fear of monsters and gods and jesus as the anti-monster

I was also surprised by the relationship Lovecraft saw between religious awe and horror. But once I started thinking about it I started seeing more connections. For instance, this passage is from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God:

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through
indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods
are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood. (145)

Is fear the common denominator between the two? According to Hurston, we only worship because we fear, and I think there’s some truth to that. People give sacrifice because they’re scared of what might happen if they don’t appease the gods. Carroll summarizes Lovecraft's beliefs in saying that “the attraction of supernatural horror is that it provokes a sense of awe which confirms a deep-seated human conviction about the world, viz., that it contains vast unknown forces” (162). I think that the attraction many feel toward religion is something very similar to this—believing in these vast unknown forces. Everything about that, that it’s out of our control, that it’s powerful, that it’s unknown, instills fear in us. This “indiscriminate suffering” Hurston talks about is all part of it—the unknown, the idea that you can try to appease the higher power but you might not ever be able to.
The difference is that monsters are disgusting and deities are anything but. They are beautiful and powerful. Therefore, we worship deities and we cringe away from monsters, and sometimes ultimately defeat them. To me, there is a relationship between these two things but it is not exactly the same. Horror stories are a kind of watered down version of religious ones of vengeful gods. Vengeful gods are all-powerful, and so there’s nothing you can do but worship them to escape their wrath. Monsters are how humans can psychologically come to terms with this deep-down feeling that there are forces out there that we can do nothing about. Monsters are disgusting, and therefore we can hate them rather than worship them, and their disgustingness is a flaw that means that we can fight them rather than worship them. Horror stories are psychologically comforting compared to religious ones.

The story told in the bible, at least in the New Testament once Jesus enters the scene, does not fit into this. Jesus does not let us believe in a vengeful God who brings wrath and fear like some of the beliefs of what we think of as pagan religions. And yet, I saw some really weird parallels between how Carroll was talking about horror and the Gospel of Mark, which I’ve been reading for my New Testament class. Now this might be a stretch, and I don't mean to blaspheme, but here goes.

What if we start looking at the Gospel of Mark as a story with Jesus as a kind of anti-monster? Jesus cannot be explained scientifically. He is a mixture of two things that cannot be logically mixed: human and divine. Monsters are disgusting and threatening. Jesus draws people to him (obviously opposite of disgusting) and he goes around healing everybody (opposite of threatening). The whole gospel is shaped as a narrative in a kind of complex discovery plot. Jesus starts performing miracles, the disciples find out that he can do all these supernatural things, and so they start trying to convince everybody that he really is the anti-monster. But some of the people are still scared of his power: the Pharisees. And they decide that this anti-monster must be put to death. This is a horror story, not a story of religious awe, in that the anti-monster can be defeated. Jesus dies at the end. But then the story twists again: Jesus is resurrected. He ultimately does have all the power. The story is one of how people tried to get rid of the power that they were unable to understand, but were ultimately unable to overpower.

All in all, I think there are some connections between horror and religion because they both deal with the supernatural. But they are not quite the same. The connections between Jesus narrative and what Carroll sees as the horror narrative are interesting, but I wonder if it just means that you can always find connections between any narratives.