The Trouble with God

by Chris Matheson

  Jesus stared at God for a long moment, then slowly dropped his head and looked at the ground. “He doesn’t seem to remember,” God thought to himself. “That’s strange. How can he not remember?”

  “Because it never happened perhaps?”

  “SILENCE, DOUBT!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Eventually, God had gotten so sick of doubters (“there’s only this world,” that asinine argument; how infuriating of people to not believe in God’s glorious, invisible world!) that he had basically turned a bunch of them into moldy garbage. (K, 23:41) The hardest part about doing this had not been, as you might guess, turning people into garbage, but rather instantly making the garbage moldy. “Mold grows so slowly!” God had muttered angrily, staring down at the non-moldy garbage for hours before finally using all of his powers to speed-grow mold on it. After God had turned the doubters into moldy garbage, he then shoved them face-first into Hell, and do you know why? Because they were insane, that’s why. (K, 54:47) Even if these insane sinners had repented, God still wouldn’t have forgiven them! (K, 3:90) Here’s what he would have done instead: Turn the flames up on them! (K, 17:97)

  Some doubters had actually had the gall to laugh at Muhammad. (K, 25:41; 45:9) That had incensed God in a way that literally nothing else ever had (which was saying a lot, granted, because God was incensed most of the time, but still, it’s true.) There was something about laughter that felt terribly corrosive to God; it suggested a lack of respect, obviously, but more than that a lack of fear. God wanted humans to be scared of him and he felt that laughter undermined fear completely and therefore he always despised it.

  The truth was, even those who didn’t doubt Muhammad had become annoying to God by this time. First off, there was the way Muhammad’s followers had prayed: All too often, drunk, sexually aroused, or, worst of all, needing to take a dump. God would have none of those things. “I want you to be clean when you pray to me,” he instructed his people. “If you can’t find water, don’t worry about that part, take a dirt-bath, that’ll be fine; I’m perfectly okay with dirt-baths. (K, 4:43) Just make sure you don’t pray to me when you’re drunk, aroused, or needing to take a dump, is that clear?” Then there was the annoying way the prophet’s followers would sometimes stroll into his house uninvited and demand, “When’s dinner, Muhammad?” (K, 33:53) God had disliked that intensely. “Only go to the prophet’s house when you’re invited, only at the set time, and then leave promptly after you’re finished,” God commanded his people. “Stop inconveniencing my prophet!” (There had undeniably been moments when God was struck by how relatively trivial his concerns could seem. “I created the entire universe and now I’m giving people instructions regarding dinner manners? That seems, I don’t know … incongruous?”)

  Knowing beforehand that Muhammad was going to have to deal with a whole lot of irritating people, God created some excellent comebacks for him to use against them. God had worked on these put-downs for quite a while during the writing of the Koran, because he had wanted them to be as devastating as possible. “Wish for death if what you say is true” had been a splendid one, God felt. (K, 2:93) He had liked it so much, in fact, that it actually became his unofficial “catchphrase” for several years. He had even made a T-shirt with that line printed on it. Another comeback God had been proud of was “Now taste the agony of burning!” (K, 3:181) This one sounded especially scary when you emphasized the word “burning.” “Now taste the agony of BURNING!” God had repeated it to himself over and over, loving it every single time. It sounded slightly less scary when you stressed “agony.” “Now taste the AGONY of burning!” Emphasizing “taste” was even less scary. “Now TASTE the agony of burning!” And stressing the other words obviously wasn’t scary in the least: “Now taste THE agony OF burning?” (“Articles and prepositions are not scary, period!”)

  Another line God had quite enjoyed, and this one was meant to be said in a quiet but chilling little voice, just above a whisper and therefore super intimidating: “Taste the torment of the fire which you used to deny.” (K, 34:42) Much later, during the period that was called “Judgment Day” (which, to jump ahead for a moment, had turned out to be a serious misnomer; it took a lot longer than one day to bring all those dead people back to life and then send them tumbling down to Hell. “Judgment Day” had turned out to be more like “Judgment Decade,” if you really want to know the truth), God used “Taste the torment of the fire which you used to deny” a great deal and it had felt marvelous every single time.

