concept that the gods are either indifferent or actively hostile towards humanity is expressed in H. P. Lovecraft's literary philosophy of Cosmic indifferentism, which pervades the Cthulhu Mythos. Historical accounts record the Greek root appearing in Aeschylus. Recent accounts distinguish misotheism, an attitude of hatred or moral opposition toward a deity, from dystheism (a deity not wholly good) and antitheism (opposition to theism). Schweizer taxonifies this historically prevalent attitude into agonistic, political, and absolute forms, and traces a genealogy. He further treats misotheism as a strand of "religious dissent" that accepts a deity’s existence while rejecting divine goodness, modern primers likewise present it as a moral protest tradition (e.g., Dostoevsky’s "Rebellion"), not mere disbelief, in his 2010 book Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism. However, in contrast to characterization of the greatest form of misotheism as "exult[ation] in the demise of deity", and specifically that "[n]o variety of atheism is really compatible with misotheism", over the course of the book citing five self-identified atheists or agnostics, Bodges writing for Patheos cites a "perceptive" atheist who, citing the well-documented paradox of fiction which describes an emotional response to characters known not to be real as normative, characterizes the issue of existence of any deity toward the question as "irrelevant". Maltheism is an ad-hoc coining appearing on Usenet in 1985,Apparently coined by Paul Zimmerman in August 1985, on net.origins referring to the misotheistic belief that God was in fact not a "Creator-God" but a "Damager-God". referring to the belief in God's malevolence inspired by the thesis of Tim Maroney that "even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards." The same term has also seen use among designers and players of role-playing games to describe a world with a malevolent deity.Naylor et al. (1994) Antitheism is direct opposition to theism. As such, it is generally manifested more as an opposition to belief in a god (to theism per se) than as opposition to gods themselves, making it more associated with antireligion, although Buddhism is generally considered to be a religion despite its status with respect to theism being more nebulous. Antitheism by this definition does not necessarily imply belief in any sort of god at all, it simply stands in opposition to the idea of theistic religion. Under this definition, antitheism is a rejection of theism that does not necessarily imply belief in gods on the part of the antitheist. Some might equate any form of antitheism to an overt opposition to God, since these beliefs run contrary to the idea of making devotion to God the highest priority in life, although those ideas would imply that God exists, and that he wishes to be worshiped, or to be believed in.See the example of Viktor Frankl in Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute. p 11. Certain forms of dualism make the assertion that the thing worshiped as God in this world is actually an evil impostor, but that a true benevolent deity worthy of being called "God" exists beyond this world. Thus, the Gnostics (see Sethian, Ophites) believed that God (the deity worshiped by Jews, Greek Pagan philosophers and Christians) was really an evil creator or demiurge that stood between us and some greater, more truly benevolent real deity. Similarly, Marcionites depicted God as represented in the Old Testament as a wrathful, malicious demiurge.
Theodicy
Dystheistic speculation arises from consideration of the problem of evil — the question of why God, who is supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, would allow evil to exist in the world. Koons notes that this is a theological problem only for a eutheist, since a dystheist would not find the existence of evil (or God's authorship of it) to be an obstacle to theistic belief. In fact, the dystheistic option would be a consistent non-contradictory response to the problem of evil. Thus Koons concludes that the problem of theodicy (explaining how God can be good despite the apparent contradiction presented in the problem of evil) does not pose a challenge to all possible forms of theism (i.e., that the problem of evil does not present a contradiction to someone who would believe that God exists but that he is not necessarily good).
This conclusion implicitly takes the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, asserting the independence of good and evil morality from God (as God is defined in monotheistic belief). Historically, the notion of "good" as an absolute concept has emerged in parallel with the notion of God being the singular entity identified with good. In this sense, dystheism amounts to the abandonment of a central feature of historical monotheism: the de facto association of God with the summum bonum.
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: "This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings."
Critics of Calvin's doctrines of predestination frequently argued that Calvin's doctrines did not successfully avoid describing God as "the author of evil".
Much of post-Holocaust theology, especially in Judaic theological circles, is devoted to a rethinking of God's goodness. Examples include the work of David R. Blumenthal, author of Facing the Abusing God (1993) and John K. Roth, whose essay "A Theodicy of Protest" is included in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (1982):
The (, 'deceptive god'), is a concept of Cartesianism. Voetius accused Descartes of blasphemy in 1643. Jacques Triglandius and Jacobus Revius, theologians at Leiden University, made similar accusations in 1647, accusing Descartes of "hold[ing] God to be a deceiver", a position that they stated to be "contrary to the glory of God". Descartes was threatened with having his views condemned by a synod, but this was prevented by the intercession of the Prince of Orange (at the request of the French Ambassador Servien). The accusations referenced a passage in the First Meditation where Descartes stated that he supposed not an optimal God but rather an evil demon "summe potens & callidus" ("most highly powerful and cunning"). The accusers identified Descartes' concept of a deus deceptor with his concept of an evil demon, stating that only an omnipotent God is "summe potens" and that describing the evil demon as such thus demonstrated the identity. Descartes' response to the accusations was that in that passage he had been expressly distinguishing between "the supremely good God, the source of truth, on the one hand, and the malicious demon on the other". He did not directly rebut the charge of implying that the evil demon was omnipotent, but asserted that simply describing something with "some attribute that in reality belongs only to God" does not mean that that something is being held to actually be a supreme God.