God : the most unpleasant character in all fiction

Dan Barker’s book had its origin, as his Introduction explains, in a single sentence of my own The God Delusion: the opening sentence of Chapter 2. It says that the God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction” and goes on to list nineteen character-traits which, if they were all combined in a single fictional villain, would strain the reader’s credulity to the point of ridicule. Certifiable psychopaths apart, no real human individual is quite so irredeemably nasty as to combine all of the following: “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”