William Empson on God
• Joys of Atheism
… The God that Empson loathed, as he shows in what is probably his best book, Milton’s God, seemed to be satisfied that he was ‘completely unconfused’, and had set his creatures a puzzle.
God, Empson intimated, was a figure of the man without conflicts who, by the same token, was a sadistic megalomaniac – the attempt to eliminate conflict being the very thing that makes people most cruel. The ‘God whose only pleasure is gloating over torture’ knows what to do with those who disagree: he might indeed want them to disagree so that he can enjoy torturing them. …