Posted by:
esias ryder
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Date: June 28, 2018 04:14PM
Chapter 3
The Trouble With God
School Chaplain: Oh Lord. Ooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this our dreadful toadying. But you’re so strong and just so super. Amen. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983
School Chaplain sings: O Lord please don’t burn us. Don’t grill or toast your flock. Don’t put us on the barbecue. Or simm our arse in stock. Don’t braise or bake or boil us. Or serve our arse in a rock. ibid.
Either God exists or God doesn’t exist.
‘Do the gods exist or do they not?’ posed Cicero. ‘There is a God,’ responded that twentieth-century rapier of philosophy Sarah Palin.
If God doesn’t exist, we rot in the ground, and worms and maggots eat our flesh and bore into the marrow of our bones. We fittingly provide fodder for further families of flowers and bees and dickies, and not forgetting of course jolly good grass.
If God exists, why bother? Why take an interest in God when God takes so rare an interest in us? We stagger home, we grab en pissant another beer from the sideboard, we lean out the window, and release not only the beer but our bugbear: ‘Look, Lord, I intend to watch Network when I get around to it. But rest assured, I’m mad, and I’m not going to take this any more.’
That should get God quaking in Her boots, hey?
Why would God bother to be God? Why would God want to be God? Did God have a choice? asked Albert Einstein. Why would God not rest the hump part of the week in Her favourite armchair and huff-’n’-puff the stiffest, spiffiest trumpet? (not asked by Albert Einstein). The scientific burning-bush question is not whether Life exists elsewhere in the universe, but where in the universe can we unearth a planet blessed with weed more wickeder than the weed we’ve been allotted.
What’s God’s job description? What qualities does God need to be God?
JOB VACANCY: GOD
God required for seven billion people. Minimum wage exempted. Must have own transport. Psychopaths and sociopaths considered. Will involve some Sunday shifts. Experience of plagues and famine desirable. Main duties will include not answering prayers, dividing the sheep from the goats and non-executive director on Spurs board. Pension scheme available. Heaven Inc is an equal opportunities employer.
We quietly dissemble and back-engineer God to find what traitorous and other admirable traits for the job does your fascist sociopathic intergalactic empire-building mass-murderer need to qualify as God.
'You couldn’t meet a nicer bloke than God.
He really is a thoroughly good guy.
He doesn’t ever ring you
When you are in the bath,
And if your haircut’s lousy
He never ever laughs.' Spitting Image s2e2, Conservative Party at prayer
How might we tell the difference between God and a fascist intergalactic empire-builder?
'Who are you carrying all those bricks for anyway? God? Is that it? God? Well I’ll tell ya. Let me give you a little inside information. He’s laughing his sick fucking ass off. He’s a tight-ass. He’s a sadist.' The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino as Satan
How to tell the difference between God and a fascist intergalactic empire-builder is a material question as the God of the scriptures shows little sign of being God and every sign of being a fascist intergalactic empire-builder.
'There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.' Robert G Ingersoll
A slurry of souls are so flushed to believe in God, it doesn’t make a pull-chain of difference how fascist and fickle their God threatens to be.
'I can’t believe that God created parasites in order to torture small children.' David Attenborough
Epicurus sets the job-test for any fancy-space-hopping-dan out there fancying a stab at being God: ‘Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?’
Picture a slime-green alien landing a small space-craft on the lawn of the White House. ‘I am God,’ squawks the slime-green alien in pigeon English, green veins bulging Her thick neck and bobbing Her Adam’s Apple. Are you a believer? What should be the proper level of proof? More than just a few party tricks? An open-palmed exposition pulls the first rabbit from the hat.
Does it matter what God looks like? A snake-God tends to shed skin on the red carpet. A good hat, a God who doesn’t wear flared trousers with sandals, and a God who doesn’t dribble green slime at award ceremonies are admirable traits for the big job.
Q: You’re dead. This is the afterlife. And I’m God.
Picard: You are not God! Star Trek: The Next Generation: Tapestry s6e15
A vox populi survey of readers might reveal the required qualities of a God and democratically compile God’s Job Description. What percentage of readers would prefer God to be perfect? Perhaps we should hesitate on humanitarian grounds before forcing God to be perfect. We recall the faults bedevilling the Greek gods, and the mad killing sprees beloved by the God of the Hebrew Bible.
'I am in contact, in communication, with those at the highest levels of Creation who are passing on this information ... with the Being we call the Godhead, certainly.' David Icke, televised interview
Nay, sisters and brethren, God forbid we give up the ghost and allow God to escape blame-free to a spiritual sanctuary with no street-law of right and wrong, and claim God-given immunity against the war-crimes, and the mass slaughters and the plagues and the famines and the hunger for sacrificial animal blood:
‘If God says something is right that isn’t right, God’s wrong.’ Professor Colin McGinn
All right, let’s cut God some rope and say God needs to be reasonably (the standard of English law) good, and reasonably have our interests at heart, and God has a reasonable explanation of why we’ve been dumped on a lonesome and dreary planet three-quarters the way across the universe.
