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their fulfillment. Thus few people ever stop to wonder why God, aka Yahweh, must have a people to rule over (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 4:19; 32:8–9) and is quite anxious to maintain a formidable reputation based on ancient Near Eastern conceptions of the values of honor and shame (Deut. 32:26–27; Mal. 1–3). Yahweh is very concerned about keeping his name secret (Gen. 32; Exod. 6; Judg. 16; etc.) and like some cosmic upper-class aristocrat prefers to have his abode far away and high above human society so as not to be disturbed by mortals (Gen. 11,18; Exod. 24; etc.). Yahweh needs to limit his direct and personal contact with the general population and, for the most part, prefers to act through intermediaries, agents, messengers, and armies. He enjoys and demands being feared (Exod. 20:19–20; Job 38–41). More than anything, Yahweh yearns to be worshipped and to have constant reminders of how wonderful, powerful, and great he is (Isa. 6:2–3; etc.).
    Take this last example: Yahweh's desire to be worshipped. Many people take this need of God for granted but never bother to ask why God wants—no, demands—to be worshipped. It is one thing if creatures, in awe of their creator, erupt spontaneously in praise. It is quite another if the creator should be thought of as having premeditated the formation of creatures who exist solely for the purpose of perpetually reminding him how exalted and powerful and benign he is (Isa. 6). I mean, is it really credible to believe that the ultimate reality is a person who is so narcissistic and egotistic that he has to prescribe in minute detail exactly how he wants to be worshipped? Why do we take for granted the idea of a god as so self-absorbed that he even threatens to destroy anyone diverging in any way from his instructions? Look at the details in Exodus 25–40 with regard to the furnishings and construction of the tabernacle and the niceties of the rituals. Such controlling obsessiveness can only be accounted for if we postulate behind it all a projection of human desire for control and order. As Don Cupitt notes (referring to a remark by Harold Bloom):
    The god of the Hebrew Bible is like a powerful and uncanny male child, a sublime mischief-maker, impish and difficult. He resembles Lear and the Freudian superego in being a demonic and persecuting Father, entirely lacking in self-knowledge and very reluctant ever to learn anything. Like the human characters he interacts with, he has a continually changing consciousness. He manifests the pure energy and force of Becoming. He is Nietzschean Will to Power, abrupt and uncontrollable, and subject to nothing and nobody. 16
    The fact that Yahweh's own alleged needs seem suspiciously similar to the historically and culturally conditioned needs of “the-powers-that-be” known to his worshippers is best accounted for by viewing Yahweh's mind as represented in the particular texts as the product of humans projecting the power-drunk autocrats familiar to them onto an imaginary cosmic monarch. Since paranoid human rulers displayed these traits, the ancients reasoned that, if the cosmos is itself a monarchy with a (super) humanlike king at the top, he might just be as vain, despotic, and attention-seeking as any earthly monarch (yet with the same amount of savvy to maintain his popularity by occasional acts of charity and goodwill as his terrestrial counterparts). Who could afford to take chances? Better safe than sorry.
    However, we know that—if we know anything—the universe is not a hierarchy where at the top of the pecking order sits a king with the psychological profile of a narcissistic, bipolar ancient Near Eastern ruler running the whole show. We can see the absurdity in imagining the existence of a god whose psychological profile displays culturally relative and historically contingent human desires. Note also that none of these divine psychological characteristics were in their biblical contexts understood as being mere metaphorical