  Yet another one of God’s favorite lines had been “Enter then the fire!” (K, 7:38) To add extra “pop” to this one (not that it needed extra pop, obviously it didn’t, but still), God then cried out “With the genies!” God had definitely regretted creating genies by this point. He had, in fact, decided to end the entire Koran with a rather blunt warning to Muhammad: “Beware of genies.” (K, 114:6) (Not that it matters, but God had also come to hate monkeys. “Monkeys are despicable,” he had announced loudly. [K, 5:60] “I loathe the way they jump around and make faces and screech, like they think they are ‘cute’ or something. They are not cute, they are vile little abominations.”)

  One put-down line that God had ended up feeling slightly ambivalent about was “Enter the gates of Hell and live there forever.” (K, 16:29) Or rather, that first part he had liked just fine, but what came after it hadn’t felt quite as good: “How dreadful a dwelling for the haughty.” “Using ‘dreadful’ and ‘haughty’ in the same sentence doesn’t make me sound tough,” God had thought to himself. “It makes me sound like a pompous a-hole!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  At a certain point in the writing of the Koran, God had started to wonder if maybe he was slightly overdoing it on the punishment side of things. “Maybe it’d be a good idea to talk a little bit more about the reward side,” he thought. God decided to describe to Muhammad what good people could expect at the end of their lives (other than the unspeakable joy of knowing that everyone else was burning, eating cactus, and drinking boiling water, haha!) (K, 35:36–37) Granted, there wouldn’t be very many good people in the end, hardly any really, like one tenth of one percent of mankind maybe, but still, for that tiny little minority of human beings that never ever doubted God’s perfection (and God frankly doubted whether such people even existed), for them there would be Paradise.

  Life in Paradise would be marvelous, God informed Muhammad. People would wear lots of jewelry; their clothes would be silk and they would lounge around on couches and carpets, murmuring “Peace, peace” to each other (K, 35:33) while sipping sparkling wine (K, 47:15)—nonalcoholic needless to say! (K, 37:47) There would also be (and this is where God had surprised himself, at least at first) big-eyed virgins (K, 37:48; 55:56), lovely young maidens who had never been with either man or genie. (Women who’d had sex with genies were extremely slutty, in God’s opinion. “Why would anyone sleep with a genie?” he had repeatedly demanded.) These virginal young maidens would be available to the men in Paradise for eternal lovemaking, God informed Muhammad. (Q: Would the lovemaking be procreative? A: No, obviously not. God didn’t want a bunch of screaming babies in Paradise. The maidens would have to be “fixed” so that they could never get pregnant.)

  God remembered stopping at that point and mulling over what he had just written, feeling frankly confused by it. “This makes no sense,” he thought to himself. “I hate sex, I always have. Why would I want it in Paradise?”

  Then, in a flash, God understood. “Of course,” he exclaimed with a broad smile. “The virgins are a temptation.” He decided to go one step further: “I will also surround those few good men in Paradise with handsome lads!” (K, 76:19) “Only the ones who decline to have sex with these nubile youths will get to stay in Paradise,” he mused. God loved to imagine a man who’d comported himself perfectly in life and had just arrived in Paradise. There he sat, reclining on a couch in his brocaded silk robe, sporting a chunky silver bracelet and drinking nonalcoholic wine
and feeling pretty damned great about himself—until he looked at one of those perfectly formed boys and thought to himself, “At last, my eternal reward,” but the moment he touched one of those eternally firm buttocks, guess what, he would find himself plunging straight to Hell! “If anyone thinks there’s going to be homosexual hanky-panky going on in Paradise, they’ve got another thing coming!!” God had yelled loudly to no one in particular.