'God has blessed us so much I can’t afford to feed you any more.' Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983, Catholic father to children
But burdening God with the need to be reasonably good may be building the gallows a bit high.
'When it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really really tried. I tried to believe that there is a God who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that. But I got to tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realise something is fucked up. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption ... Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong in the résumé of a supreme being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. Just between you and me, between you and me, in any decently run universe this guy would have been out on His all-powerful arse a long time ago ... I firmly believe if there is a God it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, if there is, I think most reasonable people might agree that He is at least incompetent. And maybe, just maybe, He doesn’t give a shit, doesn’t give a shit, which I admire in a person, and would explain a lot of these bad results.' George Carlin, Religion is Bullshit
The best prize we can hang around God’s neck is maybe God was good at some point around the time of the Big Bang, maybe God had our interests at heart once, and maybe once God thought about doing some good God stuff. Our God isn’t much up to snuff. Which positions snugly with my doctorate theory that God on the Elysian Fields of Mount Olympus (White Hart Lane) must have played left-back for the Spurs.
We anthropomorphise God supine on a plump cloud and sporting an enormous snow-white beard which She strokes every time we covet our neighbour’s ass: ‘All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.’ Tennessee Williams
'The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.' Professor Carl Sagan
God must owe us a duty of care (English law standard). God must be discernible. God must be subject to the rules of science and be a promoter of the probity of evidence. Do we really hold to God being a third-rate magician, fond of planting dinosaur bones in the ground? Then the joke has gone too far. Has God really so little regard for the scientific method?
'But should we believe in such things if it’s at the expense of everything that corresponds with scientific method, with reason?' Matthew Alper, The God Part of the Brain
Lost in the line-up of usual suspects is a God so featureless, so without form and void as to defy description, a vague presence in the universe reductive of a hope that while we can never draw near to God we sense with a warm fuzzy feeling that Life is fated to fiddle a happy ending. Hidden in a holy [— What the flying frig is holy?] ha-ha-land we find ourselves holding the woolly bollocks of a God bound in a nutshell of Nature, a concept, a consciousness, a captureless recrudescence:
'Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe’. Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy’, then you can find God in a lump of coal.' Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory
Perhaps the reader fancies a party of Gods? God by committee. If the reader fancies a God who sleeps around in the bowels of Nature, or in an orgy of Gods, the reader may slap her or his back as a pantheist. Which sounds a bit saucy. But you and I are not normally invited to those sort of parties. The temptation of the Hebrew Bible with its gods plural must be tempered with the straight monogamy of, ‘O Lord, there is none like thee, neither is there any God beside thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears.’ I Chronicles 17:20
You don’t find many Baalists these days, or followers of Zeus and Apollo. Never mind, we’ve been blessed with the Jehovah Witnesses to take the piss from so we shouldn’t complain.
'It would be no different if Bush were to summon up Jupiter and the Palace Athena. Whatever happened to those gods anyway? Where are the people to believe in them now? How quaint they seem and yet how seriously they were held to be, to exist.' Ian McEwan, interview Professor Richard Dawkins
Perhaps the prudent reader fancies a God who, having kick-started the universe party, kicks back in Her favourite armchair and rolls the Big One rather than answer prayers, count sins or ruin the party with a few cheap miraculous tricks. Yours is a chilled God who would rather hang about the bookmaker’s than run the universe. And with good reason. Your God is probably ashamed of Her creation after the advent of the Spice Girls, and if you press Her, your God will deny creating the universe on the grounds of diminished responsibility. If you hold with a half-hearted God who wouldn’t be seen dead around Planet Earth you are a deist. Which sounds boring and a bit like a Catholic S & M party with whips and chains, but such parties should be avoided for a lack of heavenly herbs, and with lashings of nuns and hermits and Earthly habits.
If the reader fancies a God who does the business, a busy-body, subordinates sins, and pruriently espies us through the mean end of a telescope, and frowns furiously over human affairs, prefers a good hymn and a tambourine, tampers with the temporal time-lines, terrible temperament tapered and trailing hell-fire, you can talk to yourself as a theist.
But a personal God presents prestigious problems that overshadow, say, the paradoxes put forward by the possibility of travelling back in Time.
So take your slim-pickings from a Reservior-Dogs line-up of a God with no redeeming features (think of the Spice Girls), a God who is ashamed of Her creation (Spice Girls) or an interfering God with a sad taste in music (again it’s the Spice Girls).
