I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Religion plays a major role in “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Ted most explicitly states the relationship between AM and a biblical God in the following passages: “Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine [...] the paternal [...] the patriarchal [...] for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged” (2). Ted sees AM as a perversion of the Christian God, with AM’s hatred for his prisoners replacing God’s love for His followers. Likewise, Ted expresses his desperation through a sort of prayer:

Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us… The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM (5).

The characters have no other frame of reference for this all-powerful, vengeful entity besides the Old Testament God. The experience of surviving the unknowable whims of an all-powerful deity most closely resembles the Book of Job, in which the titular Job loses his livestock, land, wealth, children, and health after God makes a bet with Satan that Job will stay faithful.