Of God and The Beautiful Side of the Moon

Leye - Almost every other Wednesday

God is the most malevolent entity in the universe. I mean, this dude has the power to do anything, ANYTHING, and yet he chooses to do evil – cyclones, tsunamis, cancer, Ebola, war, famine, diet coke, turkey sausages, Nigerian politicians.

Or, he chooses to do nothing in the face of evil, which is pretty evil. I mean, how evil must you be to see a puppy drowning in a pool and choose to do nothing? You just stand there and watch. Pretty evil, yeah? Absolutely. This person must be evil personified. Watching a cute, helpless puppy paddling hopelessly, yelping for help and drowning slowly, inevitably, and doing absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. That is evil, men. That’s like more evil than posting Game of Thrones spoilers on social media. More evil than breaking up with the words, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ More evil, even, than the bus driver that watches you in the side mirror as you run like your life depends on catching that bus, and waits till your outstretched hand is inches away from the door, and coolly shuts it and pulls away. Slowly. Maliciously. Evilly.

God, like Thanus of Marvel comics, can snap his fingers and change anything. Globally. Even everything. Just like that. Snap, and global warming is over. Snap, and all babies are born healthy. Snap, and there’s a cure to cancer. And that’s just me thinking with the limitations of the confines of my mere mortal brain. With God, it won’t even be a cancer cure. He would snap his fingers and there won’t be cancer. Puff. Just like that, cancer never existed. Never was. We wouldn’t even know there was such a thing. Just like that.

He, the omnipotent, omnipresent, all good God who said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light, can say ‘Let there be no evil,’ and just like that all humans will lose the desire, the ability, the compulsion to steal, cheat, kill, deceive, destroy. And we wouldn’t even know what has changed - we wouldn’t know that anything has changed. We will have no memory of aircrafts filled with lives, falling out of the sky, of wars waged over oil and lies of weapons of mass destruction, of the holocaust, of famine in Ethiopia, of four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade. There would be no KKK, no ISIS, no Boko Haram, and no possibility of there ever being any of them. Just one snap of his almighty fingers and everything good will be, and nothing bad will be, will ever have been, or ever will be. Just one snap. And yet he chooses to do nothing.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of God lately, and so far, the one thing humanity has gotten right about him is his gender, this God that does nothing to protect his worshipers in Mosques and Churches from suicide vests and the machine gun bullets. This God that sits and watches as hundreds are swept away by cyclone in Mozambique. This God that doesn’t lift a finger when children fleeing bombs and pogrom drown in the ocean. This God that did nothing to save the millions of Africans who were stolen from their homes, packed like sardines into the belly of ships, taken to foreign lands, and sold into slavery. This evil God.

I asked myself, ‘What would happen if God took a break?’ Can human life get any worse? Will the planet die any faster? Or perhaps things would suddenly get better? Perhaps, like I have concluded, God himself is the source of all evil and his absence can only be good for all things that are not God.

Of the billion, billion possibilities of the effect of the absence of God, the one most plausible to my human brain is that nothing will change. Why? Because if God disappears, humanity will find a new entity to represent what we really are.  You see, when we created God, we created him in our own image.

My new book, The Beautiful Side of the Moon (Hoatzin Books (Feb 2019), answers the question of what would happen if God took a break. And it’s not what I expected.