Why should I seek favour or advantage over my neighbour? Why should I be so solipsistic to believe God is willing to shower me personally with a golden show of blessings? Which blessings, and how do I measure the success of the appeal?
Do theist Mormons believe God is moveable to bless Her blue-eyed favourites with a bounteous Brucey bonus? Funny definition of a God. If the payment of tithing is rewarded with blessings, is there a sliding scale of reward?
'If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.' Dorothy Parker
The debasement of begging for blessings is an example of the trouble you attract with a belief in a personal God. ‘God speaks through me,’ prophesized a monosyllabic George W Bush with his finger on the button.
'The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.' Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
‘Who says that I am not under the special protection of God?’ assumed Adolf Hitler. (‘Oh no you’re fucking not,’ two-fingered God from Her favourite armchair and returning to the lucky-stars column of The Sporting Life.)
'Simply put, they want a human God to eliminate all risk from their Life. Pat them on the head, kiss their bruises, put a chicken on every dinner table, clothe their bodies, tuck them into bed at night, and tell them that everything will be all right when they wake up in the morning. This public demand is incredible.' Bill Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse
The personal God soaks the praise for every drop of good fortune that befalls our Lives from God’s high Heaven; the personal God escapes the blame for the deluge of bad fortune that drenches our Lives with devilish deliberate determination.
'If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.' Woody Allen
For God has a plan — a personal plan — that plagues our feeble prospects and from which we never find relief. The late Christopher Hitchens lamented hymn-like God’s battle-plan: ‘Some design. Some father. Some caring God. Some designing supervisor.’ Collision: Christopher Hitchens v Douglas Wilson
Overarching the unravelled rainbow of a multi-spectral belief in a pot-luck God, Professor Dennett draws the distinction between belief in God and belief in, well, Belief: ‘There are no good reasons for believing that God exists. And plenty of good reasons for believing that God does not exist. But there are several good reasons for declaring a belief in God.’ Daniel C Dennett, AAI 2007
Why would a rational God give a rat’s arse about whether we believe in Her? Why would God set Faith as the deciding factor in winning Her favour?
'The most preposterous notion that homosapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.' Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, 1973
The noble and honourable stance for the reader when cowering in the dock on Judgment Day is to protest against this fascist empire-building God in solidarity with our condemned sisters and brothers who were wasted by the wayside with disease and starvation and the wicked wayfarers condemned to blow the fag-end of Life in flaming Hell.
'God doesn’t exist. So I guess nobody loves you.' Author Unknown
Religious addicts fawn and patter and praise God-knows-what, and are selfish in the saving of their own souls rather than protesting support until every last sister and brother is saved. Selfless solidarity is the highest lesson we struggle to learn of a Life sentence, and wins the pot of Pascal’s challenge that we may as well believe in God because we have nothing to lose.
'Why do you write to me, ‘God should punish the English’? I have no close connection to either one or the other. I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His non-existence could excuse Him.' Albert Einstein
French author Jules Renard takes the ‘pleasure of breaking’ ‘un grand silence roux’: ‘I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.’
The living fear of being dumped in Hell and having your backside used as a toast-rack is not sufficient reason to worship a fascist intergalactic empire-builder.
Under English law a contract made under duress or fear is invalid. ‘To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.’ Hypatia
Shake free your spiritual shackles, shed your fear, show some backbone, and shine in support of your downbeat sisters and brothers: 'If he is infinitely God, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?' Percy Shelley, pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism
The street-philosophy of why God permits such suffering in the world, and why so many feeble infants are fated to die of suffering and starvation, presents a stunningly powerful Epicurean argument against God being God.
'Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God.' Professor Steven Weinberg
The comedian George Carlin fires the first shot in a good spot of God hunting: ‘If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill Him.’
'He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.' George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
The Mormon victim suffering cognitive dissonance after a Life sentence of indoctrination may feel obliged to worship a weirdly fascist God festooned with faults and funny habits. But many Mormon addicts openly admire and hanker for a fascist God and a Sturmbannführer brotherhood.
For example, what on Earth are blessings? This quirk of Mormonism never failed to tickle my cognitive-dissonance bone.
'If it were to be true, one would be living under a permanent surveillance, a round-the-clock celestial dictatorship that watched you while you slept; and could convict you of thought crime, could indict you for things you thought in the privacy of your own skull, and sentence you to quite a long stretch, namely an eternity of punishment for that. Or dangle not to me very attractive reward of life of eternal praise and grovelling and sprawling and singing the praises of someone who you are ordered to love; someone whom you must both love and fear ... Compulsory love — how fascinating.' Christopher Hitchens, interview Divine Impulses
The late contrarian Christopher Hitchens coldly laid out the horror of a real-life Sky-Daddy: ‘It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep. Who can subject you — who must indeed subject you — to a total surveillance ... A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? ... At least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.’
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