  And if you’re wondering whether maybe those beautiful boys would be in Paradise to tempt the ladies, well, the answer to that is no and here’s why: Because there weren’t going to be any ladies in Paradise! “Who would it be?” God had sometimes demanded of Gabriel. “I mean, seriously, who? Eve, who instantly disobeyed me? Sarah, who laughed at me? Mary, who doubted me? Lot’s wife? Noah’s wife? Honestly—who?!” The truth was, God had informed Muhammad, that women were like fields—meant to be plowed. (K, 2:223) Thinking back five hundred-plus years, God realized that Paul had been absolutely correct when he’d said that women were literally incapable of understanding truth. (NT, 2 Tim. 3:7) “And that is why I told Luke that only men were holy!” God crowed proudly. (NT, Lu. 2:23)

  (Eventually, God decided that he might allow one girl into Paradise: Jephthah’s daughter. It’s not that he felt “guilty” about what had happened to the girl, obviously; he did not. [OT, Jud. 11:31–39] A deal was a deal, after all, and the girl needed to be killed in order for her father to defeat the Ammonites. Still, God couldn’t deny that at certain moments, thinking back on watching Jephthah murder his poor crying daughter—yes, it did bother him. “I will allow Jephthah’s daughter into Paradise!” God had suddenly announced one day. “Why, I might even learn her name at some point!” [OT, Jud. 11:40])

  (As for those eternal sex-bots or whatever you wanted to call them, as soon as God was done with them, he’d destroyed them. He certainly wasn’t going to allow them to drift off and start having sex with genies. He’d dashed their brains—which were tiny anyway, what did they need brains for?—out on rocks.)

  Near the end of the Koran, God began to have some very puzzling second thoughts about—well, basically everything he’d just written. The Jews and the Christians were completely wrong about things, he had told Muhammad, but still … didn’t they believe in the most important thing of all, Him? Did he genuinely want them punished for all eternity? Nonbelievers, yes, definitely, they were beyond any hope. But other God-believers? Weren’t they, in some sense, the best of his created beings? (K, 98:7–8) Mightn’t they go to Paradise too and live there forever?

  Then God had found himself softening even more. Even to those who didn’t believe in him, why not just say, “You go your way and I’ll go mine?” he asked. (K, 109:6) Why did people have to fight about this stuff? So they disagreed about things, what was so terrible about that? They could think different things, even pray to different gods, and leave each other alone. “Why can’t you all just be kind to each other?” God asked mankind. (K, 90:17)

  And with that (as well as a few brief threats against one particular man and his wife; the man would have to be burned, the wife would have to be hung) (K, 111:1–5), God was done.

  “I will never have to speak to mankind again,” he thought to himself at that moment with supreme satisfaction. “That is wonderful.”

  He experienced a brief moment of blissful calm. Then, grotesquely, that devilish inner voice whispered to God.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Be silent!” God instantly responded.

  “Who says they are free of doubt except the man who is plagued with it?”

  “ENOUGH!”

  “Who forbids questions except the man who is terrified of them?”

  “SILENCE DOUBT!”

  But doubt, it was by now rather obvious, could not be, could never be, completely silenced.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Over the next thousand-plus years, as God watched the followers of his various prophets fighting and killing each other, he couldn’t help but occasionally wonder: “What am I doing wrong here? I tried to clarify things with the Koran, to set everything straight, but I only seem to have muddied things up more by adding different versions of the exact same stories. How are the humans supposed to know which story is actually true at this point? Is it the older version, told closer to the events described? Or the newer version, told with presumably more perspective?” While it was undeniably the case that the Koran had worked in some parts of the world—there were people who loved it—it was equally true that many other people seemed unconvinced. “The Jews don’t believe it, the Christians don’t believe it, the Asians … well, who cares about the Asians?”

  “What are people saying about me?” God sometimes demanded of Gabriel during this long, confusing stretch of time. What he heard back was, frankly, a mixed bag. On the one hand, God had adored John Calvin. “Now that is a man who understands me,” he cried out upon first hearing Calvin’s words. “Human beings ARE rotten, evil worms and the only thing they need to understand is their utter NOTHINGNESS, exactly, exactly!” Even babies, as Calvin had pointed out, were wicked. Why? Because they were created carnally, which was vile to start with (the best life for humans, as Calvin had made clear, involved zero sex; the luckiest humans, in fact, were those whom God had instructed to cut their balls off!), but beyond that, babies were little seedbeds of sin, and therefore odious to God. “Evil before they were even born, pathetic,” God had murmured to himself. Another thing Calvin had nailed was that God only loved some people. Why? “Because it would have been promiscuous for me to love everyone! Also, guess what, I don’t love everyone because I don’t want to!” (One thing God hadn’t appreciated was the way Calvin had described Satan as both “daring” and “powerful.” “Wrong!” God had instantly rejoindered. “Satan was weak and cowardly, exactly as I made him so that he could foil me at every turn!”)

