Dear God,
Just thought I'd drop you a line and get few things off my chest. I know it goes against general policy, but please, just this once, listen up to what I'm about to lob your way. Might even do you some good. I know you must be super busy running the universe and all reality, so without further ado, let me begin…
I realize you're used to everyone shamelessly sucking up to you, blowing sunshine up your holy keister nonstop and groveling about on their knees begging for mercy while trying to score enough travel miles to make it to your totalitarian utopia, where they'll while away their post-mortem eternity under optimum conditions, but I'm not one of those people. You gave me free will and presumably meant for me to use it. Well, mission accomplished, Slick, because I intend to do just that.
In short, I've got a bone to pick with you, Cowboy, and I'm not gonna sugar-coat it.
According to your official biography, you are an immature, violent, vain, judgmental, serial-smiter responsible for multiple mass killings over the past 5,000 years.
Although it's true the comedy team of God and Son has gotten and continues to receive overwhelmingly rave reviews, from this side of the abyss, your act stinks on ice. When subjected to the rigors of rational analysis, it amounts to little more than a supernatural dog and pony show. An epic metaphysical scam of, well…Biblical proportions.
Let me see if I've got this straight…
You're an invisible, omnipotent super-being, Chairman of the Board and CEO of all reality, which you can alter at will. You fashioned the human race in your own image, but for some unfathomable reason, waited about four billion years before you got around to shoving your ultimate creation onto the stage of history. Prior to that stupendous occurrence, you allowed enormous reptiles with minuscule brains to run the joint for about 187 million years, then killed off the lot with a ginormous asteroid. There followed multiple millennia of volcanoes, earthquakes, shifting tectonic plates and two or three ice-ages.
Would you care explaining the infallible thought process behind all that rigmarole?
Of course you would, because you never explain anything. I know, I know, mysterious ways and all that smoke and mirrors. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, eh?
If you play with lightning, you're gonna get struck down.
Listen up, El-Supremo, I've been going over your record, and frankly, I find it disturbing on multiple levels. According to your official biography (which is all I have to go by, since you choose not to appear in person and explain in clear, easy to comprehend language, how the hell you would have us all think and behave so as to keep you in a pleasant mood), you are an immature, insecure, violent, vain, judgmental, serial-smiter with a hair-triggered temper, who's been responsible for multiple mass killings over the past 5,000 years, and not only displays zero remorse, but threatens to do it again sometime in the near future. Sure, it says everyone who kisses your backside with appropriate sincerity will be saved, but a less than ideal fate awaits anyone deemed not towing the party line or expressing anything short of complete enthusiasm regarding the end of the world as we know it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Big Guy, but don't the non-believers get cast into a lake of fire or some other divinely sanctioned trauma center, to be tortured forever after your super-colossal, Second-Coming/Rapture/Apocalypse goes down? Honestly, are we really living in the final days, or what?
Women have really taken it on the chin under your regime, Homeboy. What up with that? I'd say unresolved mother issues but you don't have a mother.
If we are, how about a heads up, Old Buddy. No need to call, you can just text me the time and date, so I can blow it out in Vegas one last time before reporting for duty at the aforementioned flaming lake. I probably won't even have to go very far, I think there's one in front of the Mirage.
Moving right along…it says here that, among other crimes and misdemeanors too numerous to mention, you once set-off a catastrophic global flood, arranged your own son's execution, condoned infanticide, patricide, fratricide, incest, polygamy, slavery, cannibalism, stoning, raising the dead, drinking blood, speaking in tongues, faith-healing, talking snakes, inquisitions, institutionalized antisemitism and avenging angels, in addition to green-lighting plagues, scourges and pestilences of every conceivable size, shape and color.
You also ruined the life of some poor schmuck named Job for no reason whatsoever, just to prove a point, told a father to take a knife to his kid's throat as a practical joke and turned the dim-witted wife of Lot into a condiment for having the temerity to take one last look at where her home-town used to be after you'd raised the place to the ground.
Nobody ever said you didn't have a sense of humor, albeit a sick one.
I don't know how they did things in the Bronze Age, Captain, but if you were judged by today's somewhat more enlightened standards of sanity, morality, and socially acceptable behavior, you would have to be considered a mentally-unstable rage-aholic with pathologically narcissistic and homicidal tendencies. If you weren't a Supreme Being, we'd have you in rehab or behind bars so fast it would make your head spin.
Of course, to be fair, it's mostly the first three quarters of the Big Crazy Book where you come across as a cantankerous old curmudgeon, breathing hellfire and destroying entire cities on a whim, in between prohibiting the eating of meat on Friday, creating rocks too big for even you to lift, getting angels to tap dance on the head of a pin and hammering out the reality-defying mechanics behind the miracle of transubstantiation.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, WELL THAT'S YOUR FAULT NOW ISN'T IT?
Yes, in the final reel you get a fuzzy make-over by way of sending Baby Jesus down to Earth on our behalf. Thanks a lot, but let me tell you, in my opinion your behavior in this matter was appalling.
