An Open Letter to God

Dear God,

There have been a few things bothering me about the whole religion thing, so I thought I would go directly to the source for answers.  I tried taking my issues up with what I assume is your complaints department, but it seems to have been split up into constantly schisming and quarreling factions and I don’t particularly feel like getting bounced around from person to person.  I’ve already used up my tolerance for large and disorganized organizations this year by calling the DMV, so I hope you don’t mind this slight imposition.

Let’s start with the basics.  What’s with all this free-will stuff?  Allow me to clarify my question but stating my understanding of free-will.  You created men (and women, presumably?) in your image, gave these blundering creatures the freedom to make decisions for themselves, and then insisted (or gently suggested, perhaps) that they choose to worship you, is this correct?  This seems like a very roundabout and wasteful thing to do.  Why not do away with this free will crap and get straight to the worshiping?  I mean, it really doesn’t sound like the behaviour of an omniscient being; no – it sounds more like the behaviour of an insecure child who craves attention and continual vindication.  I just don’t understand why you can’t simply bask in your own glory and insist on some grossly insignificant creatures spending what little amount of time they have on this Earth staring up at you starry-eyed and muttering sweet nothings in your direction.  Free-will is about to backfire on you, god, because I flatly refuse to do this.  Sorry dude (dudette?), but life is too short – a fact of which I’m sure you are aware.

Alright, I get why you want to be worshipped.  It strokes your ego, justifies your existence to some extent, and I’m sure makes you feel just peachy.  Fine – let’s leave that point for now.

You need to tell your fan clubs, and there are certainly a lot of them, that they’re all fans of the same thing.  Somewhere between arguing who your son is (what is this, Springer?), how many wives you decreed it’s okay to have, who your supposedly chosen people are, and how many inches your pubic hair grows in a year, people have lost track of the fact they all love you (again, I’m not a fan – nothing against you… but it’s just not for me sorry).  If you really love people, and the consensus here is that you do, then you’ll swoop down from your perch on that cumulus cloud on which you sit and tell these idiots to stop bickering.  They’re really just like 5 year old kids hitting each other in a slap-frenzy in the back seat of the minivan and, frankly god, you’ve been doing a pretty horrible job of parenting by letting this go on for much too long.  Sometimes I wonder if you even bother glancing in the rearview mirror.  These kids are all just vying for your love and you really need to tell them that you love all your children equally.  Obviously you don’t – but it’s your job as a parent to pretend that you do.

Now, I really wouldn’t care about this bickering if it didn’t affect me, but these constant fights are beginning to spill over into the secular world and increase in ferocity and malignancy.  Maybe I differ with you here  (and I suspect that I do), but I don’t think anyone deserves to die or be punished in any way for belonging to the “wrong” fan club, or not belonging to a fan club, or  being in someone else’s fan club.  If you’re going to allow your fans to systematically kill off non-fans, free will is a sham and it would be far more humane to take it away, force everyone to love you, and end this quarreling.

I have a solution, though: if you really want people to live a particular way, write a book with a set of rules.  Ten sounds like a good number of rules.  Oh, so you claim that this book already exists?  Really? Did you write this by hand (or whatever appendage you all-powerful beings use to write)?  No?  Well, I’ll be frank here; your credibility is seriously hurt when you defer to humans  (fallible creatures, remember?) to do your writing for you.  Did you have writers block or something?  I can sympathize – I’ve been unable to write in weeks – but you really should buckle down and hammer something out one of these days.  I really am skeptical of these claims that thousands of years ago you revealed yourself to someone (what are you anyway, a pervert?) who saw you in all your glory and was inspired to write parts of various books.  These books somehow managed to become dogma.  Each fan club has its own, mind you.  To further my disdain for this supposed end-all of literature, you haven’t updated these books in a really really long time.  Ideally, you should be releasing a new edition every, oh I don’t know, 5 years or so?  The world changes constantly and you have to keep up to stay relevant.  I’ve had to learn from old textbooks in school and, I must say, the educational experience was far from stellar.  Your educating a class of bumbling idiots with these out-of-date texts!  Update them!  For an all-knowing being, you sure are lazy.

I have a lot more to say, but I know you’re a busy guy (girl? marsupial?) so I’ll leave with these few things for now and I’ll check back on you in a few weeks to see how you’re doing.  Hopefully you can handle it.

All the best!

(Not so) Sincerely,

Alex