If God came back to Earth

If God came back to Earth

He’d be pretty disgusted with us, I imagine.  He’d wander the globe for a few hundred years and see what we’ve done to ourselves, and each other, and shake his head.  “Why”, he would ask, “are so many of you rich and provided for beyond any needs you might have, and yet so many others are starving and living hand to mouth?  Why are the rich ones, by and large, living peaceful lives, while so many poor ones are fighting and dying every day?  Did you not listen to my Sermon on the Mount?”

“I thought I made it pretty clear”, he’d say, “that Thou Shalt Not Kill, but look at you, some of you, killing each other right and left, and what’s worse, doing it in my name!  You kill your friends, you kill your enemies, you kill strangers, you even kill your children!  Then I see some apologist trying to say I didn’t mean that, I really meant Thou Shall Not Murder!  Explain how that feels different to the one you killed.”

“Thou Shalt Not Steal, I told you, and look at you, some of you, stealing everything you can lay your hands on every chance you get.  You steal other people’s identities, you steal their trust, you steal their time, you steal their property, and you steal their mate.”

“I gave you dominion over the whole earth, and all its forms of life, and what have you done?  You killed off, exterminated, wiped out many of my most precious lives, often for the most vain and stupid reasons.  You’ve spoiled, plundered and strip mined much of the earth, chopped down way too many trees, poisoned the air and the water, first out of ignorance, and then, when it became all too clear what was going on, you pointed the finger everywhere but at yourselves, and lied about who made money creating the mess.  You have caught most of the fish and oiled the waters as the pollution you spew into the atmosphere has brought about severe changes in the weather.”

“I tell you what”, he’d say, “I’m half tempted to wipe the slate clean and try again, like last time, not that this batch of humans has done any better than the last batch.  Better yet, I’ll just sit back and watch you exterminate yourselves and see who comes up next, the cockroaches or the rats and mice.  My bet is on the cockroaches”.

Fortunately for us, God is not coming back.  That’s because he never was there in the first place; we made him up.  Unfortunately for us, that means we really have nobody to blame but ourselves for the shape we’re in, and nobody is going to step in at the last minute and call us all to judgment, let alone fix all our mistakes.  We have to do that.

We have to do it, and we have to get started now, or it will be too late.  It may already be.

Now, for all you true believers who find this idea offensive, I’m sorry, but you have to accept certain things whether you like it or not.  One is that, absent the coordinates of Heaven or Hell, there is no way to prove their existence, so it must be taken on faith.  The second is that, when you look at your beliefs logically, you must realize that, in every case, you have decided to believe a given tenet because someone you respected and trusted told you to do so.  Very few of us have done the research and read the Bible or the Koran or the Bagvad Ghita in its original versions and languages and made up our own minds.  We always take it from someone, ultimately a priest or minister of some sort.  That makes it easy to point out the obvious, that the person who told you what to believe is making a living on that belief, and counting on you for part of his or her income.  They have a direct conflict of interest.

As far as I’m concerned, the only true Christians I have met are bikers, like Wings of Faith.  They have elders, but no church, no tithing, and no expenses.  Everyone else is posturing to one degree or another, or making a living at it.  The televised criminal hucksters are the worst.  True Believers, however, are all over the place, and most of them are dangerous.

And the Bible itself is full of nonsense.  I’ve had Christians tell me, with a straight face, when I asked where all the wives came from to help make all those people named in Genesis, that they were all descended from Eve’s daughters mating with her sons, and it was ok, because “the bloodline was pure back then”, six words that toss everything we’ve learned about genetics out the window.  I guess, since God wiped out that gene pool anyway during the flood, leaving only Noah’s family to repopulate the earth, they must have still been pretty pure, too.  Yeah, right.  I don’t remember hearing about any yellow, brown or black people on the ark, either.

And all of Revelations is nonsense, bullshit dreamed up by old men on hashish to help keep the masses in line, and tithing.  And the Koran is nothing more than a plagiarized copy of the Bible twisted to the Imam’s or the Ayatollah’s best interests, as well.  Oh, oh, someone is now going to call for my execution because I said that.

What makes sense to me is that all religions, all of them, being fabricated from scratch by primitive bronze age tribes and improved on ever since by professionals making a living at it, contain a grain of truth.  That is the concept of the Soul, as an expression of a complex mind having original thoughts becoming something other than the physical body in which the mind lives.  When that body dies, the Soul changes form and substance and becomes a Spirit, which does whatever the mind of the person wanted to do.  If you have led a good life, and you know it, you will self-assign your Spirit to the heaven of your choice, just as you will send yourself to a Hell of your own creation if you have been a bad person in life, because you can’t hide your inner thoughts from yourself without suffering severe mental illness.

So if you’ve been born a Christian or a Muslim, in all their various sects and branches, and accepted all the baggage that comes with it, you will send yourself to Heaven or Hell when you die, and you don’t need Saint Peter to decide.  You already know.  And that Heaven and that Hell exist only because you believe they do, not the other way around.  That’s why in my Heaven, there’s beer, and God rides an old Harley.

In the meantime, why don’t we all start listening to folks like John Lennon, when he said, “Imagine, all the people living for today, and sharing all the world.”?

It doesn’t take a genius or a saint to realize that we’re all in this together, everybody all over the world, and that, until the poorest members of the least of all the tribes in Africa or Bangladesh or the favelas of South America have realized a sense of security brought about by the knowledge that they will always have a place to live, food on the table, and education for their children so the next generation can live better, none of us in our carefully segregated and overly protected enclaves are truly safe.  We are the ones with the means to bring them up to a minimum level of existence, and if we continue to ignore that responsibility it is inevitable that they will drag us down to theirs.  And cockroaches are everywhere. :-{)}