All you have to do is sit back and allow the deluded, nut-job humans you've allowed to define you, do all the heavy lifting.
First off, you decided to dip your wick into the human gene-pool by impregnating some random, already married Jewish chick (a virgin, no less), and didn't have the balls to inform her (or her hubby for that matter – Joseph didn't even rate a burning bush!) of this intimate arrangement in person; you had to send a third party. Hey, did you ever consider putting on your Big-God pants and doing it yourself, Hotshot? Shy? Or were you just terrified of a 16-year-old girl?
Then, to make matters worse, after your kid is born, not only don't you send along any child support, you pull the Houdini and don't even bother to take Jesus out to a ballgame or a chariot race on the weekend. Can you say dead-beat dad? Naturally, you didn't inform the Jewish chick about the whole blood-atonement human sacrifice you had cooked up for her son. I'd like to think she'd have at least wanted to put the issue to a vote. So, while Jesus may or may not have redeemed the rest of us, the whole episode didn't do your image any favors.
It would appear you've had a lot of, um, “issues” with the babes over the years, am I right, Amigo? Do the names Eve, Jezebel, Delilah, Salome and Sheba ring a bell? Not to mention a certain whore in Babylon who apparently did a major number on your head. Yeah, women have really taken it on the chin under your regime, Homeboy. What up with that? I'd say unresolved mother issues but you don't have a mother.
Still, all things considered, you've had one hell of a wild run, Chief. You scared the pantaloons off all the ignorant peons in the Middle Ages and continue to exert a Svengali-like hammerlock on the ever-befuddled, guilt-tripping, Messiah-obsessed mind of man to this day. Not too shabby, considering you're incommunicado pretty much, well… all the time.
And the kicker is, you don't even have to lift your all-powerful little finger or answer anyone's prayers or do a blessed thing really, to rate the fawning, sycophantic adulation heaped on you like some cosmic Justin Beiber. No matter what happens, you always get a free pass and emerge smelling like a rose. It's good to be the King!
Unfortunately, here in the real world, the rest of us miserable minions are held accountable for our actions. If we cause a global flood, burn down a city or knock up some other guy's wife, believe me, we're gonna hear about it.
All you have to do is sit back and allow the deluded, nut-job humans you've allowed to define you, do all the heavy lifting. We've been sold a bill of goods by every self-appointed, desert-dwelling dime store prophet, every obscenely wealthy televangelist, every altar boy buggering priest and everyone else who makes a living putting words in your mouth. The con they never stop peddling is that you love us, that you're in complete control of everything and personally interested in the tiniest minutiae of our lives, when we both know you don't like to get your hands dirty intervening in the affairs of all us sinners who populate this misery-filled, brutal little planet you designed (by the way, thanks for leaving the ingredients for a nuclear weapon lying around). If you didn't see fit to stop the Holocaust or prevent the cold-blooded murder of innocent schoolchildren, I seriously doubt you make a habit of picking out our soulmates or helping the home team win the big game or anything else.
Nowadays at least, it seems you're content to let random fate take its natural course, and that's swell by me, but due to your persistent intransigence, you increasingly reflect and conform to all OUR whacked-out human notions and petty prejudices concerning women, gays, birth-control, minorities, school prayer, evolution etc, and not the other way around.
What gives, Hombre? It would appear the proverbial tail is wagging the supernatural Dog. Dog. That's God spelled backwards, get it?
Truth be told, you prefer to remain an enigma. A riddle wrapped in a confusing, contradictory book of ancient fables and tall tales, inside a religion run by an elite priesthood politburo that rules in your name and claims to be your spokesmen here on Earth. You like being an unsolvable mystery. You don't want to be figured out. You could go on worldwide TV tomorrow and explain yourself, but you won't. You can't. You would immediately be exposed as the sham Pooh-Bah you are. All Halo and no Angels. Best to remain out of sight, permanently. Hey, it worked for Howard Hughes.
In closing, Old Sport, I bid you a less than fond farewell, but I'll make a deal with you. You leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone. I promise not to pester you for anything material or spiritual on either side of the void if you will just mind your own Goddamned business and let me mind mine. I won't tell you what to do and how to think, and you won't tell me. If that's unacceptable, if the deal with you is to submit or burn, I guess I'm toast, because I will never give in to your metaphysical protection racket, for the simple reason that no one, not even you, deserves to be worshiped at the point of a gun.
You gave me an inquiring, skeptical, logic-based mind, and I like it just fine the way it is. I wouldn't jettison my freedom of thought and my inalienable right not to bow down to a primitive, bloodthirsty, misogynist entity such as yourself and your prodigious pile of dogma, even if you threatened to send a plague of locusts to infest my jockstrap.
Do your worst, you crazy old Bastard!
Sincerely,
You Know Who
P.S. Please give my regards to Santa and the Elves, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. I understand you guys all know each other.