  On the other hand, God had found Rene Descartes’ notion of an all-powerful and all-knowing demon who was constantly tricking mankind bothersome. Where exactly had he come up with that crazy idea? As for Baruch Spinoza’s whole “I don’t differentiate between God and nature” argument? Well, that was absolutely unacceptable; God had made it clear a long time earlier that anyone who worshipped nature should be killed. (OT, Deut. 17:3) Regarding Blaise Pascal’s so-called wager visà-vis God’s existence, well, the less said about that one the better. “I don’t want humans believing in me simply so they can win a bet and go to heaven! Anyone who does that—and believe me, I will know—will definitely burn.” God also didn’t think much of Anselm’s so-called “ontological” argument for his existence. “You can’t simply define me into existence, Anselm!” As for Thomas Aquinas, God had never been able to get through him without falling asleep.

  But the thinker who had really gotten under God’s skin was David Hume. “This obese prick is openly mocking me,” God had gasped when he first read Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In this monstrous book, Hume had had the temerity to suggest that God was senile—ineffective—a child—even a vegetable. “I am NOT a vegetable!” God had yelled loudly when he read this, and everyone present in heaven had shaken their heads and clucked disapprovingly. How dare Hume imply that God was a vegetable?! Less than two hundred years earlier, God had made sure that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for having the nerve to suggest that the universe was vast, possibly even infinite, and that there might actually be life elsewhere. “WRONG!” God had shouted at the time. “WRONG WRONG WRONG! The universe is NOT infinite, the stars are NOT other suns and there is no other life ANYWHERE but Earth and even if there is I don’t want to HEAR about it, now BURN BRUNO!” And they had too. That’s how things had been back in what God had semi-facetiously come to call the “good ol’ days.” (It was semi-facetious, obviously, because there were no good ol’ days, they’d all been bad, just in different ways.)

  But David Hume had not been burned, nor had he been stoned or impaled or stomped on by horses or eaten by dogs and
pooped out or anything else. No, David Hume had gotten away with his hideous insults to God. Fine, Immanuel Kant had responded to him, but it was such a feeble defense. “Hume can’t prove that I don’t exist? That’s the best you can do, Kant?!” Søren Kierkegaard’s later defense of God was even worse! “People should believe in me because it makes no sense to do so? Am I supposed to feel good about that, Kierkegaard?” (As for the thinker who would later call himself the “Antichrist,” the one who would say that God was dead, well, God hated him the most of all. “Burn in hell, you syphilitic madman,” God would sometimes curse under his breath.) In the Islamic world, God had felt, David Hume would have been butchered for what he had said. “Those folks still know how to get it done!” he had noted approvingly at the time. (“But will they still in the year 2400 when their religion is eighteen hundred years old?” God had wondered, honestly doubting it. “They’ll probably turn all namby-pamby, just like everyone else.”)

  But as annoying as the Hume thing had been, there had been a far deeper problem growing. As centuries had passed, God had grown increasingly uncomfortable with what he had told Muhammad about Jesus. Now it’s true, Jesus had been presumptuous and self-obsessed during his time on Earth, and he had gotten under God’s skin with some of the things he’d said and done. Because of that, in what he now regarded as a fit of pique, God had told Muhammad that Jesus was not his son. But Jesus was his son, God knew that now. (“How do I know? Because no one else’s death ever affected me the way his did. Also, if he wasn’t my son, why would I have created so many knockoff versions of him? There was no ‘Swordmouth Moses’ or ‘Lamb David’ or ‘Baby Muhammad,’ you know what I mean, Gabriel?”) “I had my son tortured to death, then wrote an entire book denying he was my son,” God found himself thinking. “I kind of need to fix this. But how?”