User blog:AustinDR/PE Proposal: God (Chick Tracts)

Original: https://villains.fandom.com/f/p/3179493162221867704



For whatever reason I've been reading a lot of Chick Tracts lately, mostly because of how unintentionally hilarious they are. For those who don't know, they're an uber-fundamentalist Christian propaganda comic series named after their author, the infamous Jack Chick. These comics preach really wonky lessons like porn causes people become gay or that Harry Potter books are a gateway to witchcraft.

Ironically, despite Chick Tracts being fundamentalist Christian propaganda that features rapists, demons and all sorts of evil stuff, God himself comes across as the most vile character in the comic, despite the author's intentions for him to be the "Big Good" of the setting.

CHARACTER TRAITS
Though Jack Chick attempts to portray God as an omnibenevolent being, he instead comes across as a narcissistic egotist vindictive towards anyone who doesn't accept him as his or her savior.

This version of God doesn't care whether you've spent your life performing good or bad deeds, only if you accept him as your savior. You can spend your life raping and killing people without remorse and repent and become Christian right before you die and you'll be saved, but if you spend your life doing good deeds yet don't follow every word of his teachings you'll be sent to Hell to suffer and burn for eternity.

MORAL EVENT HORIZON
Every time God sends someone to Hell to burn for eternity for trivial reasons (like playing Dungeons and Dragons) could count as this, but there are some that really stand out as needlessly cruel.

In the tract "Flight 144", an elderly Christian couple who and spent 50 years of their lives helping out people in Africa get sent to Hell by God simply because they made no attempt to convert any of the people they helped out to Christianity. Even though they followed Christianity ardently and dedicated their lives to helping others, God condemns them to eternal torture essentially out of spite for not getting others to worship him.

In a different not-as-heinous-but-still-pretty-vile action, God sends a man to Hell after making him suffer in Purgatory for 1000 years because he loved his friends more than Him and didn't repent until after he died. Even though the man attempted to repent to God after dying and being faced with him God still sends him to Hell.

MORAL AGENCY
The tracts attempt to portray this version of God as being on a higher level of morality that humanity cannot comprehend, but really he just comes off as a vindictive and spiteful narcissist who sees any action that doesn't completely conform to his will as an affront against himself punishable by being made to suffer forever.

NO REDEEMING QUALITIES
The comic attempts to depict this version of God as being an ultimately good entity but that's... not what it comes off as. Any religious person who believes in an all-loving creator would find this version of God an affront to the God they believe in. Hell, even someone who believes in a "fire-and-brimstone" God might think this God is a bit too much.

NO SYMPATHY
In one comic, God laments having to send someone who repented after he died (but not before) to Hell, but it's seems hypocritical due to the fact that he's GOD and he's omnipotent. He's the one who set up the rules on how to get into Heaven and yet even though he claims to hate sending people to Hell, he isn't willing to make the requirements to get in any more lenient. Him stating that just makes him seem self-righteous

THE WORST
Now Chick Tracts is a series that features blood-sucking vampires and baby-sacrificing demon worshippers, but sending people to suffer for eternity for petty things like reading Harry Potter books really comes off as worse than any of that. This God is basically the bastard child of Light Yagami and Zamasu and who multiplies all of his parents' worse traits by 100. He's far more vile than even the Tracts' version of Satan and completely fails to line up with the all-loving God revered by most religions.

CONCLUSION
I'm not going to lie, I'm partly proposing him because I think it would be funny to see the supposedly "omni-benevolent" God espoused by these propaganda comics to be listed as "Pure Evil", but this version of God really does do a lot of heinous and horrible stuff that makes him an easy fit among even the most heinous of villains, and his supposedly "good" qualities are only expressed by him and never actually appear in comic.